64 pages • 2 hours read
Ruth OzekiA Tale For The Time Being
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 21-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 21 Summary: “Nao”
At first, Nao is not sure whether she should tell Jiko about seeing Haruki’s ghost. The next morning, Nao sneaks out and calls to her uncle’s ghost. Instead of Haruki, she sees what she thinks is a large monster. Upon closer inspection, she realizes it is “just a long line of very old people” (237) from the surrounding area coming to attend the ceremony. After the ceremonies, Nao sneaks back into Jiko’s study. Suddenly, she hears a voice behind her say: “The first thing they taught us was how to kill ourselves” (239). She realizes that Haruki’s ghost has returned. He tells Nao about how the military officers showed soldiers how to shoot themselves with their guns and tells her to look in the box on the altar near the photographs of Jiko’s children. Nao has been told that the box contains Haruki’s remains, but since Haruki died crashing his plane into his battleship, she can’t imagine that any part of him could have been salvaged. The ghost once again disappears.
After the four days of Obon, it is almost the end of Nao’s vacation. Jiko and Muji have a party for Nao where they sing karaoke and eat pizza. That night, Jiko comes to Nao’s room to say goodbye, and Nao decides to tell her about the visits from Haruki’s ghost and how she took the letter from the picture frame. Jiko explains to Nao that Haruki did not believe in the war at all, and the patriotic sentiments that he wrote in his letter were “just for show” and “not his true feeling” (245). She tells Nao about how Haruki was forced to join the military while he was at university. The next day, Nao’s dad comes to pick her up. Before she leaves, Nao goes to Jiko’s study and peeks in the box and finds it empty. As she is holding the box, Nao realizes that Jiko is standing behind her. Jiko explains that parents were sent a box with the remains of their children; if a body couldn’t be found, they put a piece of paper in the box with the word “remains” (247). Jiko gives Nao a freezer bag full of letters and explains that they are Haruki’s letters to her. She also gives Nao Haruki’s wristwatch, which has the characters for “Sky Soldier” (249) written on it. Before they leave, Nao’s dad tells her that he is taking her to Disneyland on the way home. To her dad’s disappointment, Nao tells him that she does not want to go. After learning about her great-uncle, she has lost patience with her dad and wants to go straight home and start reading Haruki’s letters.
Chapter 22 Summary: “Haruki #1’s Letters”
The chapter contains a series of letters from Haruki to his mother, Jiko, from the time when he joined the military to the night before he flew to his death. He tells his mother that he now rejoices in the prospect of giving his life for his country and that he is glad to have put his studies behind him to serve such a worthy cause. In the later letters, he informs her that he has volunteered to become a Special Attack Force (kamikaze) pilot. He also writes about his love of flying and how he feels like a crow soaring through the sky. In his last letter, he writes: “I’m afraid my day is approaching and my next ‘official’ letter to you may be the last one you receive from me. But no matter what nonsense I write in it, please know that those are not my last words” (258).
Chapter 23 Summary: “Nao”
Nao spends the week after she returns from the temple reading Haruki #1’s letters. She wakes up early to practice zazen and then sets to work reading the letters. Since many of the terms are unfamiliar to her, she frequently consults the kanji—or the logographic Chinese characters used in Japanese writing—dictionary. When she can’t find a kanji in the dictionary, she asks her mother for help. Her mother suggests that she show the letters to her dad and get him to help her instead, but Nao is angry at her father for failing to measure up to his namesake and does not want to share the letters with him. Eventually, however, she decides to show him the letters in the hope of forcing him to start acting more responsibly. One day when she gets home from school, she confronts him while he is folding pages from philosophy books into origami. She exclaims: “You know your uncle Haruki studied philosophy for real […] He didn’t sit around at home all day playing origami like a child” (263). She tells him that he should read Haruki’s letters so that he can learn to be more like his uncle.
Nao returns to school resolved to ignore her cruel classmates. Soon after, the September 11, 2001 attacks occur. The attacks, perpetrated by suicide bombers, have a strong effect on her dad. He stops being able to sleep, even with pills, and becomes obsessed with the people who jumped from the twin towers. He can’t stop looking at the picture of the “Falling Man,” a photograph of a man plummeting to his death from one of the towers. Nao knows that her father is thinking about what it would be like to make the decision to jump to his death.
Chapter 24 Summary: “Ruth”
Ruth thinks back to where she and Oliver were on September 11, 2001. They had just attended at conference at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and had gone into the country to spend a few days with friends. The morning of September 11, their friend John informs them that something serious has happened in New York. They turn on the radio just as the second plane hits the North Tower. After returning to Madison, Ruth and Oliver watch the videos of the towers falling. Ruth realizes that her mother will be watching the tragedy on TV and will believe that she and Oliver are in New York. She tells Oliver that they have to get back right away. Since the airports are closed, they rent a car to drive back to the island in Canada.
Chapters 21-24 analysis
After encountering Haruki #1 during Obon, Nao becomes fascinated by her great-uncle’s life. The second time he appears to her, he begins telling her about his life as a soldier in the Japanese Army. He focuses on the way in which the commanders taught soldiers how to kill themselves in case they were captured or defeated; the military instilled in them the necessity to commit suicide rather than bring shame on their country. When Jiko learns that Nao has met her son and become interested in him, she gives Nao a freezer bag full of the letters that he wrote to her during the war. Jiko warns Nao her that the letters are highly censored and don’t contain his true thoughts and feelings.
On a superficial level, Haruki’s letters appear to glorify the war, but it becomes clear that they are written in such a way to conceal the author’s true feelings from the military officials who are monitoring the soldiers’ correspondence. For instance, he describes the methods of his squadron leader “as akin to those of the brilliant French soldier the Marquis de Sade” (253); the reference to French literature provides a way to inform his mother that his squadron leader is torturing them cruelly, as Sade is the writer from whose works the concept of sadism was derived.
The September 11, 2001 attacks occur not long after Nao returns to Tokyo. Nao’s dad becomes obsessed with following the news about the 9/11 attacks, especially after learning that they were carried out by suicide bombers. He also becomes fascinated by watching the footage of people jumping to their deaths, particularly the famous “Falling Man” picture. This morbid fascination with death and suicide suggests how depressed Haruki #2 is at this point in the story. After hearing Nao describe her memories of September 11, Ruth thinks back to where she was when she first learned about the attacks and how worried she was about her mother watching the footage on TV alone. For Nao and Ruth, the September 11 attacks are the closest event in recent memory to come close to the violence and devastation that Jiko associates with the Second World War. Furthermore, the attacks were perpetrated by suicide bombers and thus resemble the kamikaze missions carried out by Japanese forces during World War II.
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