A Tale for the Time Being (10 page)

“The Merits of Home-Leaving” was originally delivered as a lecture to the monks at Eiheiji, the monastery that D
ō
gen founded, deep in the mountains of
Fukui prefecture, far away from the decadence and corruption of the city. In the
Sh
ō
b
ō
genz
ō
, the text of the lecture is followed by the date of its delivery:
A day of the summer retreat in the seventh year of Kench
ō
.

All well and good. You can imagine the pure summer heat enfolding the mountain, and the cicadas’ shrill cry piercing the torpid air; the monks sitting in zazen for hour upon hour, immobile
on their damp cushions, while mosquitoes circle their shiny bald heads and rivulets of sweat run like tears down their young faces. Time must have seemed interminable to them.

All well and good, except that the seventh year of Kench
ō
corresponds with 1255 in the Gregorian calendar, and during the summer retreat that year, Zen Master
D
ō
gen, who was purportedly delivering his lecture on the merits of home-leaving, was dead. He had died in 1253, two years and many moments earlier.

There are several explanations for this discrepancy. The most probable is that D
ō
gen wrote a draft of the talk several years prior to his death and, intending to
revise it, had left notes and commentary to that effect, and these were later incorporated into a final version and delivered to the monks by his dharma heir, Master Koun Ej
ō
.

There’s another possibility, however, which is that on that day in the summer of the seventh year of Kench
ō
, Zen Master D
ō
gen wasn’t entirely dead. Of course, he wouldn’t have been entirely alive, either. Like Schrödinger’s cat, in the quantum thought experiment, he would
have been both alive and dead.
⁴¹

The great matter of life and death is the real subject of “The Merits of Home-Leaving.” When D
ō
gen exhorts his young forest monks to continue, moment
by moment, to summon their resolve and stay true to their commitment to enlightenment, what he means is simply this:
Life is fleeting! Don’t waste a single moment of your precious
life!

Wake up now!

And now!

And now!

6.

Ruth dozed in her chair in her second-floor office. The bristling tower of pages that represented the last ten years of her life sat squarely on the desk in front of her. Letter
by letter, page by page, she had built this edifice, but now every time she contemplated the memoir, her mind contracted and she felt inexplicably sleepy. It had been months, possibly even a year,
since she’d added anything to it. New words just refused to come, and she could barely remember the old ones she’d written. And she was afraid to look. She knew she needed to read
through the draft again, to consolidate the structure, and then to start editing and filling in the gaps, but it was too much for her foggy brain to process. The world inside the pages was as dim
as a dream.

Outside, Oliver was chopping firewood and she could hear the rhythmic thunk of the ax splitting wood. The exercise was good for him. He had been out there for hours.

She summoned her resolve and sat up resolutely in her chair. The stout red diary lay on top of the memoir, and she picked it up to move it aside. The book felt like a box in her hands. She
turned it over. When she was little, she was always surprised to pick up a book in the morning, and open it, and find the letters aligned neatly in their places. Somehow she expected them to be all
jumbled up, having fallen to the bottom when the covers were shut. Nao had described something similar, seeing the blank pages of Proust and wondering if the letters had fallen off like dead ants.
When Ruth had read this, she’d felt a jolt of recognition.

She placed the diary on the far edge of the desk, out of the way, and then glowered at the manuscript. Perhaps the same sort of thing had happened to her pages. Perhaps she would start reading
only to find her words had vanished. Perhaps this would be a good thing. Perhaps it would be a relief. The battered memoir stared balefully back at her. While her mother was still alive, the
project had seemed like a good idea. During the long period of decline, Ruth had recorded the gradual erosion of her mother’s mind, and she had observed herself, too, making copious notes of
her own feelings and reactions. The result was this ungainly heap on the desk in front of her. She scanned the first page and immediately pushed it away. The tone of the writing bugged
her—cloying, elegiac. It made her cringe. She was a novelist. She was interested in the lives of others. What had gotten into her, to think she could write a memoir?

There was no denying that Nao’s diary was a distraction, and even though she was determined to pace herself, she had still managed to spend the better part of the day online, looking
through lists of names of the victims of the earthquake and tsunami. She’d located a People Finder site and run a search for Yasutani. There were several, but no Jikos or Naokos. She
didn’t know the names of the parents, so she browsed through the files that people had posted of the missing, looking for likely matches. The information was sparse: basic facts about age and
sex and residence, where the victims worked, where they’d last been seen, and what they’d been wearing. Often there were pictures, taken in happier times. A grinning boy in his school
cap. A young woman, waving at the camera in front of a shrine. A father at an amusement park, holding his child. Below this spare layer of data lay the fullness of the tragedy. All these lives, but
none were the lives she was looking for. Finally, she gave up. She needed more information about her Yasutanis, and the only way to find it was to read further in the diary.

Ruth closed her eyes. In her mind, she could picture Nao, sitting by herself in the darkened kitchen, waiting for her mother to bring her father home from the police station. What had those long
moments felt like to her? It was hard to get a sense from the diary of the texture of time passing. No writer, even the most proficient, could re-enact in words the flow of a life lived, and Nao
was hardly that skillful. The dingy kitchen was dim and still. The bar hostesses moaned and beat against the flimsy wall. The metallic clank of the key in the lock must have startled her, but she
stayed where she was. Feet scuffled in the foyer. Did her parents speak? Probably not. She listened to the sound of running water as her mother filled the tub in the bathroom, and her father
undressed in the bedroom. She didn’t move. Didn’t look up. Kept her eyes fixed on her fingers, which lay in her lap like dead things. She listened to her father bathe, and then, as her
mother grimly looked on, she listened to him stumble through his confession. Did she sneak a glance at his pink cheeks and see it as shame or just the heat of the bath? Did she notice the sweat on
his forehead? How many moments passed from the time he started talking until her mother stood and left the room? Did the hum of the fluorescent light sound particularly loud in the silence?

And afterward, in the bedroom she shared with her parents, did she pull the covers over her head, or turn on the light and read a book, or cram for a test that she was sure to fail the next day?
Perhaps she went online and googled
suicide, men
, while her parents slept, or pretended to sleep, back-to-back, on their separate futons on the floor behind her. If she did, she would have
learned, as Ruth had, that suicide surpassed cancer as the leading cause of death for middle-aged men in Japan, so her father was right on target. Was that a consolation? Dressed in her pajamas,
she sat in front of the glowing screen in the dark, dimly aware of the sounds of breathing in and out of sync, her father’s breath the louder, steady, despite his professed desire for its
cessation, her mother’s softer, but punctuated from time to time by a sharp panicky nasal intake or an apneic stopping.

What did she feel at that moment?

Ruth opened her eyes. Something was different. She listened. She could hear birds outside, a flock of scoters coming off the water, the tapping of a pileated woodpecker, the
liquid plonk and caw of the ravens, but what had caught her attention just now was not a sound, but rather its absence: the rhythmic thunk of Oliver’s ax was missing. She felt a quickening of
fear. When had it stopped? She stood and walked to the window that overlooked the woodpile. Had he hurt himself? Gotten dizzy and cut off his leg? Rural life was perilous. Every year, someone on
the island died or drowned or was seriously injured. Their neighbor died picking apples. He’d fallen off his ladder onto his head, and his wife found his body under the tree, surrounded by
spilled fruit. Dangers were rife: ladders, fruit trees, slick moss-covered roofs, rain gutters, axes, splitting mauls, chainsaws, shotguns, skinning knives, wolves, cougars, high winds, falling
tree limbs, rogue waves, faulty wiring, drug dealers, drunk drivers, elderly drivers, suicide, and even murder.

She peered out the window. Down below in the driveway, she could see her husband. He looked all right. He was standing on both legs next to the woodpile, with one hand in his pocket and the
other on the handle of the ax, staring up into a tree and listening to the ravens.

7.

“That Jungle Crow is back again,” he said in the bath that night. “It’s driving the ravens crazy.”

Ruth grunted. She was brushing her teeth with the electric toothbrush and her mouth was full of toothpaste. Oliver was stretched out in the bath-tub, flipping through the latest issue of
New
Science
magazine, while Pesto perched on the rim of the tub, next to his head.

“I was reading about the Jungle Crows,” he said. “Apparently they’ve become a huge problem in Japan. They’re very clever. They memorize the schedules for trash
pickups and then wait for the housewives to put out the garbage so they can rip it open and steal what’s inside. They eat kittens and use wire coat hangers to make nests on utility poles,
which short-circuit the lines and cause power outages. The Tokyo Electric Power Company says crows are responsible for hundreds of blackouts a year, including some major ones that even shut down
the bullet trains. They have special crow patrols to hunt them down and dismantle their nests, but the crows outsmart them and build dummy nests. Children have to carry umbrellas to school to ward
off attacks and protect themselves from droppings, and ladies have stopped wearing shiny clips in their hair.”

Ruth spat. “You sound happy about this,” she said into the bowl of the sink.

“I am. I like crows. I like all birds. Do you remember those owl incidents in Stanley Park a couple of years ago? Those joggers that kept showing up in the emergency room with cuts on
their heads, complaining about being swooped by owls? The doctors finally put it together. It was fledging season, and the owls were babies, just learning the owling trade. Then someone noticed
that the joggers were all balding middle-aged guys with ponytails. Picture it from above, all these shiny pates and flipping rodentlike tails. They must have looked like shiny fishing lures.
Irresistible to a baby owl.”

Ruth stood and wiped her mouth on a towel. “You’re a balding middle-aged guy,” she said. “You should be careful.”

She tapped her fingers lightly on the top of his head on her way to the door. The cat took a swat at her hand.

“Yes,” Oliver said, going back to his issue of
New Science
. “But you’ll notice I don’t have a ponytail.”

1.

Jiko Yasutani is my great-grandmother on my dad’s side, and she had three kids: a son named Haruki, and two daughters named Sugako and Ema. Here’s a family
tree:

Ema was my grandmother, and when Ema got married, Jiko adopted her husband, Kenji, to take the place of Haruki, who got killed in World War II. Not that anyone could replace
Haruki, but the family needed a son to keep the Yasutani name going.

Haruki was my dad’s uncle, and Ema named my dad after him. Haruki #1 was a kamikaze pilot, which is kind of weird when you think of it because before he became a suicide bomber he was a
student of philosophy at Tokyo University, and my dad, Haruki #2, really likes philosophy and keeps trying to kill himself, so I guess you could say that suicide and philosophy run in the family,
at least among the Harukis.

When I said this to Jiko, she told me that Haruki #1 didn’t actually want to commit suicide. He was just this young guy who loved books and French poetry, and he didn’t even want to
fight in the war, but they made him. They made everybody fight in the war back then, whether you wanted to or not. Jiko said that Haruki got bullied a lot in the army because he loved French
poetry, so that’s something else that runs in the family: an interest in French culture and getting picked on.

Anyway, it was on account of Haruki #1 getting killed in the war that first his sister, Ema, and then my dad got to carry on the Yasutani family name, which is why I’m Nao Yasutani today.
And I just want to say that I get kind of freaked out, looking at the family tree, because you can see it’s all up to ME. And since I don’t intend to get married or have any kids,
that’s kind of it. Kaput. Finito. Sayonara, Yasutani.