Nao Yasutani

At 16, Nao Yasutani begins a diary, telling of her life in Japan after she and her family had to leave Sunnyvale, California, because her father, a brilliant programmer, had lost his job. This diary, together with letters written by her great uncle Haruki Yasutani, a kamikazi pilot during World War II, washes up on a beach in British Columbia. Ruth, a writer, finds the packet wrapped in layers of plastic and begins a search to find out whether the diary and Nao are real.

The diary begins by telling us of Nao’s miserable family life in a tiny apartment in Tokyo. Her father can’t find work and her mother finally takes a job to support the family. After her father’s failed suicide, Nao has little faith in him. She misses California, where she lived from age 3 to 14. She can barely speak contemporary Japanese and at school she is first physically bullied and then ostracized with a mock funeral, which is filmed and put on-line. “In my heart, I am American,” she says.

That summer, Nao goes to stay in a mountain monastery northeast of Tokyo with her 104-year-old great grandmother, the nun Jiko. Jiko had been an intellectual and writer and Nao has great respect for the tiny woman. Jiko inquires into Nao’s anger and teaches her to sit zazen. “It can become your superpower,” she says. On the beach below the temple, Jiko encourages Nao to fight with the waves rolling in. She requires Nao to run up and down the steep temple steps every morning. 

All summer, Nao works in the temple kitchen, bathes in the hot springs and listens to her great-grandmother’s wisdom. “Up, down, same thing,” she says. “Not same, but not different.” Once when they are on a walk and Nao sees some scary girl bikers, she tries to hurry Jiko past. But Jiko takes her time and bows to them. The girls return the bow.

At the end of the summer the Obon festival, at which the spirits of the dead burst through the membrane separating them from the living, is celebrated at the temple. In the shrine room, in the dark, Nao believes her father has come, but it is actually her great-uncle Haruki. The man is quite young. He sings a French song and then is gone. Nao looks at a photo of Haruki to make sure and a letter slips out from the frame. It is the official letter of farewell he wrote to his mother, Jiko.

Back in school, Nao studies harder, but the bullying hasn’t stopped. After a particularly bad incident, she cuts off all her hair and goes to school in a hooded sweatshirt. In class she stands up on her desk, makes a loud cry and takes off her hood. She bows to her teacher and to her classmates and leaves.

Nao does not go back to school. At a cos-play coffeeshop, she meets Babette, to whom she speaks freely. Babette sets her up on some “dates” and she begins writing in her diary. Nao has very little hope and, like her father, plans to commit suicide after she has written down the story of her great-grandmother’s life. 

Jiko’s companion calls to tell Nao that Jiko’s last hours are approaching and she should come quickly. Nao takes the train and waits all night for the bus. In the morning her father joins her. Jiko writes a last character, the one for “life.” “For now and for the time being,” she says and dies. Nao and her father know that Jiko was speaking to them. “We must do our part,” says Nao’s father. “We must live.” They assist with the funeral and go home.

At home, Nao’s father begins a program which searches for every reference of a person’s name on-line and expunges it. He wants to clean up the cyber bullying of his daughter. Nao learns that her father was fired for raising the issue of conscience and wondering if he could build it into the game controllers he was working on, which were being purchased by the U.S. military. She also learns that her great uncle Haruki flew his plane into the ocean rather than aiming at an American ship.

Nao takes her equivalency exams and qualifies for an international school in Montreal, where she studies French. She remains determined to write down Jiko Yasutani’s story.

Nao’s story is confirmed by Ruth’s correspondence with an old friend of Nao’s father in Sunnyvale. In parallel with Nao’s story, we learn much about Ruth’s life on a remote island off British Columbia with her husband Oliver and their friends. Ruth gets so deep into Nao’s story she feels she has participated in it and Oliver tells her about quantum mechanics theories which possibly support this.

Much of Nao’s story is earthy and raunchy, the underside of being an adolescent girl in Japan. It is hard to read, but this part of the book is redeemed by the equally true stories of life in the temple with her “old Jiko.” We have the feeling that Nao is being absolutely honest about what she sees and feels, courageous in and of itself. We do not see her overcome her almost universally bad experiences in Japan, except through one defiant act. Later, we discover that she makes her way to Canada and a better life.

Learning of the anti-war lineage of her family makes Nao very proud. Ruth Ozeki tells her story in A Tale for the Time Being [published 2013], a rich evocation of both Japan and British Columbia. She puts together accurate science, everyday detail and characters with so much reality you feel you know them. Writing this open to actual, difficult life continually takes you by surprise.

Hester Prynne

The Scarlet Letter by Hugues Merle 1861

Hester Prynne was raised in England, but married a scholar whose desire for knowledge took them to Amsterdam. From there, about 1642, Hester was sent to  New England. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who tells Hester’s story in The Scarlet Letter [published 1850], does not tell us how she managed there. It cannot have been easy to be a young woman alone among the Puritans in Boston.

We meet Hester, a woman with a rich coloring and abundant dark hair, emerging from the jail with a baby in her arms. She will not tell the name of the child’s father and is condemned to stand on a scaffold above the marketplace for three hours and to wear a scarlet “A” on her breast for the rest of her life. From the scaffold, Hester sees her long lost husband, standing with some Indians at the edge of the crowd. He comes to her when she is put back in prison, saying “The man who has wronged us both still lives. I will find him.” He makes Hester promise that she will not reveal their former relationship.

Hester goes to live in a thatched cottage by the seashore, making a living for herself and her child with her needle. She embroiders the scarlet letter with gold thread and dresses her child in beautiful clothes. At three, her Pearl of great price, is something of a fairy child, happy to play in nature, since she and her mother are shunned by the townspeople. She is beautiful and intelligent, but has a wild and defiant mood. Her mother has trouble disciplining her.

When the town fathers discuss taking Pearl away from her mother, Arthur Dimmesdale, the town’s beloved young minister, intervenes: “The child is all she has to bring her to God.”

For Hester, her isolation, shame and the scarlet letter itself are teachers. She thinks her thoughts freely. “The world’s law was not law for her mind.” Though Hester becomes a cold, dignified figure as her energy leaves her body and enlivens her mind, to the townspeople she has become an inexhaustible sister of mercy. She is humble, quick to give where charity is needed and a nurse to the sick. The “A” comes to stand for able. Her consciousness of sin also makes her a counselor for those who need one.

By the time Pearl is seven, Hester observes that the minister, Dimmesdale, is very ill. She notes that her husband, Chillingworth, has been living with him. She tells Chillingworth that she will tell the minister he was her husband and is now his enemy.

Looking for a chance to speak to Dimmesdale, Hester meets him in the forest. The minister confesses his misery at the fact that people imagine he is blameless, while he himself is wracked with guilt. Hester throws her arms around him. “I do forgive you. I am your friend. May God forgive us both.” She tells him that there is a larger world around them. “Begin anew,” she says. “Make thyself a new name!” Dimmesdale does not believe he can do this alone.

For an hour Hester casts off the terrible ”A” and the two imagine leaving on a ship together. They will make a new life for themselves in the Old World. Pearl, who has been playing by the brook, will not come to Hester until she puts the “A” back on her breast, however, and when the minister kisses Pearl, she runs to the brook and washes it off.

A ship sits waiting in the harbor, to leave in three days. Hester, with her child and Dimmesdale, plans to be on it. Boston takes a holiday when a new governor is to be elected and Dimmesdale preaches an especially powerful sermon on this day. After it, Dimmesdale struggles up to the scaffolding in the marketplace, begging Hester’s help. Once there he confesses his guilt. Pearl kisses him, her father, which brings her a sense of relief and Dimmesdale dies.

Hester and Pearl disappear and are not seen for many years. But one day Hester, a stately and solemn older woman, still wearing the gold-embroidered “A” on her breast, resumes living in the seaside cottage at the edge of town. It is observed that she is the recipient of tokens of love from a foreign country and that she is embroidering clothes for a grandchild. Clearly Pearl is married and happy, living elsewhere.

Hester herself resumes her nursing, bringing counsel and comfort to those who need it. She looks forward to the day when a “new truth would be revealed in order to establish the whole relation of men and women on a surer ground of mutual happiness.” When she dies, Hester is buried beside the minister Dimmesdale in the churchyard.

Hester Prynne comes to her redemption through solitary and free-thinking reliance on natural morality and common sense rather than civil law. She is resilient enough to walk freely through the town and become a help to others. Late in life, she returns to the place which has been most meaningful to her. She reminds us that none of us live for ourselves alone, and that service to others is more important than obsession with righteousness.