A Tale For The Time Being

Nao laments that whenever you write in a diary or about the past, you can never fully catch up with the present: “No matter how fast you write, you’re always stuck in the then and you can never catch up to what’s happening now, which means that now is pretty much doomed to extinction” (98). As a little kid in California, she became obsessed with the English word “now” because it sounded like her name: “Nao was now and had this whole other meaning” (98).

At school, the other students continue to pretend that Nao is invisible and say things like “Transfer Student Yasutani hasn’t been to school weeks!” when they see her (99). One day, Nao senses that things are different at school and sees kids passing out cards. After school, she offers to go to the store to buy her dad cigarettes so that she can find one of her classmates named Daisuke, who also gets picked on at school. She beats him up and demands that he show her one of the cards. He hands it to her, and she discovers that it is an invitation to a funeral for “former transfer student Yasutani Naoko” (104).