Hi!
My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.
A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be. As for me, right now I am sitting in a French maid café in Akiba Electricity Town, listening to a sad chanson that is playing sometime in your past, which is also my present, writing this and wondering about you, somewhere in my future. And if you’re reading this, then maybe by now you’re wondering about me, too.
The central conceit of the novel is that it part of it takes the form of a journal written by a teenage girl named Naoko Yasutani—more familiarly referred to simply as Nao. Nao is living on Tokyo at the dawn of the new millennium as she is keeping her journal. What is perhaps the surprising element here is that Nao is not a native of Tokyo or even of Japan; she and her family have only been living there for about a year as a result of the decision to leave their home in Sunnydale, California after her father loses his job at a software company. Although quite obviously of Japanese descent, the only national culture she’s ever known is American culture and so has having a load of problems dealing with a very strange form of culture clash. And, yes, it is interesting, isn't it, that the girl who describes herself as a time being has a nickname which is pronounced "now".
Ruth stared at the page…Ruth’s curiosity was piqued. It was clearly a diary of some kind. She examined the cover again. Should she read it? Deliberately now, she turned to the first page, feeling vaguely prurient, like an eavesdropper or a peeping tom. Novelists spend a lot of time poking their noses into other people’s business. Ruth was not unfamiliar with this feeling.
Hi!, she read. My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? . . .
The other main character in the story is Ruth, a Japanese-American writer who calls an island off western coast of Canada home. One day while taking a walk on the beach, her attention is attracted the glint of sunlight reflecting off something which kind of looks like the twisted tendrils of a dead jellyfish. It turns out, however, to be a collection of bags within bags containing an assortment of items including a wristwatch, a Hello Kitty lunchbox, a stack of letters written in Japanese and, most importantly, the handwritten journal of a girl named Nao. And, yes, it is interesting, isn’t it, that the women on the beach is a writer named Ruth, must like the author of this book.
Okay, Nao. Why are you doing this? Like, what’s the point?...It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit. And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because they’re all so busy writing and posting, it kind of broke my heart.
The unspoken question here for many will be why is this story being partially told through a journal? It obviously takes place in internet age which has made old-fashioned handwritten journals kind of quaint at best and absurd at worst. Who the heck writes private handwritten journals anymore? The death of shame—the official pronouncement of the death of shame on October 7, 2016 is still a few years away at the time Nao is writing—has made the whole need for privacy thing far less necessary than it used to be. Add to this fact that reality that the internet has made every single expression of a person’s thoughts a kind of performance art and there just seems no logical reason for Nao to be writing private thoughts in a private journal with a gel pen for all things. The heck?
Here is the point at which that question finally comes out into the open and Nao attempts to explain it. There is one other important element to the explanation, however, not covered explicitly in this quote. While social media has made almost every single human action fodder for performance art, there is still one thing that mostly remains a private matter for most individuals: serious contemplation of the act of suicide. After all, if for none of the other much better reasons, the serious mention of suicidal contemplation in the public sphere often has the undesired effect of people you don’t know coming to your home with the intention of forcibly removing you for an indeterminate amount of time.
