A Tale For The Time Being

The first chapter is narrated by sixteen-year-old Naoko “Nao” Yasutani, who is writing the story in her diary in “a French maid café” in the “Akiba Electricity Town” district of Tokyo (3). Nao introduces herself as a “time being,” which she explains 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” (3). She speculates about what her future reader will be doing while reading her book, which “happens to be the diary of [her] last days on earth” (3). Nao goes on to describe the café where she is drinking black coffee and watching the waitresses roleplaying as maid servants. After spotting a businessman staring at her, Nao concludes by the way he is looking that he must have a schoolgirl fetish and imagines lurid scenarios in which he might try to seduce and assault her. Nao then goes on to explain that the real purpose of her book is to tell the story of her 104-year-old great-grandmother, Yasutani Jiko, a Zen Buddhist nun who was also a novelist and a radical feminist during the Taisho era. Before concluding her entry, Nao mentions that she will soon “drop out of time”(7).