A Tale For The Time Being

Haruki writes that since they have learned that senior officers will be inspecting all letters and diaries, he has resolved to keep two records of his time in the military, “one for show” and “this hidden one for truth” (317), both addressed to his mother, but the latter written in French. In his secret diary, Haruki describes the extent of the torture that he and his comrades endure at the hands of their squadron leader and his hatred of the way in which the military glorifies war and violence. At the end of the diary, he reveals that he has decided not to give his life to the war effort by crashing his plane into a battle ship; instead he will steer his ship into the sea so that he won’t kill anyone nor contribute to the war and “the capitalist greed and imperialist hubris that motivated it” (328). 

Ruth has just finished reading Benoit’s translation of Haruki #1’s French notebook. She thinks about how Nao doesn’t know that her great-uncle chose to fly into the ocean instead of the enemy’s battleship. Since Nao has never mentioned a secret French diary, Ruth assumes that Nao must not know about it and wonders how it ended up in the freezer bag along with the diary and the official Japanese letters.