Agency of the Reader

    In the final third of her novel A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki captures the harmonious connection between Nao and Ruth as time-beings and draws on the theme of agency in their story.  Ozeki suggests that one cannot truly be independent of worldly forces because all are tied together by time, such that all beings are interconnected—and arguably interdependent—with one another as they coexist in the same dimension of time.  In the second part of the novel, Nao claimed, “If I were a Christian, you would be my God,” comparing her reader, Ruth, to a personal God who has a “willingness to listen” (136-137).

    By creating a parallel between the reader and God, Nao is offering insight to faith.  She has had faith in her reader without confidently knowing with certainty that anyone would be on the other end of her diary.  However, when Nao feels at her loneliest, she doubts her reader’s existence and true dependability, essentially losing faith in her: “in my heart of hearts, I never believed in your existence…Everyone I believed in is dying. My old Jiko…my dad…I don’t believe I exist, and soon I won’t” (340).  She communicated with her reader through her writing that she prayed for her Jiko, asking desperately, “Can’t you hear me praying?” (340); this expands on the idea that the reader is in control and has agency in Nao’s life events.  After Ruth comes to find blank pages of “missing” words, she literally dreams of having a direct impact on the outcome of Nao’s life, as well as that of Nao’s father and the memory of Haruki #1; though, in this case for once, she is a reader with agency rather than a writer with agency: “Surely a reader wasn’t capable of this bizarre kind of conjuration, pulling words from the void? ...Who had conjured whom?” (392). 

    In the final pages, Ruth comes to a realization: “To study the Way is to study the self…To study the self is to forget the self…To forget the self is to be enlightened by all myriad things” (398-399).  To live in her “now,” Ruth needed Nao’s story and the perception of having some agency within it because humans are discomforted by lack of control and lack of knowing.  This agency granted her a better understanding of her sense of self and her “now” because she felt directly, personally connected to Nao and her experiences, and had the agency to determine Nao's fate.  Therefore, as the interdependency between Nao and Ruth suggests, the last third of the novel demonstrates that readers have as much agency as the writer, which also in a worldlier sense emphasizes an interconnectedness among all beings, as all share the same dimension in time and desire for agency.

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