Identity and Time

As Nao bathes with Jiko in the temple’s bathhouse, she is struck by the thought of Jiko’s identity:

Watching her pale, crooked body rise from the steam in the dark wooden tub, I thought she looked ghostly—part ghost, part child, part young girl, part sexy woman, and part yamamba, all at once. All the ages and stages, combined into a single time being (166).

Jiko, as a time being, is simultaneously every “being” she has been throughout her life.  In a novel about a girl forever chasing the now, constantly attempting to pin down a singular moment, this passage stands out.  Jiko is not separated from her past, as at least the echoes of bygone moments still reverberate within her.  Her numerous identities are in flux.

In this way, Jiko exists in a space outside of time.  She is not separated from time.  She is not fixed in a moment. Jiko is everything at once, just as the past, present, and future are happening at once.  This paradoxical theme in the novel is what seemingly allows Nao and Ruth to affect each other, as Nao is “reaching forward through time” to touch Ruth, and just as Ruth is “reaching back” to touch Nao (26).

Contrasted with Nao, Jiko's past is never really past, but inside of her, “something buried deep inside her body in the marrow of her bones” (97).  Nao cannot be both her past self and her current self.  To her, the girl in California and the girl in Tokyo are too different.  She can no longer make the connection between those moments of time, as one always identity always slips away if she tries : “catching it destroys it, and I felt like I was disappearing too” (99).  Unlike Jiko’s “all-being”, Nao attempts a sort of “non-being,” and, as evidenced by her near rape, it almost leads to disastrous consequences.

The diary itself is similarly in flux: growing, changing, and “receding” as Ruth attempts to move through the pages.  Points are never really solidly fixed, as Oliver’s tries to illustrate in art project, his “collaboration with time and place” (61), where the landscape of the long distance past exists alongside the present it will likely outlast.

Like time, identity is fluid in the novel.  And also like time, it is this fluidity that ensures that identity can never remain the same.  Moments pass unceasingly, but time remains connected.