The paradox of existence: when past, present, and future are indistinguishable

By creating a connection that crosses the barriers of space and time, Ruth Ozeki creates a paradox which makes one question how time operates in relation to the past and present. This idea is presented by Oliver, when Ruth is telling him that the final pages of the diary are suddenly blank,

“‘If that’s the case,’ he said, ‘then it’s not just her life that’s at risk.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It calls our existence into question, too, don’t you think?’

‘Us?’ she said. Was he kidding?

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I mean, if she stops writing to us, then maybe we stop being too.’” (Ozeki 344)

The idea that Oliver is presenting is that the actions of a character living in the past could be determinant of the existence of them, as characters living in the present, which would be the past character’s future. Ozeki is deliberately blurring the lines between past, present, and future. Perhaps this is a gesture which attempts to force human beings to come to terms with the total lack of control they have over time itself. Whether it is by committing suicide or by labeling fixed units of time as ‘weeks’ or ‘years’ or ‘the past,’ human beings continuously seem to be striving for control over time. Oliver and Ruth begin the story feeling secure that they are situated in the present, Nao’s future, and that Nao is situated in the past, which is her own present. Ruth even attempts to order the diary by the conventional standard of dates so that she can determine how to read Nao’s experiences. But Ozeki is not content to let the past, present, and future remain fixed in themselves. Instead, she has Ruth lose time trying to research things Nao alludes to; effectively, Ruth loses parts of her present as she tries to dig into the past. Perhaps most compelling, Ruth has a dream in which she travels back in time to speak to Nao’s father, and place Haruki #1’s journal in his remains box. In Nao’s present, she has already checked the box and found nothing. After Ruth’s dream, along another timeline, she and her father check the box and find the journal.

All of these situations provide examples of Ozeki blurring the timeline continuum on which Nao and Ruth and Oliver exist. In one situation, Ruth going back in time seems to change whether or not Nao’s father’s existence continues, and in the one above that Oliver poses, Nao’s writing seems to decide his and Ruth’s own fates. Both Ruth and Nao attempt to exert their own control over time in different ways (Nao by slowing it down, and considering suicide and Ruth by dating Nao’s diary entries and digging into her past), but Ozeki seems to aim to teach readers that time is out of any single human being’s control.