Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

The first two chapters establish the key elements and important symbols in the novel: the friendship between Sadie and Sam, the power of video games, and the centrality of grief, loss, and trauma in life. The non-linear narrative cuts across timelines, telling the concurrent stories of Sam and Sadie’s past, present, and future selves. This gives the story a distinctive sprawl; the reader immediately knows they are reading a saga of a friendship spanning a lifetime. It also adds additional depth and mystery to the storytelling, allowing details to remain concealed in a way a linear narrative couldn’t accomplish. Another notable feature of the storytelling is the plotting: Objects and themes introduced in chapters recur meaningfully through the text. For example, glass sculptures, as seen in the Glass Flowers gallery in Chapter 1, will play a part in Chapter 9. The narrative is rich with such plot devices as well as Easter eggs, or hidden surprises, a common element in video game design.

The creativity and work that goes into creating video games is an integral element in the narrative. In the Acknowledgements section, Zevin says Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a novel about work. The story dwells on the details of game development, for example, showing the difficulty Sadie has making a storm come to life in Ichigo: “What is a storm […] it is water, and it is light, and it is wind. And it is how these three elements act on the surfaces they touch. How hard can that be?” (95). Similarly, Sadie spends many days designing and perfecting the walk of Ichigo-the-child, settling on Ichigo’s trademark “few awkward accelerating steps to the side even when the player was piloting the character forward” (88). This detailed treatment immerses the reader into the world of gaming while building up the key theme that creating a game is another form of creating a narrative, a story, and a world. Games offer Sam, and especially Sadie, the same pleasures fiction and literature affords others. They can lose themselves in another world and enjoy writing or creating a new universe. For Sam, who has had to deal with great loss and disability from very early in life, games offer an endless opportunity for reinvention. Sam doesn’t have to stay stuck in his physical reality when he has games. The characters’ relationships with games throughout the novel reinforce the theme of Play as Hope, where games provide respite in difficult situations.

Sam’s grief is a powerful, shaping force in his life. The narrative doesn’t minimize or exaggerate his trauma; rather, it shows how trauma works in real life, establishing the theme of The Complex Nature of Grief. Though Sam is upbeat, his sense of loss becomes evident through tiny details, such as having a vision of his mother when he gets hurt. Anna appears to him as a protective kaiju figure: “[T]he size of Godzilla, and under the tent of her parka, Sam knows he is safe” (105). At this moment, it becomes clear that Sam’s awareness of his mother’s loss is never dimmed. At the same time, the touching vision shows that Sam had a loving relationship with his mother. Sam tends to ignore the chronic physical pain he lives with; this is both a survival tactic and a part of his self-image. When he falls in the snow, he cannot make out the extent of his injury at first because he “[…] was so used to pain. He barely felt it, really” (105). The numbing of physical pain is a metaphor for Sam numbing his emotions. For instance, despite Sadie being his best friend, he can never tell her he loves her. Sam’s reticence to share his emotions with Sadie often causes rifts in their friendship, a running motif in the text. To complicate matters, Sam’s love for Sadie is immense. Right before he slips and injures himself, Sam has been thinking of “the freight and the groove” (105), a reference to a love poem he once heard. The probability is he knows the poem—by the poet Emily Dickinson—from Sadie’s game, EmilyBlaster. Thus, the awareness of Sadie and her work colors his subconscious world. The idea of love being a groove to a freight is a recurrent motif in the novel, as well as a symbol for Sadie and Sam’s friendship. For her part, Sadie, despite her great love and empathy for Sam, cannot fully relate to Sam’s losses yet. This comes up as a barrier between the two.

The text further introduces the theme of Gender Bias Faced by Women in Gaming along with the impacts of racial biases in this first section. Sadie is one of only a few women in her computer science class at MIT. Not only that, the gender dynamics of the time make it easy for a male teacher in a position of power to take advantage of Sadie, as Dov does. Sam, who is part Asian and has a disability, faces two-fold biases. In his introductory scene, it becomes clear that Sam’s physical appearance vis-a-vis Sadie’s preoccupies him. As he grows up, he stays away from Sadie since he doesn’t want to be “one more ugly, nerdy person hovering around Sadie Green” (4). Marx, who is Korean and Japanese, is also shown to be facing racist biases. Despite his good looks and acting talent, Marx finds himself passed over for important roles in theater productions. When he asks a friend, “What is it about me? Why am I a Laertes and not a Hamlet” (71), the friend suggests it is Marx’s “quality” (71) and makes a derogatory facial gesture ridiculing Marx’s race. Though Marx is hurt by the friend’s crude actions, he knows what he is saying is true. In America, Tokyo-born Marx will always be viewed as an “exotic other,” “and even in college theater, there were only so many parts an Asian actor could play” (71).

The death by suicide of the other Anna Lee, another Asian woman like Sam’s mother, highlights an important theme: the prevalence of violence in American life. The world is powered by an undercurrent of violence, repression, and sadness, which might explode in an event randomly, such as what happens when the other Anna Lee jumps to the ground “with a percussive splat and an explosion of red blood that suggested a Jackson Pollock painting in process, more than it did a suicide” (107). The shock Sam feels at the randomness of the violence makes him think of it as cartoonish. The fact that the other Anna Lee is also an Asian woman trying to make it as an actor in New York suggests that she has experienced race and gender biases. Although these experiences are not directly or necessarily linked with her death, they do feed into the stress of overall life in America. Further, the death of the other Anna Lee foreshadows Sam’s mother’s tragic fate.