Kansai no Jikan

Fantasy and time is the conceptual bridge between the book’s debate over evolution’s purpose and its legends about Comodín, an imaginative figure who can move through time. The bridge rests on a shared possibility: what looks purposeless or impossible when viewed from within one moment may acquire meaning when considered across a longer history. Yet the book keeps a distinction between backward-looking significance and a cause that genuinely acts from the future.

Purpose and the Long View of Evolution

During a bridge game, José shifts a discussion about probabilities and card dealing toward a question in Frank’s scientific field: whether life on Earth has been driven only by unpredictable random mutations, or whether natural science might have overlooked a mechanism involving intention and purpose. Frank gives what he calls textbook answers, expecting the subject to end there. Instead, the conversation becomes a challenge to the boundaries he has accepted as a biologist.

José argues that life is not merely a real process but one filled with meaning, and that human consciousness should not be treated as an arbitrary trait in the struggle for existence. He proposes that consciousness may be the process’s purpose: just as life has repeatedly developed sight, flight, and upright walking, nature may also be moving toward an intellectual, comprehensive vision. Frank acknowledges the recurrence of such developments while defending the account of natural selection: small advantages can help an individual pass its genes to later generations. The discussion thus sets adaptive explanation against a larger claim about direction and meaning, without making the two equivalent.

John gives the disagreement a temporal dimension. Three hundred million years ago, he suggests, it would have been premature to call life absurd or purposeless: its purpose might simply not yet have had time to flower. Human beings may belong to the current vanguard without having reached the goal; only after a hundred, a thousand, or a billion years might the direction of the process become clear. From that perspective, the future can seem to become, in a certain sense, the cause of what happens now.

Frank objects that this reverses the ordinary meaning of cause, which points backward in time. John’s answer does not establish the future as a literal prior cause. Instead, it invites a reversal of perspective: the past may appear pointless when judged before its consequences have unfolded, while those consequences allow it to be understood retrospectively. John applies the same thought to the Big Bang, whose purpose, he says, may be visible only in retrospect. The idea remains a philosophical proposal rather than a scientific mechanism demonstrated in the exchange.

Comodín and the Rules of Imaginative Time

The concept also governs José’s account of Comodín and the spirits associated with the island’s magical playing cards. Comodín and the island spirits, José says, did not age during the years they lived with the sailor: unlike the mortal sailor, they remained without wrinkles or marks on their colorful costumes because they were spirits, not flesh and blood. Their unchanging appearance makes their existence a contrast between mortal time, which registers itself on the body, and imaginative or spiritual existence, which does not.

José extends that contrast into a rule about time travel. What is only spirit can move backward and forward through time, he proposes, but not to a period before its own conception. He relates the idea to the imagined characters the Little Prince and Alice: there are no stories about them before Saint-Exupéry and Lewis Carroll conceived them, while references to them multiply afterward. In this account, a fictional being can enter the past, but its passage is bounded by the historical moment when the imaginative source that made it possible first appeared.

Comodín’s origin makes that limit concrete. José says that the figure came from a deck of cards printed in France in the late 1780s. From then on, at least one person in the Old World had seen him, and that is as far back as he can travel. A reported sighting by people on the Cádiz wharf on a winter’s day in 1790 marks the earliest point to which the legend can be traced; José says there is no legend or trace of Comodín before that day. The boundary is not simply his first documented appearance: within José’s explanation, it marks the point before which the figure could not yet have been conceived.

Retrospective Meaning and the Limits of Explanation

The evolutionary argument and the legend follow related but distinct temporal logics. John asks readers to withhold judgment on a process whose possible purpose may not yet have emerged; José describes a spirit whose imagined existence permits movement through time but remains limited by its own conception. One concerns how the future might change the interpretation of an actual natural history; the other gives a fantastic being a rule-bound history of its own.

Frank’s objection keeps the distinction between interpretation and causation in view. A later outcome can make earlier events intelligible as part of a meaningful pattern without proving that the outcome reached backward and caused them. Similarly, José’s account of Comodín is presented as a theory of the fantastic, with a traceable beginning in a printed deck and a furthest-back point in the Cádiz legend, rather than as an independently verified account of time travel. The concept’s force lies in holding these possibilities beside one another: meaning may arrive late, while imagination can make time feel traversable, but neither claim erases the difference between a retrospective explanation and a physical cause.

Narrative Function

The concept joins the book’s scientific conversations to its embedded legends without resolving their different standards of evidence. At the card table, a streak of wins opens a probability question that leads to evolution, adaptation, and the possibility of purpose. In José’s story, the cards are no longer merely instruments of chance: a deck printed in France becomes the historical condition for Comodín’s existence. The recurring cards thus link a concrete object and a fantastical claim, while the conversations repeatedly test how far an explanation can reach beyond what is directly observable.

The book preserves uncertainty rather than allowing one account to settle the other. Natural selection offers Frank a mechanism for inherited advantage; John’s retrospective purpose remains a philosophical interpretation of the long evolutionary journey. José’s rules make Comodín’s temporal movement coherent within the legend, but they also impose a boundary: no trace before the figure’s conception. Fantasy and time consequently names not just the possibility of an immortal, time-traveling spirit, but the tension between what a present moment can explain and what only a later perspective—or a story—can make visible.