A Quiet Life

by Kenzaburo Oe

  If his diaper was still dry, you would use it again after taking him to the toilet, so you would carefully remove its adhesive tape to keep its folds and creases the same. You could tell immediately by its sodden warmth if it was already wet, but when you made it in the nick of time, you would be as happy as a hunter who had bagged some game.

  Yet it was precisely in this situation that there was a problem. As soon as you removed the adhesive tape, Eeyore's “peck” would spring up with a force that would all but send the diaper flying. But after the diaper was removed and everything below his waist was exposed, there would be little left to do, for Eeyore would raise his upper body, get out of bed, and stand up by himself. No matter how often I did this, though, I could never get used to the smell of his breath, which reeks like some beast, or the foams produced when alloying metals. It's totally different from the sweet smell of his breath during the day: different, too, from the odor of his mouth when he has his attacks. …

  Thanks to the conscientious instructor, Eeyore's diaper-wetting was cured virtually overnight—a half year after the instructor made his bold suggestion—when Eeyore spent, a night at the special school dormitory for a dry run to prepare the children for camping trips and the like. Since then, I don't think anyone in the family has seen his “peck” rise as it did before, with the virility of the serpents on Medusa's pate. Come to think of it, it's been years since I've seen him double up into that awkward posture with his elongated “peck.” But because Eeyore is of a serious mettle, and since he's the kind of person who doesn't allow himself to conceal such things from the eyes of his family, I wonder if this means that his “peck” has ceased to grow.

  When I told Mother what I thought, she replied, in a lowered tone of voice, “Perhaps that period has passed. A short youth, wasn't it?” Father was then in the living room, but had been listening in on our kitchen conversation, and said, “All in all, it's nothing bad. We don't need to be anxious anymore. That's the long and short of it.” I resented this.

  “We don't know if that's good or bad for Eeyore!” I protested in my heart. If his youth is gone, surely he won't do anything like what that boy was doing on the street. But again, I don't really know very much about such things. As far as my feelings go, something makes me want to say that I'd rather not be spared the anxiety. But more than this, I think to myself, Hell, no! Hell, no!

  Despite the mental preparation I had made for all the things that might occur, the first week after my parents departed from Narita presented me with a host of wholly unanticipated events that set my mind awhirl. Because I was able to sleep only four or five hours at night, I would lie on my bed a couple of times a day between my chores and doze off, and sometimes I got so absentminded that I made two entries in the “Diary as Home” I had promised Mother I would keep. There was a lot to write about, though.

  Every little thing I had to attend to did, in a way, help forget my loneliness and anxiety. Nonetheless, I was vaguely perturbed by a nagging awareness of two matters, perhaps two persons. Something categorically carnal about them hung suspended in the middle of my body, right above my stomach. I refer to the two men who, at the height of my exasperation, I called “fanatics.” Father seemed taken aback by this way of referring to them but was silent, while Mother cautioned me not to speak this way in front of others.

  The men started coming to our gate, at least once a week beginning late last year, to bring us presents of a sort. We knew nothing about them, but it was because of their odd behavior that I began calling them fanatics. One of the men brought a bouquet of small flowers, not the kind you find at a florist's, but one that was bunched together in a peculiar fashion. The bouquet was like a cheerless classmate with downcast eyes who one day. when you're not on guard, usurps your inner thoughts. The other man brought water in a half-pint sake bottle stoppered with a cork. This one just went away after leaving the bottle on the brick wall by the gate, but once I confronted him face to face when I went out to receive the delivery of a year-end gift. He was a hefty, muscular person, like a monk who practices rigid religious austerities, and under his broad brow were the light-brown dots of eyes set too far apart.

  The bouquet man rang the bell on our gate and offered the flowers to whoever answered. He was a diminutive person with the bearing of a bank teller or a schoolteacher, and always attached to his flowers was a letter in a small envelope. I never read any of them, but because the envelopes bore the letterhead of his workplace, got the impression he was comparatively normal. Father and Mother made little if any mention of him, but come to think of it, I remember there was a big commotion in the house many years back, possibly because of this man. It happened in the small hours of the morning, but oblivious to everything in those days, I had slept through most of it, and only very vaguely remember sensing that there had been some kind of trouble. Now I wanted to know what it was, so I asked Eeyore if he remembered what had happened. “Ah! We really had trouble! A police car came, but I didn't hear any siren!” His reply came in the usual belated fashion, yet he seemed to have a clear memory of the incident. “What kind of trouble was it?” I asked. Eeyore then lowered his eyes and said, with touching sincerity, “I'm in trouble! I'm in trouble!” From the way he tried to skirt my question, I assumed Father had told him to be quiet about it.

  The appearance of such visitors was the high point, but there were also letters and phone calls that I felt were of the same nature, and as far as I krrow they increased after the telecast of a lecture called “The Prayers of a Faithless Man,” which Father had given at a women's university. As someone who has had to directly put up with numerous nuisances, I can argue that there was no need for Father to go and tell everyone he was a “faithless man.” And though I don't think he meant to offend anyone, for him to talk of prayers after admitting he professed no faith was, in my opinion, a breach of common courtesy. In this sense, he did make a social blunder, for which I think he well deserved some minor castigation. “But why do we have to go through this!” I protested to Mother once, and I think Father heard about it later. Anyway, that's when I first called the two visitors “fanatics.”

  Actually, Father seemed to bear all this as a kind of reprimand to himself, but thinking there might be a visitation after he, the person responsible for the family, had gone, and apparently feeling some guilt toward me, he wrote to the bouquet man and implored him to stop visiting. And so the delivery of the small bouquets ended. There was no way to get in touch with the water-bottle man, however, so the week before their departure, Father kept turning his eyes toward the gate as he worked in the living room, and was prepared to hand the man a similar letter, but he never appeared. Then, on Saturday, when dusk had fallen, we found another bottle on the gate, but no trace of the stranger.

  After Father and Mother had left for California, I continued to worry about what I would do in the event I was again confronted at the gate by the water-bottle man. It would be depressing enough just to see a bottle there, let alone suffer another encounter with him.

  Father's letter to the man rested untouched on a visiting-card tray by the front door. I was aware of its presence, but I let it sit there, for it's never to my liking to pry into someone else's correspondence, whoever its sender or receiver may be. Mother's first phone call to me after they had settled into one of the faculty quarters was to say that Father was anxious about the letter, and that he was having second thoughts about the water-bottle man getting it, for in it he had mentioned that he and Mother would be overseas for some time; this, he worried, might fan a zealous flame in the man, and make him want to see Eeyore protected by the power of his faith. … Then Father came on the phone instead of Mother and appeasingly said, “Even so, Ma-chan, I hope you don't become too apprehensive,” which left me feeling he was being a bit irresponsible.

  We kept the bottles in the corner of our storeroom in the order they were brought to us, for Mother worried that the stranger might ask for them back. The array of bottles, identical in s
hape, with tight corks fitted evenly on them, presented an awesome sight. The bottling was obviously the handwork of an amateur, and though the water in the bottles didn't look as though it had been boiled to kill the germs, when I picked up one of the earlier ones and gave it a shake, I saw no signs of fermentation, and again I felt the eeriness that gelled right above my stomach. …

  One evening ten days after my parents' departure, a disturbance erupted on the block right next to ours, which brought a rush of police cars, their sirens ripping the air, unlike the police car in Eeyore's memory. I already know what happened, but I will write as though I am recalling exactly how I felt and what I thought at each point in time. I have already been writing this way about the water-bottle man.

  The sirens of patrol cars suddenly began pressing in from all around, and I was so shocked that my mind went completely blank. When I rose from my chair, still without a single thought in my head, all the blood seemed to drain out of my body, and I was forced to slouch down on the dining table, where I had been writing a report. I panicked like this because, at the time, Eeyore was at the barbershop.

  The barbershop is on the corner where the bus route meets the street in front of the railway station, and it has always been my job to take Eeyore there, and pay the barber in advance. Eeyore has had his hair cut there for years, so he is familiar with the procedure. He seems to get a kick out of the young proprietor, who asks him repeatedly when his hair is just about done, “Is this all right? Is this all right?” And he loves the slow walk home, I suppose because of the refreshed feeling that a haircut gives. It suited me fine that Eeyore would come home by himself, because it's rather weird for a young girl to sit and wait in a barbershop lounge.

  As the patrol car warnings sounded from all directions, I checked to see whether Eeyore had returned home, but he hadn't. O-chan was at cram school for his university entrance exams, and I intensely regretted falling out of the habit of not staying by Eeyore's side until his haircut was done.

  Nevertheless, bracing myself, I dashed outside in my jogging shoes. I ran the course Eeyore takes home, and at the third corner, a block just off the route connecting the house and the barbershop, in a quarter where there were a number of stately mansions, their grounds, buildings, and hedges just as they were in the past, I saw four police cars. The passing summer lingered in the twilight air, and its dying light could be seen in the perspiration on the faces and necks of the neighbors who had come out for an evening stroll, and were now milling around watching the policemen go about their work.

  My body was already leaning in that direction, but I resisted the urge to start running again, and with a pounding chest, I said to an old man who was standing on the street near our house in calf-length drawers, “A traffic accident, sir?”

  The old man turned his face, of classic features, toward me, and from his expression you would have thought he'd been watching a riveting TV serial about the ups and downs of life. This told me, vaguely, that the matter the police were investigating up ahead was nothing so simple as a traffic accident, but something more intimate and involved. With his already sanguine complexion even redder with emotion, the old man said, in a dread-inspiring voice, “It's no traffic accident. A molester, it seems. You'd better not take that road.”

  I bowed to him, turned with a good swing of my shoulders, and before I knew it, continued running along the route Eeyore should have been taking home. “Well, well!” I said to myself, savoring the rush of relief. “A molester, is it? I haven't heard of a gay molester anywhere in this country. Eeyore's safe! He's safe!” But Eeyore wasn't there at the barbershop; nor were there any customers, in the waiting lounge or in the chairs, but just the barbers cleaning up for the day.

  The “Is this all right?” proprietor raised his body, bent over the floor he was sweeping, and said, perplexedly, “Your younger brother left for home some time ago,” making the not-uncommon mistake of thinking that Eeyore was younger.

  On the way home, I was struck with a new fear. Until then I had optimistically figured Eeyore was safe, since I had never heard of a gay molester. But couldn't it have been the other way around, that Eeyore had victimized someone? He wouldn't, at first, have meant to. He had probably just been trying to be kind to a cute little girl, but had frightened her instead. … And Eeyore just hates screaming and wailing. …

  But Eeyore was home, safe and sound, sitting on the sofa, perusing the coming week's FM program guide in the evening paper. I sat down beside him and calmed the throbbing of my heart. He quickly glanced toward me, with a look of wonder, and quietly continued to mark off titles of classical music compositions with a red pencil. From his closely cropped head came the scent of hair lotion, and from his sport shirt came the green-smelling scent of lush vegetation! I immediately felt relieved, but from the next day on, I keenly recalled this green-leaf scent as material evidence of my distress. And then, that evening, when I went outside to close the front gate, there, sitting on the brick wall, was another bottle, the first in some time—not that I longed to see another one—and I felt totally exhausted.

  The local page of next morning's paper carried an article about the molester. The report said that an elementary schoolgirl had been victimized, and that a series of assaults identical in nature had been committed since the end of last year—which was news to me—and that the culprit was still at large. And a couple of days later, as I was sweeping the path from our porch to the front gate, I heard two of our neighbors talking: the woman who lives across from us, and another woman her age who always goes shopping with her to the stores in front of the station. I guess they didn't know I was there, because they were standing on the paved street, on the other side of the closed gate and one step down, while I was inside the gate, my body stooped over a short garden broom, sweeping.

  “The pervert was lying in wait at the corner of the block where the mansions are. He seized the girl and pushed her into the hollow of a hedge, then grabbed both wrists with one hand and pinned her down. Then he kept moving his other hand where the legs of his pants meet, and squirted something on her face.” I think I also heard the words “facial emission.” “How dreadful if he has AIDS. The girl's face was drenched, with her tears too.” “Why didn't she cry out?” “Perhaps he punched her hard, and she was too frightened.” “That, reminds me. The other day, I saw someone standing rock-still by the hedge with his back toward me. …”

  I had to sweep in front of the gate, too, so I stepped out and bowed to the women, whereupon they smiled back at me and promptly changed the subject. Before I was done with the sweeping, one of them went back into her house as the other hastily pedaled away on her bicycle.

  The women's conversation imparted an even more ominous vigor to the movements of my floundering heart, which had been possessed by distress since the day after the pervert's appearance. The women had started talking about a figure standing by the hedge, but had dropped the subject when they caught sight of my small, round head emerging above the gate. Yet it was this part of their story that had fallen on me with a heavy thud—for the fact is, the distress had become so great that, while feeling apologetic toward him, I had tested Eeyore.

  The day before, Eeyore and I had gone to a coffee shop on the street in front of the station. Paying the cashier in advance for his coffee, I asked Eeyore to go home alone because I needed to pick up a few things at the supermarket. I then hid in, and watched from, the shade of a pagoda tree whose small, yellowed leaves had already begun to shrivel. Finishing his coffee, Eeyore emerged, and in his placid tension was a soft expression that might, at any moment, have broken into a smile; in other words, he was in a good mood. He was taking delight in carrying out, by himself, the special suggestion he had gotten from me. He waited cautiously for a break in the stream of cars to cross the busy bus route, and then continued walking, slowly, as though on an old-fashioned pleasure stroll.

  If he walked the course we always take to and from the station, then my distress would prove a n
eedless worry. And indeed he turned the corner as we always do, then continued on the same well-trodden course. I think I already felt very relieved. But when he came to the crossroads where the disturbance had occurred, he turned south, in the opposite direction. His gait was steady, which was unusual in view of the disorder in his legs, and he moved them firmly forward. In time he stopped in front of an old mansion with an untended hedge consisting mainly of a clump of azalea shrubs that had grown thick and scraggly in the summer sun. Then he forcefully thrust his right shoulder into one of the hedge's hollows, and stood there as though hiding himself.

  I don't think I stopped to watch him for even a minute. I just couldn't, though there were no passersby. I saw, coming in our direction, only the figures of two uniformed schoolgirls, who in the distance looked like magpies or crows. However, being totally flattened by my distress, I desperately ran up to Eeyore's side and said, my voice breaking, “What's the matter? What happened? You took the wrong road. Let's go home!”

  While reading over what I had written in the “Diary as Home,” I realized that another ten days had passed since then. But it's weird, even mystifying, for at the time, although I must have been overwhelmed by the great mass of my distress, not a trace of it remained, its serious weight notwithstanding, once this period had passed. Still, living through those hellish days had made a new person out of me, in a way, I guess. I say this because I, the always withdrawn coward that I am, accomplished something I had never dreamed of.

  That, day, too, it never cooled off, and in the windless, stagnant air, only the faint evening glow in the western sky was beautiful. Going out to get the evening paper, I saw that, another water-filled bottle had been left on top of the wall by the gate. It somberly mirrored the twilight air, and as though a lens had gathered the sunset hues, the confined water surface right below the cork reflected a reddish sheen—which I felt was like the flush on the face of a con artist who has just sold you a bill of goods. If the bottle had been left there only minutes ago, I could run out and give it back to the man, I thought. I then became totally absorbed in this idea, as when one gets excited about something and blood rises to the head.