A Quiet Life

by Kenzaburo Oe

  I returned to the porch-side window to make sure, through the lace curtains, that Eeyore was still lying on the floor, on his stomach, composing music. Then I quietly closed the door and wheeled our bicycle up to the gate. I put the bottle of tepid water in the wire basket attached to the bike's handlebars—carefully setting it on its side to give it some stability, though it rolled this way and that once I started pedaling—and sped off down the road toward the station.

  I raced straight to the bus route, turned south, and coasted down the pedestrian walk all the way to the intersection with a traffic light. If I made a left, I would be on the street that meets the one to the station. However, the traffic there was still heavy, despite the time of day, and I wasn't sure if I would be able to make out the water donor even if I did catch up with him. After all, I had seen him only once, and my memory of his face wasn't all that vivid. So I decided that, if possible, I should search for him, one street after another, along the several that few people take at dusk, which run north and south, perpendicular to the one we take from our house to the bus route. And if I saw him on one of them, I would be able to identify him. …

  When I was a little girl, still free from all cares, we used to spend the summers in our mountain cabin in Gumma, and Father once said I ran like a pony. And now, actually pumping my shoulders like a horse, I pedaled on the bike I hadn't ridden for some time, first north on the street nearest the bus route, and peered up and down the streets whenever I hit an intersection. I turned at the north end and sped along the road running east and west, until I came to the next corner. When I turned south, I spotted two figures, one bigger than the other, entangled in a knot. They were clenched together at the junction of two hedges, the farther one of dense, closely pruned fragrant olives running along the street side of an old mansion, the closer one of dwarf cypresses, poorly cared for, bordering the neighboring mansion.

  I jammed on the brakes after I had gone another good five or six meters. The two figures, a man and a girl, seemed to be scuffling. The man had on a dark, grass-colored raincoat, despite the fine weather, and the girl, who wore a light pink one-piece dress, appeared to be in the upper grades of elementary school, or in middle school. He had pushed her down with one hand and forced her to squat between his legs. He had thrust his other hand into the front of his raincoat, and was frantically moving it back and forth. …

  My immediate course of action was so peculiar that I felt like laughing when I later related my part in the story to the police. I raised myself off the saddle, lowered my head, and quickly pumped the pedals, just like the scout in a game we played when I was a child. Then I raced past the scuffling pair while loudly ringing the bell. Going past them. I caught, out of the comer of my eye, a glimpse of the man in the raincoat glaring at. me with his brown-dot eyes.

  I stopped some fifteen, sixteen meters ahead, jumped off my bike, turned around, hopped astride the seat again, and with one foot on the ground, looked right at him. All the while I kept ringing the bell. By then the movement of the man's hand where his raincoat parted had ceased, but the other hand continued to restrain the girl with a seemingly strong force. He kept that face with too much space between the eyes turned toward me, and appeared to be busy wondering what to do. Then he raised the hand he had withdrawn from the front of his raincoat and waved it at me as though shooing away a dog.

  I furiously shook my head, so mortified I could have burst into a fearful wail. Then I caught sight of a woman, who appeared to be. in her mid-thirties, looking down from the second-story window of her boxlike house, which had been built on one of the lots the owner of the mansion beyond the unkempt hedge had divided off and sold.

  “Hey!” I hollered. “Please help!” The woman opened the window with a clamor, leaned out to look up and down the street, and with a quick thrust of her head over her shoulder called to someone behind her.

  Sensing a new turn of events, I looked back and saw that the man had released the girl. He was about to quickly walk away in the other direction, his shoulders slanted at an oddly acute angle. Finally the girl began crying out loud as she hobbled on her knees to safety. Still ringing the bell, I slipped past her and went after the man. Noticing I was chasing him, he stopped in his tracks and turned to glare at me with those tiny eyes of his. And I stopped, for the most I could do was stare hack at him from a distance. Before long, the man dashed into a side street with an incredible vigor, his raincoat fluttering on his back like Batman's cape.

  The culprit was caught by the woman's brother, who had quickly wheeled out his motorbike and, unlike me, who had simply followed the molester, beaten him to the bus route. But I was the one—though all I did was belatedly give chase on my bike while furiously ringing the bell—who was able to point out to the police that the pale, perspiring, panting man who pretended to know nothing was indeed the pervert I had seen molesting the girl. In this sense, then, I believe I played my part well enough.

  The woman's brother and her husband pinned the man from both sides until the police came, while the woman stayed with the little victim and kept comforting her. I felt uneasy because the man with the brown-dot eyes, which were like those of a febrile catfish, was staring at me, even as he was being held. From what I later heard from the police, though, the man said he didn't make an all-out effort to flee because he knew I had remembered his face.

  The man apparently also admitted to bringing all those bottles to our house. Until hearing this, I had felt very queasy about the dampness on the front of my skirt. Then it dawned on me that the cork had come out of the bottle I had put in the basket on the handlebars.

  The next day, I came down with a fever and couldn't get out of bed, so Eeyore took a few days off from his work at the welfare workshop, and O-chan prepared our meals. “I took nutrition and balance into consideration, sort of,” he said as he prepared the table, but the assortment was all instant food he had bought at the supermarket—on sale, for that matter. It was funny, though, since what he set out gave the semblance of well-chosen fare. This was about the only time while I lay in bed that I felt my heart uplifted, for I was possessed by a ponderous fear, morning, noon, and night.

  Why had the water-bottle man been a molester? The police said that the bottles of water merely gave him an alibi. If someone had asked why he was loitering around this residential area, he would say he was merely delivering water to our house. To make his alibi even more plausible, he had intentionally chosen a house of a person whose name occasionally appeared in the papers. Still, I think there was something unusual in the way the man kept staring at me while he had the girl pinned down, or when he was trying to get away, and even after he was caught. I sensed those brown-dot eyes had revealed to me, my Father's daughter, the inside of a “fanatic's” mind with an interest in Father's prayers.

  Even as the night wore on, sleep did not come to me, and in that same half-dreamlike state I often fall into I thought of something even more fearful. Though the man was a molester, he won't be long in prison. So as soon as he gets out, won't he come around the neighborhood, lie in wait for me in one of the hedges, and, remembering me through that stare of his, catch me, and force me down to my knees with that same strength? And like that girl who was hit so hard she couldn't even cry, I, too, would be unable to offer the slightest resistance. That cold water which never becomes stale would be poured from that small bottle into my eyes, my nose. …

  One day, autumn in the air and my fever finally gone. I went shopping with Eeyore to the supermarket in front of the station. I felt very weak, and so I had Eeyore, who has a strong pair of arms, carry the two shopping bags for me as we slowly walked home. But when we came to the crossroads where one of the streets led to the old mansion hedged with a clump of shrubs, where I had once seen him stand alone, he turned in that direction, and walked on ahead as though leading me there.

  “What's the matter, Eeyore? That's the long way home,” I protested in undertones as I reluctantly followed him.

 
Eeyore again pushed one shoulder into the hollow of the azalea bush, and stood there straining his ears with a serious expression on his face. I could hear the restrained notes of someone practicing the piano. Eeyore listened for a while, then he turned to me with a placid, contented look.

  “That's Piano Sonata K. 311,” he said. “But it's all right now. The rest shouldn't be difficult. Not at all!”

  I realized then that I, too, would be able to rise above the distress that possessed me. Sure, there will always be new worries, but what could they amount to, compared to that distress. …s

  *Chan is a term of endearment, the diminutive of san. Both are suffixes commonly attached to personal names.

  abandoned children of this planet

  For as long as I can remember, Father has, on a number of occasions, lived overseas for a period of time. Whether for work or for study, these were always situations in which he would depart for, and reside alone at, a place related to some literary figure he was concerned about at the time. So for Mother to accompany him to a foreign country and live there for eight months, leaving here half the family, namely the children, as we are to them despite our ages, was an unprecedented development in our life. Apparently this wholly new situation came about not only because Father needed Mother with him, but also because Mother resolved to accompany him. Knowing Mother's character, I don't doubt her judgment. If she deemed it important to join him, then it must have been important. In any event, even before I asked her why exactly she was going, I had already volunteered to take care of Feyore during their absence. O-chan, my younger brother, has college entrance exams to prepare for, hut anyway, he's an independent, go-it-alone person.

  I then realized the terrifying gravity of the situation I had accepted from the reaction I got when I related it to Father's friend, Mr. Shigeto, who has been looking at Eeyore's music compositions since last year.

  Mr. Shigeto sorrowfully returned my gaze, through eyes that shined with a varnishlike transparency, and said, “Life's a sea of troubles for you, too, isn't it, Ma-chan? With Eeyore along and all…”

  He was trying to comfort me, but his eyes were so painfully sad that I, in turn, felt sorry for him, and had to look away. Yet I could feel my mind turn to the seriousness that I had until then avoided thinking about. A case in point: suppose Eeyore were to meet with an accident. Our family situation is to some extent publicly known from what Father writes, and so surely people would criticize my parents if they were to find out that they had gone to the United States, leaving behind a handicapped child and his younger sister and brother to look after themselves—although, as I said, agewise Eeyore was, like me, an adult, and was already duly working, albeit at a welfare workshop for people with handicaps. In any event, if Eeyore was in an accident, that in itself would be a serious matter!

  When it comes to such seriousness, undoubtedly Mother knows more than any of us. She's the kind of person who, once she falls silent, dwells on a problem all by herself until she comes up with a satisfactory solution. So it goes without saying that Mother must have had good reason to decide to leave us here and go to America. I tried not to be too nosy, but I asked her before their departure what it was that had set her heart on accompanying Father.

  Father was motivated to go to one of the several campuses of the University of California as a writer-in-residence because, having already attended a number of symposia at UC, he had made friends he respects in the English and history departments there. If this was all that had motivated him, though, he could very well have gone by himself, and lived in the faculty quarters as he had on previous occasions.

  Mother's laconic explanation for all this was that Father was in a “pinch.” She also said that Father himself had admitted to her that it was a “pinch” such as he had never experienced.

  If I detected any change in Father these days, it was only that I sometimes found him distracted. Because I'm the type who doesn't immediately feel shock when I hear something, but who slowly dwells on it afterwards, Mother had already filled me in on Father's condition by first telling me he had previously experienced several “pinches,” each of which he had managed to overcome. Once, for instance, by secluding himself in our cabin in Gumma, and another time by taking on an agreeable job at a university in Mexico. What Father needs at such places of shelter is a lush growth of trees. Serious as she was, Mother chuckled when she said that no matter how shattering Father's many pinches had been, he had always taken stock of the trees that were essential to his hideaway: the Erman's white birches in Kita-Karuizawa, the bougainvillea and flame trees in Mexico City, and now the live oaks and redwoods in California. While this was somewhat amusing, at the same time I felt sorry for Father, knowing that he had grown up in a valley enclosed by forests, and so in a pinch would try to return to a place where there were trees.

  This time, too, it so happened that Father, to overcome a “pinch,” would go to California, a land of trees he himself had already taken measure of. At first he was to have gone alone, as he had until now, but in the meantime Mother began to feel that, in any event, Father was too distracted. … First she thought of having Eeyore accompany him. However, an acquaintance of hers at the welfare workshop, a person with some experience, told her that someone with a mental handicap would encounter visa problems. So one morning, a couple of days later, Mother disclosed her intention to go with him. Father himself was there at the breakfast table, as large as life. Father is the kind of person who, whenever he feels he might inconvenience any of us over something about himself, excessively tries to make up for it by carrying everything on his own shoulders. But this day he remained totally distracted.

  Reorganizing my thoughts now, I think I embraced two conflicting sentiments when seeing him in that state of mind: one, a feeling of anger at his slack attitude, irrespective of the nature of his “pinch”; the other, an immediate feeling that he was aging. Having seen Father confronted with similar predicaments even before their marriage, Mother said she was used to it, but. she gave me no concrete clue as to what the new “pinch” involved. And so mingled in me were the fear and sadness that, despite all the “pinches” Father had overcome by himself, he was now facing one in which a mere seclusion of his person at a place of shelter offered him no solution at all.

  The manner in which I have written about things until now should show this, but it seems my character naturally leaves me empathizing with Mother, while I always feel remote about Father. I think I can trace this sentiment back to my childhood, when I saw him always preoccupied with Eeyore and felt that he wasn't really interested in either me or O-chan. Yet fairly recently, Father and I have had several opportunities to talk at some length, and this time, as far as his stay in California goes, he writes to me quite copiously. Still, I often find his letters sitting there unopened on the dining table where I put them. Mother's letters, though. I can hardly wait to open, and I read them with delight.

  From Mother's letters, I feel that, she's been trying to convey to me more about Father's “pinches” than she did when they were here. “When I thought about it,” she wrote in one of them, “I had to admit that Papa's depression—I use this word although I don't like it—started with the sewer-cleaning incident. Don't you, Ma-chan, feel the same way?”

  The sewer-cleaning incident. I remember very well, occurred in February this year. The drainpipe connected to our kitchen sink gets clogged up once or twice during the winter. When this happens, Father promptly goes to work with a gadget consisting of some metal bars covered with synthetic resin, which used to be part of the fence around our flower bed and were now connected together with hemp twine—a tool he had made himself. Some fatty substance and mud hardens in the drainpipe, and encrusts it like some kind of brown mortar. Father wields this untrustworthy gadget of his, which looks unreliable even to the casual eye, and goes at it with dogged resolve, until he finally succeeds in opening up a channel for the water to flow. This done, he thoroughly scours the entire pipe to allow the
sewage to run more smoothly. When through, he washes his hands and feet well, yet the stench of the sewer is still on him when he starts reading a book on the sofa. And his entire prostrate body, like the sewer stench, clearly gives rise to a sense of satisfaction, however small. …

  Father has the habit of obsessing over things like this, and he never misses an opportunity for an experiment. When he passes a drugstore and sees an ad or something for a can of drainpipe-cleaning chemicals, he jumps at it. One morning, seeing the breathtaking results of the chemicals he had poured into the pipe the night before,, he was beside himself with happiness. All of us had to go out and see the wonder before going to school or the welfare workshop. This was actually the genesis of the sewer-cleaning incident. Above the pipe that runs from the kitchen sink to the back of the house, then along its course all the way to the main sewer system, is a sequence of metal drain covers marked 1, 2, 3 … n. And what needs cleaning is the whole length of the pipe between lids 1 and 2, 2 and 3, and so forth. On the day the chemicals finally succeeded in loosening up the sewage, the mortarlike globs that the powerful acids had washed out had accumulated under every cover. Father kept furiously ladling out the globs, like an excited farmer reaping his bountiful harvest.

  Though Father was very elated at this stage, he appeared to already have sensed an ominous, obscure anxiety, for he had correctly suspected that more globs had been washed away into the long pipe that led to the main system, beyond the last cover, as he then thought it, within our lot. … Our fears turned into reality, and the next day water from the sewer gushed out from that very cover. Father's tool no longer served its purpose, and a team of sewer specialists had to come in with a lot of heavy-duty equipment.