A Quiet Life

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “Come, come, Mr. Shigeto. Ma-chan's already nonplussed, and she's all but crying. Is this what gives you pleasure? Making a poor, helpless girl like her cry?”

  A redder flush appeared around Mr. Shigeto's blinking eyes and on the tip of his nose, which made him resemble a liquor-loving tailor or cobbler in a European fable—which, in fact, is what I thought about to stifle rny tears.

  “K is basically of a halfway character. The trouble is, on the more conscious level, he can't stand halfwayness. That's the kind of odd guy he is. By this I mean … he believes that he could never enter into a faith only halfway. But being halfway about it, he can't keep from contemplating what it means to pray. Worse yet, he's unscrupulous in talking about it. So in the end this ‘pinch’ of his is something he himself invited.

  “Oyu-san told me that soon after the lecture was televised, K quite unexpectedly received a letter from a Catholic priest he'd held in high esteem. Coming from such a person, it must have been a very serious letter. The priest wrote that he deemed K already a member of the flock. This was a powerful punch for him. K had believed that he'd always been writing from the side of a man without faith, as though thrusting his arms toward the territory of people with faith. But if he'd already unwittingly crossed over to their side, as the priest wrote … Don't you find this a fearful but intriguing summons? The problem, though, is that K himself is blind to the whereabouts of true faith. It's pathetic.”

  “Really, faith is something Father never talks to me about. He's never said anything to me about the church my university is affiliated with, neither in jest nor as a topic of serious discussion. He once attended a service at the cathedral there when an old friend of his, a literary critic, passed away, but he didn't say anything about the funeral mass when he came home. All he did was read, for several days, the many books he had bought at the bookstore next to the church.”

  “Mr. Shigeto,” his wife put in, “is faith in general really important to K-chan? I never thought it mattered to him all that much. Compared with K-chan, I've always thought that you were in every way poorer at heart.”

  ‘Preposterous!” exclaimed Mr. Shigeto. as if to dispel his bewilderment. “But that reminds me of when we were at college. A class had been canceled, so to kill time, we sat by the water fountain in front of the dorm, and chatted as we gnawed at a dry loaf of bread. All of a sudden K blurted out that salvation or damnation of the soul was immaterial to him, that all that mattered to him was whether or not there was life after death. He said he didn't care if he went to heaven or hell, because neither could be more fearful than absolute nothingness; salvation and damnation were one and the same if the only thing out there was total nothingness. It was infantile logic, but it made sense. Anyway, in those days, this was what K kept thinking about.

  “But then H, you remember him, don't you, Ma-chan, the guy who became editor after graduation but died of leukemia? H, the level-headed cosmopolitan, needled your father, saying, ‘You've got it all wrong, K. What lies beyond us is not, I think, a choice of one or the other. Rather it's been arranged for us to choose one of three. Heaven and purgatory can be lumped together as one. Then you have hell. And the third choice is absolute nothingness. Now should you go to the third place—absolute nothingness—over heaven or hell, which fortunately already exist—well, then, you end up at a place that's tantamount to your not being born. This, too, should appall you.’ When K heard this, he became so disheartened that I couldn't bear to look at him….”

  Then Eeyore came walking along the hallway from the music room. A somewhat unusual nervousness seemed to tighten his large-featured face. He showed Mr. Shigeto the sheet music he had brought with him, the whole page of which was full of erased and repenciled notes, and he waited for Mr. Shigeto's reaction, which is to say that he ignored both Mrs. Shigeto and me, even though I had primly greeted him. Taking a relaxed breath, the “Sutego” composer pointed to the array of notes—long, thin ones which Father says look like bean sprouts—toward the bottom of the page, and emphatically said, “This part wasn't very good. But I've already corrected it!”

  Mr. Shigeto reread the part Eeyore had pointed at, likewise the parts that preceded and followed it, with an expression that was not that of a specialist on Eastern European literature, as when he turns his face to me, but one more typical of a musician. All the while, it seemed as though the common language of music was shuttling between Mr. Shigeto's head and Eeyore's, as Eeyore eagerly waited. The moment Mr. Shigeto acknowledged the validity of the changes Eeyore had made, Eeyore's face fully blossomed into a bright smile. And with the eraser and pencil he had brought in his pocket, he started erasing and rewriting some of the notes on the clean copy he had given to Mr. Shigeto. I blankly watched the title “Sutego” tremble, as if in fear, under the eraser's vigorous movements. And then I blurted. “Feyore, is that a sad piece? Is it about the loneliness you feel? It's about an ‘abandoned child,’ isn't it?”

  “It's in D minor. Is it a sad piece? I wonder,” he replied, with eyes that told me his thoughts still remained on the score. The pencil he had used to finish making his corrections now rested on his ear. “I've only just now finished it.”

  “In time you're going to know very well, Feyore, whether it's a sad piece or not,” Mrs. Shigeto said with a deep sigh, squinting her heavy-lidded, thread-thin eyes. I think that in our hearts Mr. Shigeto and I sighed, in unison, the same deep sigh she sighed.

  When October came, Eeyore and I flew to Father's birthplace in Shikoku because of a bereavement in the family. Great-uncle—that's what we called Father's elder brother, using the title differently from the way it's defined in dictionaries—had passed away. I was told that cancer had spread from his liver to his lungs, and even to his brain. And so we were prompted to pay our condolences on behalf of our parents. Aunt Fusa sounded calm when she called to inform us of Great-uncle's passing, probably because he had been in the hospital a long time, and also because she didn't wish to cause me alarm.

  Aunt Fusa asked for the phone number of our parents' quarters in California, and said she would discuss with Father what we, who were looking alter the house in their absence, should do, and then call back. She added that she would be the information center, for if I also called Mother, not only would this be redundant, but it might cause some confusion of information, which would require another overseas call, and this would be uneconomical. Although I didn't have direct, specific memories of Great-uncle, I remembered Aunt Fusa to be a woman who occasionally said a few humorous things, and who could exercise practicality, as she did in the present situation. Other than this, I remembered her as being basically a quiet, reserved person. She was quite different from Father, though they were brother and sister. A half hour later, she called back to tell me she had been able to reach Father at his quarters, for it was early morning here, and the time difference was just right.

  The content of Aunt Fusa's second call was that K-chan was shocked, but with Oyu-san with him, he was all right. When he visited Great-uncle in the hospital before leaving for the States, the doctor informed him that his brother's condition was serious, that the cancer had metastasized, which was something everyone in the family already knew. Perhaps the cowardly K-chan had gone to California because he feared he would have to witness the scene of Great-uncle painfully dying of cancer. This was most likely the reason he left. There may have been others, of course, but he became utterly depressed after visiting Great-uncle.

  They had talked, she continued, of the possibility of K-chan coming back for the funeral. He said he would, but then they decided that he should remain in California. They would, however, like me to come with Eeyore and attend the funeral ceremony. She told me how much we should bring as a monetary offering to the departed soul. If we came on that day's flight, someone would be there to pick us up at the airport, and we could spend the night at the house in the valley. She wanted me to bring Eeyore along because Grandma was grieving, much more than K-chan, and his coming the
re would cheer her up a little.

  When we arrived at Matsuyama Airport and came out of the boxlike passageway that joined the plane to the airport building, the landscape beyond the window met us with a brightness I thought I hadn't seen in a long, long time. Squinting, and smiling a smile induced by the sun, Eeyore let out a “Hoh!” and kept looking into the light outside. As I stood at the narrow baggage-claim counter, I saw Aunt Fusa—she looked like she had added on a few years—waving at us from beyond the glass partition. Beside her stood a giant of a man, who looked like a fresh sumo recruit. I assumed he must have been Shu-chan, who had visited us once, when he came to Tokyo on his high school excursion. When our baggage came out on the conveyor belt, Eeyore, like another sumo wrestler, vigorously lifted it, taking one deep breath and exclaiming “Yoishoh!” and then carried it for me. Aunt Fusa, who had circled around to the exit and greeted us there, looked sad and serious with the shadow of Great-uncle's death on her face, but the lines around her pale eyes were those of a smile. After obligingly taking the suitcase from Eeyore, the big man, who indeed was Shu-chan, started walking ahead of us to the parking lot. He made the suitcase look like a toy box, carrying it with his arms thrust out at an angle that maintained space between his torso and the case.

  “He teaches at a middle school,” Aunt Fusa said, as she walked along next to Eeyore and me, exiting the building into the truly dazzling light, “but he's become much more sober, to the point that he's even stifling.” The way she quietly said this suggested to me the presence of a nostalgic levity beneath the level to which her feelings had sunk.

  “Oh,” I replied, politely.

  I was in middle school when Shu-chan came to Tokyo on his high school excursion, and in those days, I understood sober to be a generic term referring to suave-looking youngsters. So I said to Mother, “If anybody is sober, it's Shu-chan!” Father heard me and got a big kick out. of it, in the inconsiderate manner so typical of him, and called Aunt Fusa to tell her what I had said. This was what had transpired in connection with sober.

  Once out of the city area, the well-paved but upward-climbing road continued, on and on. It appeared to wedge its way into a chain of mountains, and the autumn-tinted, broad-leaved trees on the slopes beyond the now-parched rice paddies, and even the forests of cedar and cypress higher above them, glowed calm and bright in the noonday sun. It was through such rural, festive scenery that we sped on, in a small two-door car, with Shu-chan and Eeyore in front, their seatbelts tightly fastened, and Aunt Fusa and me in the back. Treating me the way she would a full-fledged adult, Aunt Fusa told me about how Great-uncle had taken ill, about the pain he had suffered and his last moments. Hefty as both of them are, Shu-chan and Eeyore together looked like a towering wall before us, yet they, too, lent a polite and reverential ear.

  What I found most impressive with what Aunt Fusa told me, of course, was the part that pertained to Father. And I feel that. Aunt Fusa herself spoke to me especially from that angle. She said that by the time Father had gone to see Great-uncle in the hospital, on the pretext that he was making a courtesy call before leaving for California, Great-uncle had already been taking morphine shots, which made him delirious and drowsy even during the day. Father entered Great-uncle's sickroom, but because all he did was sit deep in the low sofa beside the bed in utter dejection, Aunt Fusa said to Great-uncle, “K-chan's come to see you,” to which Great-uncle's knee, the one he had drawn up under the blanket, quivered as if in frightful surprise.

  Later, according to Aunt Fusa, Great-uncle let his bare toes touch the floor, saying that his leg was heavy, which in turn made Father's whole body quiver, for he saw when the middle toe should have been on Great-uncle's right foot. Didn't K-chan, who is always shocked when he sees such mutilation of a family member's body, feel rankly enervated just thinking of Big Brother suffering the last stages of terminal cancer and dying? And so did he not, after learning from the doctor about how long Big Brother had left to live, choose to turn tail and fly to California? “… I'm not the only one guessing as much,” she said. “Grandma feels the same way, and she understands these things.”

  “It seems that Father told Mother about Great-uncle's toe. He was always thinking of Great-uncle. He felt indebted to him for putting him through college, while Great-uncle himself lived in the forest doing the manual labor that had cost him his toe. The lost toe was a great shock to Father.”

  “I feel so sorry for K-chan and Big Brother.” Aunt Fusa said, her voice sounding angry. When she started talking of how Great-uncle had breathed his last, Eeyore restlessly moved his upper body, secured with the belt of the passenger seat, and clasped his hands in prayer. This startled Aunt Fusa.

  “Eeyore does that, and bows in deference, whenever he sees a familiar name in the obituaries,” I explained. “When a musician or a sumo stable master dies, for instance.” To this Eeyore firmly nodded.

  “…Oh? You've returned to calling him Eeyore again, Ma-chan. Grandma just loves that name. How nice. She'll be relieved to know she can freely call him Eeyore again.”

  Indeed, in our family, the vicissitudes the name Eeyore has undergone is a story in itself. After enrolling in the secondary division of the special school for the handicapped, Eeyore came home one day after a week of dorm life and training, and when Father called him Eeyore, his usual nickname, he didn't answer. This threw Father into such a dither that we dared not utter a word. After a while, O-chan, who sensed Eeyore's aspiration for independence, discovered that he wished us to use his real name. So we all started calling him Hikari-san, and Grandma followed suit, in her letters and on the phone. But in time we started calling him Eeyore again, and he appears to suffer no discomfort over this. There was a time when Mother became concerned about this, more than ever before, and worried if his frequent fits of epilepsy weren't causing him mental regression. For one fit of epilepsy, she said, is believed to destroy on the order of several hundred thousand brain cells. …

  Without touching on the part about the effect of epileptic fits on brain cells, for Eeyore was in the front seat listening, I briefed Aunt Fusa on what had made us stop calling him Eeyore for a while, and how we came to use this name again. Aunt Fusa, apparently immersed in quiet thought, said: “I think Eeyore's desire for independence was most prominent when he was in secondary school. Because Shu was the same. But both now possess a most admirable calmness that goes with their age.”

  It struck me that Aunt Fusa had been very rapidly working her head over all manner of things, even the mental regression that Mother worried about, and that she was also encouraging me. However, she fell silent immediately after she said this, and didn't say anything for quite some time, apparently a character trait she shared with Father.

  We drove through a tunnel that had been bored near the top of a big pass, and wound down a tortuous drive into a resplendent ravine matted with the golden and crimson foliage of autumn. When we came out on the flat, wide topography that formed the basin of a town, Aunt Fusa explained that the place had served as a distribution base for all outgoing produce and products from the entire region, and also for the culture that came into the area. We drove on farther, along a sparkling shallow river and into the forest where only a few houses lined the narrow road. And in the distance, on the slope on the other side of the river, we saw the few large and small houses of the village where Father was raised.

  In front of Father's childhood home were rows of leafy hamboo trees, floral wreaths to be used at the funeral ceremony, and equipment for votive lanterns. The sight of men in black suits that didn't seem to fit their bodies, busily going about their work, was imposing. Aunt Fusa told Shu-chan to pass them. Sensitive to anything that has to do with death, Feyore very reverentially clasped his hands toward the funeral paraphernalia as we passed by. We drove upstream for a while, then went back along the levee road. Soon Eeyore and I were ushered into Grandma's detached room through the backyard, where some kiwis hung from a tree. Faint, suppressed voices, like those of
spies whispering battle strategy, drifted in from the main house, together with the presence of people moving around nearby.

  Grandma was changing into her mourning kimono, but she was standing motionless, in front of the dresser. An age-old, long undergarment, which from its coloration looked like silk, hung from her narrow shoulders. I had stopped at the entrance to the room, in the hallway, and it was in a mirror that I first saw Grandma's small, gray, paperlike face. She was gazing into space with her dark, long-slitted eyes—like Father's—which looked to be all iris, as if blackish water had puddled in them. … Eeyore and I stood rooted there in the hallway, and Aunt Fusa didn't goad us on. Sensing our presence, however, Grandma made brisk movements from the seemingly paralyzed posture in which she'll been standing. And as soon as she had donned her black kimono, she straightened the garment around her breasts and turned toward us.

  “Welcome,” she said, “and thank you for traveling from so far away to come here….”

  “You can call him Eeyore,” Aunt Fusa said the moment Grandma's words trailed off. “I hear it's back to what it was before.”

  “Well, Eeyore-san,” Grandma resumed, “how nice of you to come. Great-uncle's funeral ceremony is starting soon. Would you please attend it? And Ma-chan, forgive us, please, for the trouble we're causing you. And thank you for coming!”

  “I'll have Ma-chan and Eeyore go to the main house,” Aunt Fusa said, “and pay their condolences there while you tie your obi, Grandma. … Now don't spend so much time putting on your mourning kimono, with the movements of an astronaut swimming in space.”