A Quiet Life

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “How true,” Grandma replied. “I've been taking too much time, haven't I? … Ma-chan and Eeyore-san, you don't have to go up to Great-uncle's coffin when they ask you to! There's an ingenious device, a small window on it, through which you can see him, but I don't think young people need to see the face of the deceased,” she said, as though to send us off, standing there with her hands pressed against the pit of her stomach.

  I extended my sympathy to Great-uncle's wife and eldest son, and Eeyore reverentially placed the monetary condolence on the altar. Since Aunt Fusa had informed the mourners of Grandma's wish that we not go up to the casket, all we did was how in the enclosure of white chrysanthemums, before the altar that was set up in the second floor parlor. By the time we returned to the detached room, Grandma was neatly clad in her mourning livery. Her small, entirely gray head rested comfortably on her neck as she sat on the tatami, proper and straight, the epitome of dignity. …

  Now what words of condolence could I offer this woman who, in her late eighties, had lost a son? I could only hang my head. I depended on Eeyore, who was seated before Grandma, for though the expression on his face was stiff, he was natural, and was answering her questions about the welfare workshop, and about how he was faring with his music composition.

  Soon Aunt Fusa started telling Grandma in detail about what I had told her in the car on the way there, about the ‘fanatic,’ the molester, who kept bringing us bottles of water. While I thought the topic inappropriate for a funeral wake, I fell all the more tense after realizing it was nobody's fault but mine that such a conversation had started. Grandma listened intently to Aunt Fusa's every word, wearing an expression suffused with such force that her eyelids formed a triangle, and a pink flush that made her look somewhat healthier appeared on her ashen countenance.

  “Ma-chan,” Grandma said, “you were smart to stand on your bicycle and keep watch over the villain before you chased him. The taller one is, the more imposing!”

  “Don't tell us we're no different from bears that fight over territory,” Aunt Fusa chided Grandma, summarily rejecting her logic. Eeyore still looked serious as he turned his eyes toward me, but those eyes gave a glimpse of his reaction to finding bears a humorous word.

  The funeral ceremony commenced at three o'clock, although it's customary in the village to have them much earlier in the day. Apparently, they had arranged for it to start later, to accommodate the time of our incoming flight. The procession started in front of Father's home and followed a path downstream to Bodhi Temple. Eeyore and I saw the mourners off, flanking Grandma, who held a walking stick in her left hand. At the head of the procession was Great-uncle's picture, then his mortuary tablet, and following this, in single file, were bamboo poles with baskets hanging from them, and tall floral wreaths, which were trailed by a long line of strangely shaped paper banners. On went the procession, between the villagers, some dressed in black, some in their everyday attire, who were standing under the eaves of the houses along both sides of the road to pay their last respects to the deceased. A bright late-autumn shower crossed over from the mountainside facing the river to the south-facing side, which was dark with the colors of evergreens. Against this backdrop, the whole panorama of the procession presented a strange sight. The way paper flowers were poured from the baskets on the bamboo poles, each time the mourners crowding in on the weighty coffin circled around it, resembled funerals among indigenous peoples in remote areas of Polynesia. It also impressed me as being gentle and nostalgic. Each time small red, blue, and yellow paper flowers flew from the baskets on the bamboo poles, Grandma raised her head on her emaciated neck, and seemed to strain her eyes to see beneath her triangular eyelids.

  When the tail end of the procession started off, Grandma, Eeyore, and I retired to the cottage, where we rested for a while, and then headed for the temple, again in Shu-chan's car. Because Grandma can't walk far, Shu-chan took a side road, and we got off at a fork where the precincts of Bodhi Temple and its graveyard meet a woodland trail that climbs into the forest. We entered the temple from its backyard path and found that the funeral services were just about to commence. The monk conducting the funeral and the other monks in attendance were making their entrance into the main sanctuary, while a corpulent undertaker from the basin town, the distribution base, shouted from the housetops to the attending mourners, as though he were giving orders, military fashion—like in an old movie—to sit up straight and correct. Grandma, who sat between me and Eeyore in the middle of the section allocated for surviving members of the family and relatives, stretched her hack and began waving for the chief monk to come over. Apparently she had something to say to him. The monk halted in the midst of his procession and sent a young monk to see what she wanted.

  The import of what Grandma conveyed was: “Gould you please ask that man who's trying to preside over the funeral service to leave?” The chief monk nodded when his disciple returned and repeated Grandma's message, which he in turn relayed to the undertaker. There were no more shouted commands after this, and the ceremony progressed in a natural manner. After the service, as I left the sanctuary and stepped down into the garden, I noticed, in the corner of the wet veranda, the undertaker in his black mourning suit, vest, and bow tie, sitting there hugging his knees, looking at the clintonia leaves on which the rain was spattering.

  Great-uncle's eldest son made a brief speech of thanks to the mourners who stood in the garden before the sanctuary. Grandma deemed this to be the end of it all. While we waited for Great-uncle's body to be placed in the hearse and then taken to the crematory upstream, Grandma returned to the antechamber of the sanctuary and talked with the chief monk, who seemed to be an old friend of hers. Watching this, Aunt Fusa remarked, ‘She's evading her responsibilities. She doesn't like to be greeted by her acquaintances from far away.” Soon afterwards, Shu-chan, who looked like the lumpy figure in those Michelin ads, in that his mourning suit was much too small for him, came to tell us that Grandma had left from the rear entrance and was waiting for us at the place where he had dropped us off earlier.

  So we went back up the pretty little path lined with small shrubs of various kinds sparkling in their colorful leaves of autumn, and found Grandma seated in the back of the car, pushing the passenger seat forward to help Eeyore get in and sit beside her. On the way to the temple, Grandma, Aunt Fusa, and I had shared the backseat, and though we're all thin, and on the small side, we did feel cramped. But on the way back, Grandma seemed bent on monopolizing the backseat with Eeyore, for as soon as he entered, she pulled the front seat back again.

  “I guess you want Eeyore to see the forest, is that it, Grandma? “Aunt Fusa asked, sprinkling the postfuneral purifying salt on the two in the car, and on the three of us, including herself, outside. “If what you've got in mind is a forced march all the way up to the higher places, then three in the rear would indeed be backbreaking. Ma-chan, why don't you sit. up front, and I'll do the driving. Shu, you run home on those legs of yours you're so proud of, and help put things back in order there.”

  We drove down the woodland path, crossed the bridge over the village river, and headed for the road that wound around the mountain beyond. I looked back as we turned the sharp corner at the end of the bridge, and caught sight of Shu-chan, looking exactly like the Michelin man, running firmly and “soberly” down the path along the cliff, rock-bare now that the trees had shed their leaves.

  The ever-ascending drive to the top of the mountainside we were headed for was beguilingly tortuous. It's a family joke that the very first time Father took us to his village, I asked O-chan, my intellectual mentor ever since I was small, “Did mammoths still roam this place when Papa was a child?” I don't remember asking this question, but the long stretch of the road up to and down from Father's home before the tunnel was built is vividly etched in my memory. Still, I actually felt that the climb from the road along the river up to the hamlet of the “country”—to put it in the language of the village map—was an even l
onger journey.

  The scenery we glided through was breathtaking beyond measure. After passing through the basin town, I became aware that, on the slopes of the hills on both sides of the road leading to Father's village in the hollow, there were parcels of land where autumn's orange foliage was tinctured with sparkling red. As we climbed farther up into the higher regions of the “country,” I realized that the colors were from persimmon patches. Patches, not orchards, is the word. Originally they were farmland, cleared during the postwar years for growing wheat, in the days of food shortages. Grandma, who had once been the proprietor of a “mountain-produce wholesale store,” explained to me that after the wheat came chestnut trees, and then the switch to persimmons.

  After a while, the road we were driving on was enveloped by a bright crimson-orange: sparkling red-oeher over us, below us, to our right, and to our left. And we got into more of this as we navigated upward. Whenever we came to relatively level topography, we saw stately houses standing on top of firm, solid stone masonry, roofed in part with thatch, in part with tile, unlike the roofing of the houses in the hollow. Such decorous houses lined the road at intervals, and they continued to appear with a certain consistency of style. Eventually, Aunt Fusa stopped the car on a spur from which unrolled a panoramic view. On one side lay a wide, deep-cut valley that sloped down like an enormous earthenware mortar. Beyond the valley, at eye level, across the deep, wide gully, stretched an overlapping range of quiet, somber blue mountains.

  “Over there is the Shikoku Range,” Aunt Fusa said. “I understand our ancestors finally found refuge from their pursuers in the depths of this forest after trudging over the many trails that meander between those ridges. It's a wonder how, despite all the difficulties, they still dreamed of establishing a new settlement. It's pitiful,” she sighed, her eyes traveling over the scenery. Eeyore was helping Grandma out of the car.

  “I thought the same thing,” Grandma rejoined, “while standing on this high ground, when they wheeled me here on our cart for me to buy chestnuts for the store. But. many years have passed since then, and looking at the village in the hollow now, I can see this place is spacious enough—big as it already is—to sustain a sizable community. In any case, just look at those slopes. There're so many of them I don't think human feet could ever walk their every nook and cranny. The place is truly vast! And it's because the place is so vast that a legend such as ‘The Marvels of the Forest’ has remained in the hearts of the people for so long. But Eeyore-san, you're the only one who's composed music about the legend. … I listened to the cassette tape you sent me, right here on this spur. Your music really made me think of ‘The Marvels of the Forest.’ By the way, Eeyore-san, what's your most recent composition?”

  “‘Sutego’ is its title,” Eeyore emphatically replied.

  I wasn't the only one startled. Grandma and Aunt Fusa stood there in fearful silence with their bodies and faces petrified in the direction they were looking. Seeing them in that state, I wondered to myself why two women whose ages were so different—granted they were mother and daughter—could react in so much the same way. Then endearing thoughts of Mother far away in California struck my heart. So strong was the emotion that I wanted to cry out, “Help me, too, Mother! Help me with my ‘pinch.’” But Eeyore, the source of the ripples in my heart, had nonchalantly walked over to the side of the road, beyond which, a step lower, lay a patch of common persimmon trees pruned short for picking. Holding his face close to a red-and-yellow-studded leaf, he was smelling the sparkling beads the passing rain had caused to form on it. …

  “If you go so close to the persimmons, Eeyore, they might think you'll pick and eat a few,” I exclaimed. The words my mouth uttered were different from those that had welled up from the depths of my heart.

  “Nobody's going to think that,” Grandma said, recovering her smile. “If this were ten, fifteen years ago, the farmers would have built wire fences around these fields. But everything has changed now. You saw those piles of ripe persimmons in front of every farmer's house, didn't you? They're the ones that were culled as loo ripe to ship. With all these persimmons, the children are indifferent toward even those that are just waiting to be picked and eaten. … The things children do change at a frightening pace, don't they, Ma-chan? When we were children, we wore straw sandals, had one unlined kimono to wear, and one red, stringy band of cloth for an obi. We used to build a fire on the bare ground with dried branches to bake sweet potatoes, strip down to the waist and catch fish in the river, and scoop them out with a small bamboo basket. You've seen books, haven't you … like Premodern Children's Customs and Children's Festivals? The illustrations in them show exactly the things we used to do.”

  “You're premodern, Grandma,” Aunt Fusa said. “We've already leapt the premodern and are modern. Eeyore and the others are stepping into the future.”

  “Well, then,” Grandma observed, “shall the premodern and future have a relaxed conversation? Eeyore-san, will you tell me about your music composition?”

  “Very well,” Eeyore replied. Immediately showing interest, he raised his body, which was stooped over the foliage, and returned to when; Grandma was.

  “Then let us, the contemporary pair, go and talk a little farther up,” Aunt Fusa said. “There could very well be an unexpected concurrence of minds if the modern age and the future converse.”

  As I had suspected, what Aunt Fusa wanted to personally ask me about—as two contemporaries—was “Sutego.” She discussed this in the practical manner that was so typical of her. She matter-of-factly told me that if my parents' long-term stay at an American university was making Eeyore feel abandoned, I should call and ask them to come back immediately. What need was there for K-chan, who wrote in Japanese, to be a writer-in-residence in America, and put a burden on that country at a time when the value of the dollar was so low? He claimed that communication with his fellow professors was important, but how much could he accomplish in an English that he confuses with French? K-chan himself, she said, quite honestly admitted this when she last talked to him on the phone.

  I didn't think I could tell her about Father's “pinch.” I only told her that, although Eeyore did in fact compose a piece he had titled “Sutego,” he didn't appear to be suffering the emotions of an abandoned child while working on it. And when it was completed, he was eager about the chords in the final part, and seemed more concerned about the technical results than about its theme.

  Because Aunt Fusa had parked the car on one of the topographical overlooks of the delicately undulating mountainside, we could see, after climbing a little farther up, the whole valley below our eyes like the bottom of an earthenware mortar. Upstream the river was as tortuous as the road, and its water sparkled brightly at every short bend. Upriver some distance was a thickly wooded hill of tall, straight cypress trees that protruded like an appendage of the forest, and there a thick congregation of age-old cedars rose fiercely high above the cypresses. Among those trees, quite out of character with the forest, stood a boxlike, concrete structure with a tall chimney. Plumes of white smoke suddenly rose from the chimney with force. Aunt Fusa gazed down on this smoke with a stern expression, and appeared to he immersed in thought.

  Alone, I kept looking up at the sky, blue as ever without a trace of the late-autumn shower it had just rained down on us. Confronting the sun, I sneezed: a blessing in disguise, for it unfettered Aunt Fusa from the thoughts that bound her, of Eeyore's “Sutego” or of Great-uncle being burned at the crematory, though most likely a mixture of the two.

  “So the sun makes you sneeze, too, Ma-chan!” she said, vigorously raising her head and turning it toward me. “When K-chan was in middle school, he once read a magazine article about that. So he thought of an experiment to see if there was actually any relationship between the sun and sneezing. With only a limited number of subjects, he had me look at the sun every morning, which was no easy task for me. In those days, K-chan was a science nut, just like O-chan.”

&nbs
p; Aunt Fusa squinted her eyes and gazed at the sun in the western sky, and then sneezed a cute, sneeze. We continued to laugh for a while. I then decided to ask her something.

  “I guess this happened when Father was even younger,” I began. “I heard that after he read about St. Francis, at the water mill where he took some wheat to have it ground, he seriously worried about whether he should immediately begin doing something concerning matters of the soul.”

  “That's right. It's a true story,” Aunt Fusa said. “You see down there where the river forks out into two streams, one shining, the other shaded? The water mill is quite a distance up that narrow, darker one, and K-chan came back tightly clutching the bag of flour to his chest, and his face was all white. Fearing that a neighborhood St. Francis of Assisi might appear out of the shade of a nearby tree and lure him to engage in matters of the soul, he began to shed tears, and his eyes looked like those of a raccoon dog. …

  “From what Father said in the lecture, I understand that you told him he looked like a white monkey. …”

  “He's embellished his memory a bit because this concerns him personally. A raw-boned raccoon dog, a runty raccoon dog: that's what he looked like. … But I expect he's lived his life ever since in fear of the day he would have, to abandon everything in order to dedicate himself to matters of the soul. At least that's the kind of person he was while he lived with us, until he graduated from high school. He used to get so depressed when his friends invited him to go with them to study the Bible in English. …

  “Big Brother was also very much concerned about this. He worried whether K-Chan would join some religious organization in Tokyo, though he didn't mind political parties. And once he lamented that if this ever happened it would spell the end of K-chan's future, in a social sense. Come to think of it, though, both Big Brother and K-chan were pitiful young men who were constantly hounded by matters of the soul. But one of them has already turned into white smoke, without doing anything about matters of the soul. …