A Quiet Life

by Kenzaburo Oe

  Mr. Shigeto quickly guessed correctly that Eeyore must have come from Winnie-the-Pooh, to which his wife said, “The pessimistic donkey, isn't it? These days, Mr. Shigeto is really sensitive to anything pessimistic.” She seemed frustrated she hadn't been the first one to guess.

  “Well, after all,” Mr. Shigeto remarked, “it was the postwar editions of Selected Poems from the Man'yōshū and Winnie-the-Pooh that helped K develop a closer relationship with Oyu-san. Oyu-san's mother, who then lived in Ashiya, asked him to send her the two books. I happened to know of a secondhand bookseller in Shimo-Kitazawa who had a collection of old Iwanami Press books, and I took him there.”

  “So,” Mrs. Shigeto said proudly, “you've been a connoisseur of old books that long!” Learning how long Father had known Mr. Shigeto, and that their friendship went back to even before Father got to know Mother, I understood, though I felt somewhat remote from it all, why even now Father turned to him in times of trouble. This, I think, is why I explained to them in detail how I got my nickname, and even cited Father's very words. …

  I have indicated that I'm called Ma-chan, but haven't explained why. Everyone calls me Ma-chan, my family and my friends, but it's got nothing to do with my real name. It's related to the shape of my small, round head. From kindergarten to college, my head has always been the smallest among my friends, in whichever class I was placed. Moreover, it's a perfect sphere. At an outdoor camp I once went to when I was in middle school, every group in each class had to perform a skit by the campfire. Our group decided on a sort of game where we would form a ring and bounce or pass a ball around. They had me wear a black shirt and black tights, which hid my body from my throat on down, all the way to my toes, and covered my head and face with a red ski cap. So who else but me could have been the ball, the mari. … Ever since then, my nickname has been Mari, hence Ma-chan, through high school and even now at college. Some of my friends think it's my real name, and that's how they address their letters.

  Once when I was crabbing to Mother about why my head had to be so small and round, Father explained why. I told Mr. Shigeto and his wife exactly what he said. I remember he was straightforward and serious that day, which was unusual for him. He stuck to the facts, and didn't interlace them with his typical banter. This astounded me so much that I, instead, ended up throwing in a few words of levity. And when I said that I had seen, in a dream, my whole body being cast, subject to a certain system, in some foundrylike place, Father needlessly got angry.

  “Four years before you came, Ma-chan, Eeyore was born to us, with a deformity on his head. To be exact, at first he had a minuscule defect in his skull, a small hole. As the skull developed, this defect became larger, which was a matter of course. Then a pouch formed on the outside of the hole to keep what was in the skull from spilling out. In other words, a system was formed whereby the pressure of the spinal fluid flowing into the pouch worked to push back the brain, to keep the brain in the cranium. Amazing, isn't it? In all cases, human genes function in an orderly, predetermined way to create the body. But here was a system quite different from the original design, the bricolage of the organism of the flesh. The pouch took the form of a wen, and grew larger and larger.

  “When Eeyore was born, the moment he slipped out of Mama's body, she heard the nurse, who should have received him from the doctor like a rugby pass, cry “Ah!” just before she fainted. Even when I first saw him, he looked like he had two heads.

  “Mama's first delivery, and that was the sort of child we had. So she worried whether, the next time, another deformed body would take shape in her dark womb. But she rose above this fear of hers, and decided to have you. Now that took some courage. I wonder, though, if apart from her indomitable resolve, her body wasn't likewise bent on self-defense. Mama's womb thought, on its own, that its next delivery should be of a child whose head wasn't too bulky—alter all, Eeyore's head was twice the size of an ordinary infant's—and that it should create as small a head as possible. But the brain would have to be of decent size. Isn't that why it chose a sphere, its shape being the least bulky and the most capacious? I think your head, Ma-chan, its shape, is cute. And the brain has decent substance. So I would say that the womb-level control was a success. You were actually a skinny little baby when you were born. I understand your delivery was a very easy one.

  “I know it must be revolting to hear a boy in your class call you Ma-chan the mari. But I think you have every reason to feel proud of your head, for it's certain that your still-unconscious body cooperated with your mother's womb. So neither Eeyore's wenned head, nor your super small, round head, is in any manner the kind that could have been produced with a die in a factory!”

  “That's how carefully K explained things to you,” Mr. Shigeto said, after a few moments of silence, “and you carved his words deep in your heart. It's strange, though. K was grumbling to me that he has trouble communicating with you. Yet he's said all this to you, and you understand him quite well. Isn't that enough? I feel he expects too much when it comes to his family relationships.”

  “It was unusual for Father to talk to me at such length. … But I think I was more moved when I learned about Mother's resolve than I was by Father's explanation. In those days, I was more simpleminded than I am now. … Besides, my younger brother told me there's no scientific evidence to support the notion that interaction between mother and fetus at the unconscious level can control the physical aspects of the fetus.”

  “I can't be so sure,” Mr. Shigeto rejoined. “There's not much that, science has thoroughly resolved—especially when it comes to such a thing as the interaction of minds between a conceived child and its mother.”

  “Prosaic as he is, Ma-chan, Mr. Shigeto is also a mystic, of the Russian Orthodox kind,” his wife wedged in. “No, Ma-chan, you think things out very thoroughly. And I can see that K-chan's life at home hasn't been all that peaceful.”

  “All I think about is Eeyore and myself, if I do any thinking at all,” I said, wondering why I was talking so much at the home of someone I was meeting for the first time.

  * * *

  The day after Eeyore toted in the heavy potted plants, another incident occurred on our way to the welfare workshop. There is a girls' middle school on the same bus route, and the buses are full. They are even more packed during winter, when everyone wears more. Eeyore, who has a big, bulky satchel hanging from his shoulder, clings to a strap to support himself, but the way he stands reveals the slight abnormality in his legs, which I must admit is obvious to the girls around him. That morning, Eeyore had collided with two female students near the entrance of the bus, one a defiant-looking girl with well-chiseled features, and the other an unassertive type, who seemed to be under her protection. Eeyore's satchel, too, hit the seemingly quiet girl's bosom with a thud. The defiant-looking girl glared at him with the stare of a young tomcat, though Eeyore didn't notice this, for he was concentrating on clinging to a strap with both hands. I finally made my way to his side and apologized to the girls. The seemingly strong-willed girl, with a violence I could feel in the breath she spewed on my face, cursed. “Dropouts!”

  I could see Eeyore's face from between his strap-clutching arms. For a moment he appeared to cower at the outburst, yet, unaware of having done anything wrong, he also seemed amused, perhaps because he had never heard the word dropout uttered with such malice. Of course, we never used it at home. I had never heard it on my way to or from the special school, at least not when I was with him, and certainly not at the welfare workshop either. The instructors wouldn't possibly use such a word when reprimanding the workers, and I don't think it's ever been spoken among the co-workers. In all fairness, of course, dropout is hardly the appropriate word for Eeyore and his co-workers, who work very hard at the workshop.

  That's probably why Eeyore found the sound of dropout amusing, especially the -out part. So thinking. I disengaged my thoughts from the girl, and we made our transfer to the train we had to take. But as we approached th
e welfare workshop, I saw Tamio-san coming our way. Tamio-san, who is normally a very cheerful person, was walking with his head down, looking painfully dispirited, and an equally dejected-looking woman was trailing him—and dropout floated back into my mind.

  Tamio-san is one of Eeyore's co-workers, but he is about Father's age. Nevertheless, this woman, his watchdog, sometimes comes with him, as when he isn't feeling well, to see to it that on his way home he doesn't buy and drink sake from the vending machines. I now know that the woman, who I had taken to be as old as Grandma, is Tamio-san's younger sister. And when I saw the two of them that day, I imagined a certain point in our future, when Eeyore would be Tamio-san's age and I would be the age of his younger sister. And both of us would age in such a way that the muscle tissues of our face could only make us look despondent. Despite our age, people would still be calling us the dropout duo, Eeyore and Ma-chan. … When I thought about this, I felt wretched and sad for the first time.

  I contemplated again, only languidly this time, something I had recalled just the day before, something Father had said about my small, round head. I also regretted having told Mr. Shigeto about it in such detail, which made me say to myself, You're a fool. Languidly and You're a fool, by the way, are expressions my younger brother O-chan had newly imported from cram school. I need not even think about it to realize that the problem I'm having at present is the small, round head riding on my thin neck. Would Father's dubious psychological explanation serve me in repelling an ignominious individual who might saunter up to me and ask, “Why is your head so small and so round?”?

  When I think of the future, for Eeyore and me as a duo, he with his handicap and I with my small, round head, won't the most important thing—not in a universal sense, hut in an eminently personal sense, to put it in O-chan's normal way of using words—be the fact that, dropouts, the word that school-girl uttered, will gradually penetrate even more harshly into our minds?

  I made pork cutlet for dinner that evening, for which O-chan commended me with one of his “it's better than just sort of good” compliments, and Eeyore, too, ate it with great delight. As for me, though I did sit with them at the dinner table, I just didn't have an appetite. And O-chan got to worrying so much he asked, “Do I detect early symptoms of your robotization? I know you have lots to be anxious about!”

  What I thought that night, with no energy to log anything in “Diary as Home,” was this. Sure O-chan is with us, but I couldn't ask very much of him, the independent, go-it-alone person that he is. Besides, he has college entrance exams to prepare for, his second try at them, after once failing. So at a time like this it must have taken tremendous resolve on Mother's part to entrust Eeyore to someone like me, someone with the sort of character that robotizes, and accompany Father to a California university. Could it be that she had perceived the unusual seriousness of Father's inner “pinch”—one that went beyond my imagination and one that he would have to get away from the trivialities of life in Japan to tackle?

  That's why I'm holding out, but hard as I try, at times things go awry and I end up, for instance, being called a dropout by someone like that female student, a girl who appeared to be the miniature of a woman who stands on her own—by someone who had clearly seen me as the parasitic type, a harmful insect gnawing away at this tree called society. … Again I fully robotized, and kept gazing into the darkness of my room with unblinking eyes. No need to compare myself with Sportsman Asashio to know that I have become a robot, skinny and unworthy of notice—and a faint mechanical whir kept droning in my heart.

  During Eeyore's next lesson, after he and Mr. Shigeto had gone into the music room, I talked intermittently with Mrs. Shigeto, and ended up telling her about the dropout incident. But I didn't speak with the same sense of depression I had felt when thinking to myself about it. Had I been feeling that heavy-hearted, I think I would have chosen another topic. Eeyore, however, had said something funny on our way there, words that unfettered my heart, and I was prompted to tell her what had happened, as I rode the momentum of this heart.

  As for the words Eeyore uttered, I'll just copy what I wrote in “Diary as Home.” The Shigetos' house is in a newly developed residential area along the Keio railway line. It stands halfway down the slope from a high ground that leads into a hollow. The station is level with the high ground, and most houses from about where the decline begins have wire-fenced lawns with golf-practice nets hanging over them, flaunting a higher status than the houses in the hollow. And as a rule, there is a dog in the garden.

  That day, as Eeyore was retying his shoelace—I had told him it was loose—a spitz in the garden across the road started yelping like crazy, while running about as though it had gone berserk.

  “It's really only timid dogs that bark like that,” I said to Eeyore before he got angry at the dog and scared the life out of it. “They're weak dogs. You could even feel sorry for them.”

  Eeyore raised himself and, probably because there was still a good four or five meters to the fence, he called out to the yelping dog with composure, “Ken, Ken!”

  “Oh? Do you know him?” I asked.

  Eeyore let my question hang in the air, and nonchalantly started walking.

  “Today I just thought I'd call him ‘dog’ in Chinese,” he said.

  I laughed so loud the dog's yelping turned into a timorous whimper. Going down the road, side by side, I felt that Eeyore had blown away the despondent feeling that had been with me the past few days.

  Mrs. Shigeto sank into thought as she listened to me speak of the dropout incident. On the dining table, where she sat opposite me, were paper and scissors, and a tube of paste. She was very carefully doing some handwork, and when she rested her hands and raised her eyes, she presented her opinion in the form of two blocks of convincing thought. First she asked me how Eeyore had taken it, if I had detected any sign of hurt in him.

  “He appeared to like the sound of the word then,” I replied. “But I don't know how he felt afterwards; we never talked about it. … If he'd asked any of his instructors what it meant, they would've written something to that effect in the welfare workshop home-correspondence notebook. No, I don't think he asked.

  “The incident has left me so depressed that perhaps it's my dejection that's affecting him. My younger brother is the take-things-as-they-come type, and it doesn't seem to matter much if our parents are here or not. Yet even he remarked that I must have many tilings to be anxious about. Perhaps Eeyore sensed my anxieties, and maybe that's why he tried to cheer me up with his Chinese version of dog.”

  Mrs. Shigeto relaxed the skin of her feverish cheeks into a soft smile only toward the end of my reply, hut from what she said, after tightening the skin again, I realized that her face had flushed simply because she was angry.

  “Ma-chan,” she said, “the little relief I find in what you told me, if I can call it that, is that you apologized for Eeyore before the girl called you dropouts and not afterwards. I wouldn't have gone so far as to slap her in the face, but if I'd been there, I would at least have made her take it back. I wish you had. It's very important for a human being to take such action.

  “I told you about the time Mr. Shigeto and I traveled around Europe with our cat, didn't I? We got to Warsaw Airport on a Polish airliner from Dubai on the Arabian Peninsula. Out of an oven, then straight into a refrigerator. We were all shivering as we wailed, but our luggage just didn't come out. Then we saw a government official, clad in a suit you could tell was tailored in England, ordering a porter to pick out his suitcases, while luggage for the general passengers was being held up. Mr. Shigeto, as a Japanese visitor who could speak Polish, went up to the gentleman and asked if doing such a thing was socialism. I think it's important to have this kind of courage.”

  “But this girl was only a middle-school student,” I said. “A child yet, and cute, too. …”

  “All children are cute, Ma-chan,” Mrs. Shigeto rejoined. “And cute as they may he, they have certain traits, a
s yet hidden, that will manifest themselves when they become adults. What I do every time I see a child is to picture him or her in middle age, from whatever outcropping of hidden character I perceive in the child. By doing this, I understand human beings better. What you should have seen, in the girl you say looked cute, was a middle-aged woman with a nicely featured face and a shapely figure, but a discriminatory character. I believe there was a lot of meaning embedded in her disparaging of Eeyore and you as dropouts.”

  Dejected, I felt I was going to robotize. I knew that my attitude toward the girl, who in the bus had appeared so much the teacher's-pet type, had been servile. And Mrs. Shigeto's words echoed even more forcefully in my heart, for until then I'd been thinking that, compared to how I had reacted to the word, Eeyore's reserved way of enjoying the ring of dropouts in his ears had even been noble. Mrs. Shigeto asked me no further questions, probably because she had clearly seen through my plight.

  After Eeyore's lesson, the dropout topic; cropped up again, this time with Mr. Shigcto entering into the discussion. Mrs. Shigeto began by recapitulating our experience in the bus. Eeyore clearly remembered and vigorously kept nodding his head, and when she came to the part about his satchel hitting the girl's chest, he looked very sorry. Then she reminded her husband about what he had done at Warsaw Airport, to which he, in turn, supplemented her words by telling us what she had done there.