A Quiet Life

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “This lady here,” he began, “knew very well that summer in Europe could often be very chilly. So after putting a kerchief she'd brought with her around the basket we kept our cat in, she lent a hand-woven muffler to a little girl who was sitting beside her. She's very kind to little girls.”

  That day Mrs. Shigeto continued with the work she was doing, even after Eeyore joined us, and asked me to bring in the cookies and tea in her stead. She was preparing a draft of a handbill the size of a small notebook, by making a collage of letters she had clipped from an English-language newspaper and other publications. She was going to make copies on a duplicating machine installed at some twenty-four-hour supermarket. Its content was directed toward the chairman of the Polish National Council who would be visiting Napan, and it protested the oppression of the country's poets and writers.

  “Why don't you give some copies to Ma-chan to send to K?” Mr. Shigeto said. “There are quite a few expatriate intellectuals from Poland who work on the various UC campuses, like Milosz, for one. I'd like K to know what some Japanese are doing for them.”

  “K-chan is apathetic,” Mrs. Shigeto said emphatically, which made me, and Eeyore too, feel sad. “We've known of Chairman Jaruzelski's visit for quite some time, so I asked K-chan if he'd do something to have the Japan P.E.N. Club protest his coming here, but he didn't do anything. I guess he feels a little guilty about it. That's why he didn't come here himself to ask you about Eeyore's lesson, but got Ma-chan to do it. Don't you think so?”

  “K's already issued so many statements, enough to make him sick, all of them ineffective,” Mr. Shigeto replied. “Jaruzelski is coming from poverty-stricken Poland to request economic aid of a filthy-rich Japan. At a time when the nation welcoming him has one careful eye directed toward the U.S. and the E.C., while the other's exploiting business opportunities in Poland. Don't you think K shied away from making a statement because he knew it would fall on deaf ears?”

  “The privileged few may know it's of no use,” Mrs. Shigeto said, “but those of us with no name have to give it all we've got: that's my policy. … Mr. Shigeto, could you look over the direct-appeal part for me, the part in Polish? A few copies might fall into the hands of some members of the delegation, you know.”

  “Anyway, we'll ask Ma-chan to send some to K. He may feel a bit relieved to know that some people are trying to accomplish what he couldn't,” Mr. Shigeto said, reading the draft as soon as he got it. “He may suffer a few pangs of guilt for not having done anything, hut that can't he helped. … I think the Polish here is very good.”

  “Well then, Ma-chan, I'm going to ask you to send K-chan a few copies when I get it duplicated.” Mrs. Shigeto said, happily retrieving the draft. Putting an end to the talk about the handbills, she brought up the dropout topic again.

  “Of course,” she said, “I'm angry at the girl who called you dropouts, but that doesn't mean I worry ahout the kind of person she'll turn out to be. A girl like her is bound to become a fine middle-aged woman who lives robustly in everything she does.

  “My feelings go out to those who people of her kind hurt by calling them ‘dropouts.’ And I wonder how we can become more aware of the unique existence of dropouts as individuals. A case in point—I may be jumping to conclusions—but I admire the composure in Eeyore's attitude.” (“Thank you very much!” Eeyore happily broke in; to which Mrs. Shigeto gave the rather incoherent reply, “Please don't mention it! The pleasure's mine!”)

  “As a matter of fact, Ma-chan, I consider myself a dropout. I've been one since I was a young girl, I was one during my previous marriage, and I'm one even now with Mr. Shigeto. … I'd never thought in terms of dropout, but I say dropout here because it: happens to be the word in question. You see, I feel that I was born a nobody. I've lived all my years feeling like this, and I'll live a few more feeling the same way, then die the death of a nobody. (Reservedly, so as not to interrupt Mrs. Shigeto's talk, Eeyore, who is sensitive to death, the word itself, sighed “Hoh!”—which took Mrs. Shigeto by surprise, prompting her to say, “Oh, Eeyore! I'm sorry if I caused you alarm.”)

  “My thoroughly ordinary head thinks that, so long as you refrain from privileging yourself in any manner and live as a nobody, you'll have a certain amount of leeway,” she continued. “And within its limits, you exert as much energy as you can. Within my limited capacity, exerting energy is not much more than, as Mr. Shigeto just reminded me, lending a muffler to a shivering, tired girl.

  “But once you set your mind to living the life of a nobody, I feel that—sorry Eeyore, I'm going to frighten you again—even when it's time to die, you can go to zero with some leeway. Which is to say, you return to zero from a point practically next to zero. Isn't being anxious about your soul after death, or about eternal life, privileging yourself? Compared to an insect, for example. … Wasn't Abraham the patriarch of the chosen people who made a special contract with some celestial existence? Even in Poland, it's not just the higher-ups in the communist hierarchy who are privileged. Aren't the Catholics there also privileged?—though in a mundane sense they may now be underprivileged. …”

  “You are an anarchist, aren't you—and one who's got absolutely nothing to do with faith …,” Mr. Shigeto observed, blinking his eyes in amusement. “But I think your handbill supports the Catholic masses in Poland, too.”

  “I stand on the side of the nobodies there,” Mrs. Shigeto said. “I can't support anybody else. I'm a nobody down to the marrow, and I rejoice in this. … But Ma-chan, when I look through the eyes of a nobody, I seem to get a sharper picture of the reality of K-chan's ‘pinch.’”

  Taking what Mrs. Shigeto said as something she had carefully thought about and wanted to convey through me to Father himself and to Mother as well, I summarized her subsequent comments in “Diary as Home.” I knew that I was in no position to say anything about Father's “pinch,” let alone do anything to help him overcome it, but if I was going to forward Mrs. Shigeto's handbills to him, I thought I ought to enclose a letter, which would be a verbatim copy from the diary, of the ideas about Father that she had earnestly put together. Another reason I chose to do this was because I feared that, if I sent Father only the handbills, he wouldn't take them seriously, which wouldn't be fair to Mrs. Shigcto. Besides, they would be more meaningful if they came with a letter explaining her thoughts about him, and more so if these thoughts were tied to something within herself.

  1. K-chan and Mr. Shigeto became friends when they were both very young, before I got to know either of them. K-chan was already writing novels, and was gaining a repu tation. Mr. Shigeto recalls with disgust that K-chan, for the next several years, appeared to be walking a few feet above the ground—a shameful sight, frankly. Didn't he more or less come to himself after Eeyore was born, after experi encing various difficulties? The only thing that had kept Mr. Shigeto from severing ties with K-chan was his toler ance toward a classmate who had come from a rural area, and who, when his writings began to appear in the media, had fallen emotionally ill. I got to know K-chan while he still had traces of that air of self-importance about him, so I don't think Mr. Shigeto was being arrogant when he de scribed young K-chan this way.

  2. But isn't K-chan still dragging around some of the scars, or habits, from that period when he thought of himself as constituting a special existence? Doesn't this account for the gall he had in going to California with Oyu-san, monop olizing her, leaving a handicapped child to his daughter's care, under the pretext that he, a full-fledged adult, was tormented by a “pinch”? Wouldn't his long career of writing about himself for a wide readership have left him unable to spontaneously feel that he's a nobody, though in ways that differ from the feelings he had when he was young and didn't reflect upon himself?

  3. Let me say that the muddled ideas K-chan sometimes expresses on faith and life after death stem from the fact that he feels he constitutes some sort of privileged existence. I don't know how many billion people are walking this planet today, but those
who have religion are, I think, a small minority. Multitudes of nobodies live and end their lives without faith, and without any solid assurance of what happens to our souls after we die. If only K-chan realized that he was living in the sea of lives and deaths of all these nobodies, he could objectify his own life and death with more leeway. In any case, I don't at all think that leading the life and death of a nobody is meaningless. As someone who has lived as a nobody for many, many years, I firmly believe this….

  I was certainly captivated by Mrs. Shigeto's story. For I, too, long to lead a quiet life with Eeyore as nobodies. This was all the more reason that I, feeling a little guilty, thought I needed to put in a few words in Father's defense. Although I didn't write this in “Diary as Home,” I told Mrs. Shigeto that Father probably didn't think being a writer made him a privileged person.

  “You might refute me,” I said, “by saying that, at this very moment, Father is a writer-in-residence, but I think he honestly feels very grateful to have the position. I understand he was grumbling to Mother that if he wasn't suffering this ‘pinch,’ he'd have declined. He'd accepted the offer, he said, only because he considered himself an unscaworthy old tub that needed shelter from an imminent storm.”

  Mrs. Shigeto's reply to my words was slightly off the mark, for it seemed she had already thought of putting an end to the discussion. So this is how the long dropout talk drew to a close, at least for the day.

  “Ma-chan,” she said, ‘a person changes with his or her position, whatever it is—though, of course, you can't ignore the individual's inborn character.… Mr. Shigeto's former supervisor, who is still with the news agency, was just recently promoted to director. Mr. Shigeto attended the private party honoring the occasion and came home enervated. He told me the new director's speech was very long, and he got very tired just listening to him. So he drank to recover his vigor, and he overdid it. … Remember, Mr. Shigeto, you were still worn out the next morning, and you kept griping about your fatigue, citing some rules of Latin grammar?”

  “My Latin grammar doesn't amount to much. It's only elementary stuff everybody knows,” Mr. Shigeto said languidly. “You see, when accentuating Latin words with vowel clusters,” he went on to explain, “the syllables with long vowels are important, and there are two kinds: essentially long, and long due to their position. In other words, long by nature and long by position.

  “My boss was, by nature, a guy who gave long speeches. But after he got the director's position, his speeches became longer. …”

  Hearing the joke for the first time, I laughed out. loud, but Mrs. Shigeto laughed with such vigor that one might have thought it was new to her, too. Eeyore looked on happily as we laughed, while Mr. Shigeto, somewhat dramatically, sat there even more languidly.

  * * *

  That night, after finally falling asleep, I had a really sad dream. In the pale glow of a still, seemingly everlasting desert twilight—probably on the Arabian Peninsula, because Mrs. Shigeto had briefly mentioned it—was a multitude of people, some standing, some squatting, but all peering in the same direction. Some were lying down, but they were frantically lifting up their heads, trying to see in that direction. It resembled a scene Father once told me about, in one of Blake's images, just before the Last Judgment. Father went through a period of reading Blake day after day, and he once told me about the scene, while referring to one of the memo cards on which he had written its translation. The powers-that-be had already been arrested in their golden palace, and it seemed they were being tormented. In the desert, the multitude rejoiced and sang as the bowlings of the arrestees readied them. The air was fraught with furious energy, charged, as though before the crashing of thunder. … “It's just like Blake's desert scene,” I reminded myself as I dreamed, as if I had actually been there. …

  I didn't quite understand what Father's intention had been in telling me about Blake's desert scene, but the focus of his talk was on the babies who, though they had died before being baptized, and their bodies were already cold, were screaming. “… the children of six thousand years / Who died in infancy rage furious, a mighty multitude rage furious, / Naked & pale standing on the expecting air to be delivered.” And in my dream, too, Eeyore and I were children again, standing quietly in the desert. Perhaps we reverted to childhood because of Eeyore's head disorder, and because I hadn't married. Our desert was different from Blake's in that our Last Judgment wouldn't come for another six thousand years, unlike Blake's desert, where the Second Coming of Christ is imminent. Which gave me some relief, because this dream meant that Eeyore wasn't the antichrist.

  I soon realized that Eeyore and I were truly nobodies. I knew that nobody cared about us; nobody, come hell or high water, would come to take us to some other place. And what made it even worse than having nobody to help us, Mrs. Shigeto, who had been on our side that afternoon, was peering over her silver-rimmed glasses, which made her look like an elderly German woman, and was sending us wordless, reproachful glances from across the pale-dark multitude. In her carry-on bag was a thin, hand-woven muffler that, though we were cold, she didn't dare lend us. …

  It appeared that she was never going to forgive us, for despite the fact that we were nobodies, we were pretending otherwise, and she had seen through it. Needless to say, it wasn't because she believed we were self-conscious about Father being a fairly well-known writer. Actually, ever since I was a child, I resented it when someone mentioned his name to me. I tried to maintain as much distance as I could from those who did, even my homeroom teacher. There was no misunderstanding on Mrs. Shigeto's part here. To be sure, she was silently sending a tacit, condemnatory message that the wrong I'd been committing was in taking Eeyore's disorder to be a privilege: cherishing pride in him, believing that his prowess in understanding music, his disorder notwithstanding, had truly made him not a nobody; being proud of myself, too, for having decided I would follow him wherever he went. Then I came to this desert on the Arabian Peninsula, and I was thinking that the decision to follow Eeyore there entitled me to be something other than a nobody.

  “See in the pale glow how you compare with the people around you!” she said. “Look at you two! Retarded Eeyore! And you, Ma-chan, you can't even hope for marriage! Even among other nobodies, you're a dead-end dropout!”

  Neither Father nor Mother was beside us. They had gone to California to devote themselves to matters of the soul, and later left for some other place to pursue more. O-chan, too, may have been on this desert, but he's such a fundamentally independent and go-it-alone person that he was probably treading his own path somewhere far away from us. And with the expertise he had acquired on the orienteering team, he may have quickly made a map of the desert and could have been running on the sand toward the control points he had set up. I soon robotized under Mrs. Shigeto's glare, and could not even turn to see if Eeyore was at my side. I could no longer spot him in the horde of nobodies, and I had the feeling he had long ago forgotten me.

  So we were going to stand on the Arabian desert for another six thousand years, the same way we had stood there for the six thousand that had already passed. …

  As soon as I awoke, I began to weep, and I continued to weep for some time. The twilight desert in my dream was thoroughly arid, and my tears dried even before they welled up in my eyes. I thought of Mrs. Shigeto as I wept. Mrs. Shigeto is never the fear-instilling, inhumane person who appeared in my dream, but there was no denying that the dream portrayed a deep-rooted element in her person. I find her to be a “righteous person,” and I have to admit that the reproach, from a “righteous person” like her, had struck home. …

  I waited until my eyes shed no more tears, then picked up “Diary as Home,” which I had put by my pillow, and started reading the part I had written about the fit Eeyore had had on the platform coming home from the Shigetos. Eeyore had protected me from the stampede, though he had been in the midst of a fit, his mind was muddled, and on top of all this, his body was tormenting him. And I wrote then:
“I began wondering it Eeyore, deep inside, embraced a malevolent force like that of the antichrist. Even if he were the antichrist, I would follow him wherever he went”—though I had added that even for me this was a peculiar resolve.

  Now why did I so naively think I could follow him wherever he went? I'm a nobody in the truest sense of the word. Sheer complacency had led me—a nobody and nothing more—to think the way I did, relying solely on Eeyore's handicap. … How pitifully sad it is, though, that I'm merely a nobody, neither beautiful nor strong, just a robotizing coward. …

  It must have been this sadness, I thought in my weary, frayed heart, that had substantialized—that's how O-chan would put it—in my dream of a twilight desert.

  In my heart, I apologized to Mrs. Shigeto for dreaming her to be a merciless person. But as the possessor of a mind as perverse as mine, only after the free leap in the dream was I, for the first time, able to associate her with the “righteous person” that she is. Ramifying thoughts of her continued to occupy my mind, making me feel nervous about seeing her the next time I took Eeyore to her place.

  While I was having this selfish dream, and was alone ruminating on it, however, the real-life Mrs. Shigeto had met with a calamity totally undeserving of her benign person. What occasioned this, to begin with, was her behavior as a “righteous person.” Undue violence had been wrought upon her, an accident in which she had broken her clavicle in a complex way. …

  Mrs. Shigeto had gone to pass out the handbills, the draft of which she'd been preparing the day I took Eeyore to his lesson, to a place she had discerned would be best for the purpose: the prime minister's official residence, of all places, where the chairman of the Polish National Council was making his formal visit. And she had tried to hand one of her bills directly to Mr. Jaruzelski, the consequence of which was that she was knocked down by a security guard, and broke her clavicle. Mr. Shigeto asked his friend at a news agency to inquire of the police as to why a guard at the prime minister's official residence should exercise such brutality on a middle-aged woman, but both Mr. Shigeto and his wife understood it was not a situation that: warranted a tedious protest.