A Quiet Life

by Kenzaburo Oe

  What Mrs. Shigeto had intended to do in front of the official residence was this: since people would be mobilized to welcome Chairman Jaruzelski, as the hour of his visit pressed closer, she would wait behind the welcoming crowd; and if, by any chance, the accompanying representatives came near her, she would hand the fliers to them. To avoid being excluded as a black sheep, she would not yet show the fliers to anyone among the welcomers who had been mobilized. Instead, she would wait until the chairman entered the building, and then get those interested in Japanese-Polish relations to read the fliers.

  But Mrs. Shigeto, who surprisingly has an impatient side to her character, arrived there before the guards were stationed. And she saw an elderly Polish woman, evidently lost, walking to the intersection from the street down by the Diet Members' Hall. Mrs. Shigeto asked her if something was wrong, and learned that though she had waited and waited, her interpreter, a woman who had promised to meet her, hadn't come. So Mrs. Shigeto acted as the liaison between this woman and one of the security guards, whereupon she was mistaken for the woman's interpreter and was led in through the gate, together with the woman, who had an invitation card with her. Beside the entrance, a band of media personnel was already waiting for Mr. Jaruzelski's arrival. Mrs. Shigeto asked one of the secretaries to accommodate the woman, while she herself joined the phalanx of media people and wailed with them. And when the members of the Polish delegation got out of their limousines, she scrambled out from among the cameramen to hand Mr. Jaruzelski one of her handbills. A security guard, panicking at this unforeseen event—his blunder—thrust her back with his outstretched arms, which hit her clavicle and knocked her down. …

  The incident was conveyed to me over the phone by Mr. Shigeto. The conscientious person that he is, he called to tell me that an accident had occurred, compelling him to cancel Eeyore's composition lesson that day. When I expressed my wish to immediately visit Mrs. Shigeto with Eeyore, he fell silent for a moment and said, hesitantly, as if speaking the unspeakable, that we didn't have to come, since she was leaving the hospital very soon anyway. He went on to explain that his wife, in a hospital bed from the shock of the accident, was so despondent that she wouldn't give even him a decent answer. He said that the hospital she had been rushed to in an ambulance had five patients to a room, and one of them was rude. He wouldn't want Eeyore to experience something disagreeable.

  Having been cussed at on the bus, and seeing a sad dream, paranoia had gotten the better of me. I imagined, for instance, Eeyore passing the rude patient's bed and tripping on the stand from which her IV bottle hung, and she shouting at him in her very fearsome adult voice, Dropout! Wouldn't even Mrs. Shigeto, who is so nice to Eeyore when she is healthy, also find it exasperating, when bedridden, to have to receive an unrelated person with a handicap? … Isn't this what Mr. Shigeto foresaw, and why he didn't welcome the idea of us visiting her? I was starting to see things with jaundiced eyes.

  But no, Mr. Shigeto's tantalizing reserve in speaking his mind had stemmed from his concern for canceling, at his own convenience, a lesson Eeyore looked forward to as a matter of weekly routine.

  “My wife's being in the hospital would not ordinarily come in the way of welcoming Eeyore for his lesson,” he said apologetically.

  Mr. Shigeto added, however, that his wife was concerned about the handbills that she had prepared for distribution, and that he had read in the paper of a return-of-courtesy reception to be hosted by the Polish delegation that evening at. the Tokyo Kaikan, a hall by the Imperial Palace moat. He went on to say that his relationship with the petty officials at the Polish embassy had been sour for several years, and that he himself had received no invitation to the party, but that he wished, at least, to go and stand in front of the hall, and pass out fliers to the guests. The most important point of his phone call was that because of this, there was going to be no lesson that day.

  It so happened that. O-chan had no afternoon classes that day, and had returned home for lunch. So while he ate, I told him about what Mr. Shigeto had said to me. Eeyore, who had already heard me tell him about Mrs. Shigeto's injury, sat beside me listening, occasionally sighing “Hoh!” again, as if the information was new to him. O-chan, for his part, was merely a lunch-munching deadpan. He listened without saying a word and then retreated to his room. A while later, though, he came running downstairs and suggested something that took me by surprise. He knew Mr. Shigeto only from what I had told him, but he conjectured that Mr. Shigeto was currently not affiliated with any political party, or involved in a citizens' movement. So wasn't he intending to do the handbill distribution alone? O-chan's experience in handbill distribution was limited to an event that his high school orienteering team had held at a school festival. But he knew that it wasn't easy to get people to take the fliers, especially if all you did was stand there absentmindedly. Many people didn't even notice that he was handing out fliers, he said. So why don't we join Mr. Shigeto's handbill distribution, and take his injured wife's place?

  “What do you mean we, O-chan?” I asked.

  “I want you to count me in—that's what I mean.” he replied, looking offended. “It would be dangerous if Eeyore had a fit like he did the other time he was in a crowd. You'll need somebody to watch him, won't you, while you pass out the fliers?”

  “Yes, please watch carefully, O-chan. It could be dangerous!” Eeyore said authoritatively. The expression on his face, however, was that of innocent reliance.

  So that evening, after duly setting aside some copies for Father, we were going to pass out, in front of the Tokyo Kaikan, the fliers Mrs. Shigeto had duplicated on a copying machine. We planned to stand on the corner of the road along the moat, two of us on each side, in such a way that we could close in on the pedestrians. We knew that distributing the handbills in front of the main entrance to the hall was out of the question, because although the reception for the Polish delegation wouldn't be the only party there, the place would be tightly guarded by the security personnel the Polish embassy had requested.

  When we got to the Tokyo Kaikan, after taking the Odakyu Line and then transferring to the subway, we saw Mr. Shigeto standing some distance from the building, with a bundle of handbills under his arm and in a state of genuine absentmindedness. His explanation of the situation was this: when the delegation approached the Tokyo Kaikan, a group of young demonstrators voicing solidarity with the democracy movement in Poland waited for the delegates' cars to come by. It was a small group, but because it was small, it was very mobile, and the timing went well. The delegates merely slowed down, but after passing the demonstrators, they had to enter the hall through a staff-only passage from the basement parking lot of an adjacent building. Apparently Mr. Jaruzelski's car was the only one able to reenter the hall's driveway, but only after the area was secured by the riot police. In any event, security at the front entrance was tightened, and Mr. Shigeto had no choice but to stand off to the side of the entrance, and try to guess which of the people going into the hall were the invited guests of the Polish embassy. …

  “Are you sort of through with the fliers?” O-chan unreservedly asked Mr. Shigeto, who shook his head. The cap Mr. Shigeto had on, the kind that Irish seamen wear, made his head look awfully flat.

  “Those who know my face avoid me,” he said. “They probably feel uncomfortable just seeing me. They jaywalk across the street over there to get to the building, and don't use the pedestrian crossing here. … In any case, my wife told me not to give any to people who probably wouldn't read them. After all, they're duplicates of a handmade draft, and she made only a hundred copies.”

  “Please give us a share of the fliers then,” O-chan said. “You and Ma-chan can stand on this side of the walkway, and Eeyore and I will be on the other side. And so we will sort of surround the people who take the pedestrian crossing. … I've checked the information board for today's schedule of parties. There are only two others besides the Polish one: a Japanese chess championship party, and a reception spons
ored by a women's apparel company. So it shouldn't be hard to tell who's going to the Polish reception. All right, Eeyore, let's cross to the other side. There's also the subway exit, you know!”

  That's how we started distributing the handbills. But the winter sun had already set, and since the party had commenced some time before, all we could do was hand out a few to the latecomers who trickled by. I wasn't too disappointed, though, for O-chan and I had worked out a strategy on the train going there, which was to wait until after the party broke up, for embassy parties aren't that long anyway, perhaps an hour or so. Mr. Shigeto didn't seem very excited when we told him of our plan, but he stayed with us, standing in his big coat, also a seaman's, though it didn't seem to be staving off the cold. Once, during the wait, he walked into the hall pretending he had some business to attend to. I thought he had gone to the bathroom, but he came back giving off the nice fragrance of distilled spirits from around his reddened nose. …

  Before long, people you could easily tell had attended the Polish reception started coming out. I started working with the handbills, and when I looked to see how Eeyore, with O-chan beside him, was doing on the walkway across the street, I saw him passing out his share with great composure, bowing courteously, both to those who accepted one and to those who passed without taking any. Some bowed deeply in return, as though infected with Eeyore's bow. I did not, by any means, neglect passing out my share, but really, Eeyore's demeanor was eye-catching. Soon an idea that had never before occurred to me sprang to mind. Though I was his younger sister, I had all along taken it upon myself to be his guardian. And though at times he undoubtedly had been the one protecting me, my heart never rested unless I thought he was within my realm of guardianship. But wasn't it simply wrong of me to think so?

  I believe that Mr. Shigeto and I, encouraged by the way the Eeyore-O-chan pair was distributing the fliers, became more aggressive. More people received our handbills, and before I knew it I had finished mine. I asked Mr. Shigeto to give me what he had left, which was soon gone too. Then Eeyore and O-chan, who had come across the pedestrian crossing, reported that they, too, had finished passing out all their bills. O-chan said he had given out even the copy on which he had worked out a math problem—he had used the back, where there had been lots of room to write—while waiting for the party to finish, to a foreign lady who happened to be the last among the party guests coming out of the hall, and who seemed to take a serious interest in what, we were doing.

  Again the week after we distributed the fliers, there was no music lesson for Eeyore. Instead, he was engrossed in composing a new piece. As for O-chan, I have written a number of times so far that I always considered him an independent, go-it-alone person. So he really did surprise me when he suggested that we help Mr. Shigeto with the handbills. And he actually helped, though he himself had probably thought it the natural thing to do, by giving up some of the precious time he needed to prepare for his exams, sacrificing time that was so precious to him that he worked on his math even while we waited for the party to break up. Moreover, he appeared to have changed somewhat in the way he relates to Eeyore. The day after we went to the Tokyo Kaikan, for example, when I returned home from my errands—shopping for groceries at the supermarket in front of the station, and paying our bills at the bank—I saw not only Eeyore, who was lying flat on the carpet, as usual, composing music, but O-chan, too, studying at the dining table with, at his feet, a bag as big as a medium-size raccoon dog, which is always full of the handouts he gets at cram school.

  When I asked him if he had chosen to stay in the dining room after coming downstairs to answer a call, his curt reply was “Not really!” Eeyore then supplemented this by saying, “I answer all phone calls! O-chan has to work hard for his entrance exams!”

  What had become an everyday sight, O-chan at the dining table and Eeyore lying on the carpet, and the way each concentrated on his work, revealed to me a similarity the two brothers shared that I hadn't noticed until then. The notes that Eeyore wrote on his staff paper were long, thin, and relaxed, and looked like what Father aptly called “bean sprouts,” while the numbers and figures O-chan penciled on his calculation sheets looked like unrestrained processions of eccentric ants devoid of team spirit. …

  Eeyore completed a new piece during the two weeks he had no lessons with Mr. Shigeto. I didn't ask him about it, though, for I didn't want to dilute the pleasure that. I knew he—and I, too, for that matter—would derive from announcing it at Mr. Shigeto's place, at the right moment. And when the day came for us to go to the Shigetos, Eeyore was in such high spirits that he got ready for the visit all by himself. On the train, he offered a seat to an elderly gentleman. He stayed calm and turned to look at me, placidly, when suddenly, at the corner of the street where the slope down to the Shigetos begins, the dog he had addressed as Ken scurried to the wire fence and started barking. The irascible small dog kept yelping, but I think it also looked puzzled, as if it had lost confidence in itself.

  Mrs. Shigeto, who had just returned from the hospital— her face emaciated and smaller, and her hair, which had lost its perm, bound in a ponytail—reminded me of an upper-class student I knew in the girls' high school I had gone to, a serious girl by nature, who had always been very kind to me. Mrs. Shigeto was preparing ribs of lamb for us, just like the last time. The look on Mr. Shigeto's face was one of solemnity, but he also appeared to be wearing a poker face. In other words, he appeared his usual self, except that he wasn't reading when we visited him that day—he was sitting at the dining table, toying with the bottles of marjoram, whole pepper, and some kind of special salt they use.

  “Eeyore, Ma-chan, and even your younger brother did a great job of distributing my handbills,” Mrs. Shigeto said. “K-chan, too, wrote me a card as a token of his having received them. Thank you so much. If I didn't have garlic on my hands, I'd give you both a firm handshake this very minute.” She imparted her feelings with eyes that, behind her glasses, appeared almost unnaturally clear.

  “Why don't you wipe off the garlic?” Mr. Shigeto broke in, handing his wife a napkin with an agility I had rarely seen him exercise; and Mrs. Shigeto obediently complied. While she shook Eeyore's hand and then mine, I was thinking to myself that we were lucky O-chan wasn't there, for he's the sort of person who would have had to smell his fingers to see if the garlic odor had been transferred to them.

  “Thank you, Eeyore. Thank you, Ma-chan. Thanks to you, I've already received a response to my handbill from a Polish person,” Mrs. Shigeto said as she wiped her hands again with meticulous care to resume the task of rubbing more garlic into the ribs of lamb. Her complexion was paler than usual, and the flush that appeared on her cheeks—I even saw it spread— looked very pink.

  “A letter in Polish was addressed here because of the reference I wrote on the handbills,” she said. “It's from a female professor at a university in Warsaw. She uses mathematics to analyze contemporary economics, which is unusual. She said in the letter that she was also an adviser to the government, and that she was projecting Poland's agricultural reconstruction while studying Japanese economic policy. … She's the one I took to the prime minister's residence, on the occasion of my catastrophe. …”

  “Perhaps she's the lady who asked Eeyore and O-chan for their last flier,” I said.

  “Yes, she's the one,” Mr. Shigeto said, taking out an envelope from the letter basket that had been shoved to the edge in order that the table could be set. He wasn't going to hand it to me or anything—it was written in Polish anyway—he just kept waving it in circles in front of Eeyore's face, and continued, “When Eeyore was fretting about having no more fliers to give out, O-chan remembered there was one he'd used to work out a math problem. … It says here that the calculation on the back has nothing to do with the handbill's message, yet still it's an excellent answer. But I thought O-chan was a humanities person, like K.”

  “He's a science person,” I said, “down to the marrow.”

  “Evide
ntly,” Mrs. Shigeto said, “there are scholars, even among Jaruzelski's delegation, who are seriously concerned about Poland's future. And that's a pleasant surprise, because I've been disgusted with all embassy people.”

  “‘At least this woman deserves respect,” Mr. Shigeto said. “I guess she's returning to Poland very soon, but I hope the establishment there will change for the better so that people like her can prove their worth. The labor unions at the Gdansk factories are important, of course. But the reconstruction of the nation's agricultural economy, this woman's special field, is more pressing.”

  “Don't you think Poland will change, too?” Mrs. Shigeto said. “This scholar seems to have that outlook.”

  “You'll be able to see her when you go to Warsaw next time,” I said.

  “I don't think so, Ma-chan,” Mrs. Shigeto rejoined, and continued with biting seriousness. “Scholars like her may not be in the upper echelons of the privileged, but they are still important people. Really, I don't wish to meet anybody, except the nobodies—wherever I go and under whatever regime they are living. … I'm sure this woman was happy because she received a handbill from a nobody in Japan.” Mr. Shigeto blinked at his wife's words and fell into thought.

  Then Eeyore, who had been politely sitting there, made a move, as though he'd been waiting for that very moment. He took out a piece of staff paper from his satchel and nonchalantly placed it where Mr. Shigeto had dropped his eyes. From the way he did this, you could clearly see that he had been prompted by unrestrainable joy.

  “Huh!? ‘Ribs’!?” Mr. Shigeto asked, taken off guard. Eeyore answered by pointing to Mrs. Shigeto with the typical gesture of a concertmaster introducing a soloist.