A Quiet Life

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “In connection with this, ‘The Marvels of the Forest,’ the legend Grandma spoke of when she was talking about Eeyore's composition, is a story Grandma's mother once related to K-chan. Or perhaps I should say that K-chan unearthed the strange legend with his power. The science-minded child that he was in those days, he tried interpreting it all sorts of ways. He once even said that ‘The Marvels of the Forest’ may have been delivered to Earth by a rocket from either the solar system or from the universe beyond it. Anyway, he said that civilization may have started on this planet with this as its genesis. I've always been a simple-minded girl, and so I imagined a shoal of children from some faraway star, packed like sardines in the ‘Marvels of the Forest’ rocket, being abandoned here on Earth. And I used to get so lonely. …

  “When you think of it, though, don't you feel that Eeyore and I share a similar vocabulary of imagination somewhere? And K-chau's probably behind it all. I felt really lonely, thinking about the ‘Marvels of the Forest’ rocket, probably because he bad said something to the effect that we were interplanetary abandoned children. I wouldn't be surprised if he's directed remarks of a similar vein at Eeyore. And then having done something so careless, he himself leaves for California with Oyu-san! It may surprise some people, but that's the kind of person he is.”

  Grandma and Eeyore had been gently leaning their backs against the stone wall that retained the persimmon patch above them on the upper side of the road. Then Grandma briskly pulled her small shoulders away from the wall. She raised her right hand, in which she again held her cane, and waved at us. Until then, I had thought that both Grandma and Eeyore had been looking in silence at the forest, the sunlight and its reflections on the red-orange foliage of the persimmon trees. But evidently Grandma had, all the while, been very patiently conversing with Eeyore. Half tripping, we ran to her, and heard her voice emphatically ring out.

  “The title of ‘Sutego’ in full,” she called out, “is ‘Rescuing a Sutego. Eeyore-san and his co-workers at the welfare workshop clean the park every Tuesday, don't they? He's told me that some of his co-workers once found an abandoned baby there and saved it. Eeyore-san has set his heart: on saving such a baby if ever he finds one while he's on duty. That's what he had on his mind while composing his music, and that's why the piece was titled ‘Rescuing a Sutego.’”

  “Ah, so that's what it was, Eeyore!” I exclaimed. “Yes, I remember that occasion, when they saved a baby while park cleaning. I should have remembered it as soon as I heard the title … but it was so long ago. So that's what it was all about, Eeyore. So it's all right for the melody to be sad. Alter all, it's about rescuing a sutego!” I said, savoring a sensation of quiet happiness.

  “Oh, so that's what it was!” Aunt Fusa repeated. Her way of understanding the situation was the same as mine, but in her own characteristic manner, she crowned this understanding with a conclusion. “If we think of all the people on this planet as being abandoned children, then Eeyore's composition expresses something very grand in scale!”

  *“Abandoned Child.”

  *Sutegozaurusu in Japanese, hence the play on stegosaur and sutego.

  the guide (stalker)

  I saw Tarkovsky's Stalker, a movie my younger brother O-chan videotaped for me from a late-night TV broadcast. Eevore, for a change, watched it with me all the way to the end because its music was interesting. It was a kind my ears weren't used to hearing, though, and to me it sounded Indian. As the movie neared the end, there was a scene in which a mysterious child used the power of her eyes to move three glasses of different sizes. You could also hear the rumble of a train and see the effects of its tremor. While the screen still showed the child's face, Eeyore, who was lying at my feet, flat on the carpet, as usual, raised his body and heaved a sighlike “Hoh!?” In the earlier half of the scene, a dog had become frightened when it sensed the eerie strength—let me call it this for the moment—of the child's eyes, and perhaps Eeyore had reacted to its whining, for more than anything he hates dogs that yelp. Soon after this, when the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven's Ninth resounded from the sound track, Eeyore straightened his back and began conducting it, in all seriousness, and with great vigor too.

  The film was a good three hours long, and it left me exhausted, so preparation for dinner turned out to be simpler than what I had planned. O-chan and I sat at the table, where the dining itself was over very quickly, and talked about the movie, with my role in the discussion being basically that of a listener. The night before, despite his preparations for college entrance exams, O-chan had gone downstairs now and then until the movie was over, to check if the videotaping was going all right. And every time he did so, he spared some time to watch parts of it. He couldn't do much about the commercials, but figuring I wouldn't like it, he did erase the commentary—”It ran a good five minutes”—by the somewhat heavy, energetic movie critic I had once seen costumed as an American police officer in a weekly magazine photograph. In a way, though, I would have liked to listen to what a person of his kind had to say, comments by someone who appears to have very little to do with the general atmosphere of Stalker.

  To summarize, I believe this is what O-chan said at dinner. I can't in all places reproduce his exact words because I often became distracted, when my thoughts wandered to other things. In any case, this is how he began. “I hardly ever watch movies, and I wasn't watching Stalker very closely either, but it set me thinking about something. … What did you think of it, Ma-chan?”

  “I don't think I have what it takes to make an overall comment,” I replied. “But in the grassland scene, for example, you have these people huddled together? With a host of other props placed unobtrusively at some distance from them? And this scene goes on and on. With scenes like this, I feel like I'm looking at a stage performance where you can watch each actor or actress any way you like. These scenes are good for people like me who don't think very quickly.”

  O-chan sort of—to use his pet expression—lent a thoughtful ear to what I said, and then he made this comment: “It seems to me Tarkovsky portrayed a village that had instantly perished when a huge meteor or something fell on it. You could even see it as a village like Chernobyl after a nuclear reactor accident. Of course, with all its radioactivity, you'd be in a sorry plight if somebody took you there now, but I liked the way the guide led his clients, how he zigzagged forward, while hurling into the fields ahead those nuts with the ribbons tied to them. It brought back fond memories of the exploration game we played in Kita-Karuizawa when we were kids, when we followed our own rules, never doubting them, always believing them to be serious promises. Come to think of it, I've gotten old. …

  “And I also liked the scene where the guide, who is physically and mentally much stronger than the professor and writer he escorts to the Zone, becomes the most exhausted, and a number of times he falls flat on the bare ground and lies there gasping in agony. It reminded me of the orienteering meets I took part in when I was in high school. While running around, I'd slip on some grass and fall, and as though it'd been my good fortune to be there, I'd lie there and exaggerate my fatigue, while clinging, as it were, to the bare ground. I'd be doing this for myself, while nobody was watching, and I would feel I was gelling a better grasp of how the earth and I related to each other, and even of my own material body.

  “I can't comment on the movie with the kind of formula where one says, ‘On the whole, isn't Tarkovsky trying to say something like this?’ This, however, is sort of what I thought. The ‘end of the world’ will come. It won't come today or tomorrow. Most likely, it won't come in our time. But it will come creeping along, slowly, as if it didn't want to. And we'll go on living, as if we didn't want to, because all we can do is wait in fearful uncertainly. Now if things were really like this, wouldn't it be natural for us to want to snatch a preview of this ‘end of the world’ that's so slow in coining? This, after all, is sort of what I think the job of an artist is.”

  Though I thought that my younger brot
her was truly smarter than me, I sometimes found myself listening only vacantly, for one of the earlier scenes, the one showing the guide's wife in agony, kept running through my mind. The scene had stunned me, for although the guide's wife appeared to be a married woman suffering pangs of lust, as in those “adult movies” you inadvertently see previewed in theaters, she was actually suffering from matters of the soul. After all, when the prideful O-chan slips and falls on the grass in his orienteering meets, it's not just physical fatigue that causes him to hug the bare ground, is it?

  The guide's wife is a beautiful woman who conceals a dark passion within. Her whole figure, too, is beautiful when, for instance, she endures her suffering by falling and writhing on the floor, as if she were having a fit. Allow O-chan to analyze my unwitting association of this woman with an “adult movie” actress, and he would probably say it's because she possesses a breathtaking carnal beauty. Though I couldn't imagine myself ever having such a beautiful body, I was, in fact, filled more with respect, for her than with envy. Moreover, the words this beautiful woman spoke so despairingly to her husband, who had but to herd his charges to a dangerous Zone, captivated me. “Our marriage was a mistake.” she says, “and that's why an ‘accursed child’ was born to us.”

  The guide, who has managed to return from the Zone safely, and is exhausted, is also in despair, for he has learned that his clients hadn't wished for their souls' happiness, which was to be given them in the Room in the center of the Zone. All in all, he's a serious man—serious to the point of being almost pitiful—who believes the “zone” could put degenerate mortals back on their feet. After the guide's wife takes him to bed and lulls him to sleep, she suddenly turns to look straight at us, as though replying to the camera in an interview, and starts telling us her innermost thoughts. Whether or not this is a common technique employed in movies of this kind, I don't know. Even though my mother's father was a movie director, and my uncle is one now, like O-chan I have seen only a few movies. Anyway, I really liked this scene a lot. The woman recalls that, as a young man, her husband had been the laughingstock of the town. He had been called a slowpoke and a ne'er-do-well, and at the time of her marriage, her mother had objected that, since the guide was accursed, no child they had could be normal. The woman says she chose to marry the man despite all this, because she preferred a hard life with its few happy moments over a monotonous one. She confesses she may have started thinking this way after the fact, and had glossed things over, but in any event she says she presumes this is what led her to marry him. Here I wanted to cry out, “No, lady! You haven't glossed over things! You've always thought this way! And I believe your way of thinking is correct!”

  In connection with this, I asked O-chan the next morning about another related scene I thought was important but didn't understand very well. I asked him about it because his character is such that once he discusses a movie with me, it sets him to thinking, and though it was long, he appeared to have carefully watched this one straight through, using his study time, after Eeyore and I had retired to our bedrooms.

  “O-chan,” I began, “I want to ask you about the girl who had that gold-colored kerchief around her head. Platok, it's called? Remember Papa bought one like that in Moscow? Twice in the movie, her mother calls her an ‘accursed child,’ and in the scene where her mother comes to the bar to take her husband home, she has crutches with her. So the child must have had some affliction in her legs, but other than this, she didn't seem to have any other handicap. A very beautiful child. …”

  “I think the child has the power to move objects with just her own consciousness,” O-chan remarked. “Psychokinesis, I think it's called, In this sense, I suppose she's endowed with an ability that's newer and stranger than the guide's. The long scene where she moves three glasses with the power of her eyes—it was interesting to watch it in reverse, because then the glasses looked like they were being pulled toward her. And I guess ‘accursed child’ means she's a child with supernatural powers which neither she herself nor the people around her understand very well.”

  “The glasses moved in two scenes,” I said, “in the beginning and at the end. In the first one, the girl is sleeping. Then the rumble of a train becomes loud. You begin to hear it before this, and it's filmed in a way that makes you think the things on the table slide because of the tremor of the train that's approaching the apartment building. I wonder if this isn't a technique Tarkovsky likes. At first you just can't figure out what he's trying to get across, but as the story develops, important meanings are communicated to you. … You can say the same for the scene where the guide tells the professor and writer to tie ribbons to the nuts. Thinking of it this way, don't the glasses move as a result of the train's vibrations?”

  “As a science student,” O-chan replied, “I'm inclined to see it as due to the vibrations of the train, but isn't it in fact psychokinesis? While watching this scene, I thought, Ah, this must be a precautionary measure against the ‘technicians.’ You see, Papa once told me that in the Soviet Union it's the ‘technicians’ who, as representatives of the local masses, write letters to the newspapers criticizing various forms of art, like literature and the movies. Because these ‘technicians’ strive to construct socialism through scientific practice, they actually occupy a higher place in their society than writers and movie directors. Of course, there would be problems if these ‘technicians’ wrote letters saying the movie was incomprehensible. And so you have the creation of a means to explain the movement of the glasses as due to the vibrations from the train. Yet somehow I feel that Tarkovsky is showing a child who's able to transmit the power of her mind to objects.”

  “I half thought so, too,” I said, “but I didn't take ‘technicians’ into account the way you did. … If you pursue this line of thought, though, couldn't you say that the girl with her head wrapped in the golden kerchief was the image of Jesus Christ in his ‘Second Corning?’ The guide walks a long distance with the girl on his shoulders, remember? Walks on, makes a sharp left, and then continues walking? Typical of Tarkovsky's style, I guess. And you know about the man who bears Christ on his back? Christopher, is it? I think the scene's alluding to this.”

  “The Second Coming of Christ! Now that's bewildering. Because then you'd have the Antichrist appearing on the scene to wreak universal havoc.”

  “Yes,” I continued, “but isn't the mere fact that the Zone came into existence after a meteor fell evidence of the havoc, basically? If I were a girl in a farming village in Russia, I would take such a horrible disaster as an omen of Christ's Second Coming.”

  “Indeed, the woman's mother, who objected to her daughter's marriage to the guide, sensed that: their child was an evil omen and called her ‘accursed.’ Really, though, this movie was a mind-boggier. But it's my fault that I didn't understand it.”

  “Well, O-chan,” I said, “thanks for keeping me company. I'm beginning to feel I understand everything a little better. I guess I'll do some more thinking on my own now.”

  I'd been thinking about something else in connection with the child's mother in Stalker. After our parents left for America, I often thought about them, especially Mother. I associated her with various minor events that occurred in the house, and because of this, I hadn't delved very deeply into anything in particular. Or at least this is what I first thought.

  But what I next thought about Mother—or rather what I, the scatterbrain that. I am, imagined about her—is as follows. As I now transcribe this thought from “Diary as Home,” I realize that its contents are simple and brief, yet it was an idea I'd been quietly nursing in my mind for some time. I had also wondered, while knowing it could never happen in reality, whether Mother had ever thought Eeyore an ‘accursed child.’ And believing this to be somewhat more probable, I had wondered whether Father, in the habit of carrying his jokes dangerously far, hadn't said to Mother, “You bore me an accursed child.” Which is the way he usually unwittingly hurts other people's feelings. And when it backf
ires he thinks he's been misunderstood, though he's asked for it by being the one who stalled it. And this, in turn, leads him to indulge in self-pity, and then end up mercilessly angry at the one he offends. My heart sank as I thought of Mother's sorrows and sufferings at the time.

  Obviously, it's only a supposition, but if such a thing had actually happened at some point in time, could it be that going to live together alone for the first time in their long married life, twenty-five years after Eeyore was born, was an attempt on their part to heal and restore what had been hurt or broken? … I brooded over this, and though I told myself it was only a figment of my imagination, a safety valve on my consciousness, I sank into such a deep abyss of despair, one from which I felt I could not be redeemed by merely sitting quietly beside Eeyore like I usually do, that all I could do was stagger up to my room and bury myself in bed.

  Because things like this happened, the next time I took Eeyore to the Shigetos for his music composition lesson I ended up talking with Mr. Shigeto about Stalker, which I'd been thinking about all the while. I said nothing about my doubts as to whether my parents had ever thought Eeyore an ‘accursed child,’ about these suspicions that came to my mind during the night, thoughts that were as vivid as the night's menacing darkness, but which disappeared as evanescent foolishness with the brightness of day. Nevertheless. I talked to him in detail about the little girl whose head was wrapped in the golden kerchief.

  “Hmm, Stalker …” Mr. Shigeto said. “I can't comment on a movie I haven't seen. And I haven't heard of a Russian word like stalker. But it's a movie title, so perhaps they're using a new word from English or something. We do that a lot in Japan, too, don't we? If it's stalker, then it's a person who pursues game. Couldn't be stoker, someone who tends a furnace. … This girl, who's protected from the cold air with the golden platok, is probably going home, preciously borne on her father's shoulders, so I don't think her parents usually think of her as an ‘accursed child.’ Such a thought enters the guide's wife's mind only when she's downhearted and wants to reproach her husband. … And the guide obviously loves his family, for he says he has no intention of taking his wife and child to the perilous Zone. At the same time, he has a sense of mission to escort those who have a reason to go there. In other words, he's stuck on the Zone. And that's why he can't get a steady job. His wife nags him about this, but she wholeheartedly cares for his well-being. Which is to say, they're a beautiful family.”