A Quiet Life

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “Just tell them it's fiction.” cool-headed O-chan replied.

  Neither O-chan nor I read all the stories when it came out as a book, but a woman—a mother of a girl with cerebral palsy who I helped about two years ago through volunteer work at the university—recommended that I read at least the short story that rounds off the anthology, and so I did. I wasn't as impressed with it as I was with the Blake poem he had translated and quoted.

  This reminds me: the day Father finished this anthology, he dug a hole in the garden and then burned the bundle of cards he had prepared while reading Blake. When Mother told him he should perhaps keep at least the translations, he gave it some serious thought, and then replied, “A specialist would say it's full of mistakes.” That would be a matter of grave concern to the family, I thought, and with the branch of a tree I quickly poked away at the mass of cards, so that brisk flames would rise.

  “Jesus replied: ‘Fear not, Albion: unless I die thou canst not live. / But if I die I shall rise again & thou with me; / This is friendship & brotherhood; without it man is not.’ / So Jesus spoke, the Covering Cherub coining on in darkness / Overshadowed them & Jesus said: ‘Thus do men in Eternity, / One for another to put off by forgiveness ever sin.”’

  Father had explained in his story that these lines were from “Jerusalem” in the Prophecies, and so I went to his upstairs library and took out the big facsimile edition from the shelf of his Blake-related books, and looked at the illuminations Blake himself had done. White outlines of a tree float up, silhouetted against the entire blackish background. It's the “Tree of Life.” Christ is crucified here. As I understand it, Albion, standing at the foot of the tree, listening to Christ's words, has the role of representing the whole of humanity by himself.

  I went to bed after reading these lines over and over, until I could recite them almost by heart, and dreamed I was standing at the foot of the “Tree of Life” in Albion's stead—the story is becoming high-flown, but then I, too, belong to mankind. … I can't see Christ very well, for even in our dreams he is too awesome for our eyes to behold, and in the dark only the platinum rays, which the outline of the tree emits, are conspicuous. But when Christ's voice says, “But if I die I shall arise again & thou with me,” the covering cherub glides through the pale dark with his accustomed grace, and throws the shadow of a deeper darkness over me. While wondering whether to act this way means, in other words, to act with grace, I'm enticed by the form of the familiar shadow; and when I lift my eyes, Eeyore, who has sprouted wings, is floating in the sky with a facial expression that suggests he is stifling a smile.

  Christ must have gone through many deaths this way, I thought, and then been reborn many times; and Eeyore has stood witness to each one, which is why he appears so accustomed to them. … While I was telling Mother about this dream, Father, who as always was reading a book on the sofa, heard me with his sharp ears. I didn't care how, but I think I actually wanted Father, too, to hear me talk about the dream that Blake had caused me to have. Anyway, he came over and said, “I don't think Christians would accept the thought that Jesus has repeatedly entered into the history of the world—a world bound by time. I should ask you to exercise caution when you speak with your Christian friends. It's an important matter for those who have faith.”

  I was unable for a while after this to hold my head up when walking past the congregation in front of the cathedral at my university, which I had to pass on the several Sunday mornings our volunteer group met on campus. One morning, a group member, who had been waiting where we were supposed to meet, and was watching me come, perplexedly said. “What happened, Ma-chan? I thought I saw a repentant virgin coming this way!”

  Some time after this letter, Father wrote me another one, from which I could tell he was genuinely concerned about the rebirth question I had on my mind.

  “Regarding Stalker, which you say you and O-chan watched on a late-night TV program, well, I don't have any video equipment here, so I thought I might read the novel it's based on, and went to look for it in a San Francisco bookstore that has a selection of Russian novels in English. Unfortunately, they didn't have Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers, but they had a novel by Aitmatov, a contemporary writer, one that has as its theme the Crucifixion and the question of rebirth. I will forward the book by separate post for you to deliver to Mr. Shigeto, though he may have already read it in Russian.

  “Presenting in a novel the philosophical implications of the Crucifixion through Pontius Pilate's interrogation of Christ: I found this arrangement also in Bulgakov's novel, so I wonder if this isn't a technique Russian writers like, including Dostoevsky with his Grand Inquisitor. The setting of Aitmatov's novel is one in which two millennia have passed since Jesus's death and resurrection. The protagonist is a modern young man who has taken it upon himself to worship Jesus Christ in his own way, different from the way churches do—which in itself is nothing new—and who strives to see to it that Christ has not died in vain. The young man is strung from a tree and murdered by some men who hunt elk in a remote area of Russia—men who had come from the city, having been hired to procure meat, and who have a savageness different from that of the local people. This is the central plot.

  “Also before this, the young man had once penetrated a gang that illegally procured hallucinogenic plants. His motive was to report the gang's circumstances to a newspaper. But the other gang members found out, and they booted him off a speeding freight train. Though he's had only two such experiences, the young man takes them to be forms of his reliving the drama of Christ's death and rebirth. In the novel, Christ is crucified and reborn three times. In other words, the young man relives each of Christ's sufferings on the cross—the first time in his mind, the two other times as a direct physical experience.

  “Come to think of it, no novelist today could write a story on so grand a theme as Christ's Crucifixion and resurrection in one vertical flow. What Aitmatov does with the Crucifixion, therefore, is portray a character who leaps over history in order to experience synchronicity with Christ. This is how the writer traces the original death and rebirth of Christ. As a novelistic technique, it was invented in desperation, but perhaps it runs parallel to what moves in the minds of those who have faith.

  “I myself have never written a novel like this, directed toward something that transcends the real world, but I have come to understand the efficacy of this technique through reading many excellent works. And this is what I think of as I reread this work by a Kirgiz-born writer, an Asian writer like myself. … Ma-chan, I'm afraid that this letter has ended up a mere confession of a vulnerable writer who has sought emergency refuge in a quiet place in a foreign land, and that it serves no purpose as regards the question on your mind.”

  Well, from what I have written so far about my relationship with Father, it might strike you as strange when I say that I'm a student of French literature. It's no big deal, though: nothing I meant to hide. Actually I'm a stranger to literature, yet through my own decision, independent of Father, I ended up choosing to pursue it in college. But would I confuse you more to tell you that Céline steered me toward this decision, and that I'm planning to write my graduation thesis on him? My thesis adviser quite frankly told me that Céline's French, with all its slang, would be too difficult for me. He also said he wasn't sure if a girl from today's affluent society could enter into Céline's sensitivity and way of thinking. Blunt as he was, I think his intention was neutral, and his advice—well, pedagogical.

  In any case, from about the end of my sophomore year, I started reading Céline every day, making reference cards as I read. When some of my seniors in graduate school found out about this, one flung at me some words laced with toxic implications: “You say ‘Céline.’ … An innocent princess reading Céline, huh? … feigning the villain. When did Céline turn into a cute hobbyhorse?” My sheepish reply on such occasions: “I'm not really reading him. I'm a cat lover, and I'm thinking of making a list of quotations of what t
his writer said about cats.”

  From the very start, though, I had made up my mind as to how I would approach Céline. I would try to understand him through the children he calls nos petite cretins, our little idiots, the children who live under dire circumstances but who live life for all it is worth. And fortunately, I was allowed to participate in the university's volunteer program for handicapped children. I haven't written in “Diary as Home,” let alone talked to my family, about the friends I made there, for their privacy is a complex matter. And I intend to live by this ethic, always. But it's through my encounters with handicapped children and their parents—not only with members of the group I belong to, but with people at other colleges as well—that I have been able to somehow re-create my inhibited character, one that's led me to wish always to live like someone who isn't there. … With the experience I have gained through working with this group—and I've got Eeyore, too, of course—I think I have some idea of what it takes to enter the world of children with handicaps.

  Nevertheless, every time I reread the various episodes where Céline vividly portrays our little idiots, I always discover, to my amazement, freshly bizarre expressions. For I find truly villain-feigning exaggerations, not so much in the way he addresses the children as in the way he expresses his attendance on them. On the other hand, though my fellow able-bodied countrymen may not express it in words, experience has taught me that they sometimes take a startlingly vicious attitude toward handicapped children, as on the stairs at a railway station, when a child with a handicap desperately reaches out for a helping hand—though granted this may be a situation that reflexively brings out the bigot in them. I believe Céline, in contrast, was a person to whom this sort of meanness, at least, was never to his liking.

  I intend to focus on these children and the cat, Bébert, in Rigadoon. By way of preparing the general framework of my thesis, I have started by first copying down certain passages from the novel, and then attaching my own translations to them. I have one here that, I think, clearly shows Céline's warm-hearted seriousness. Incidentally, it's in this passage that our little idiots, an expression I have written a number of times already, appears for the first time.

  “Our little idiots are all where they belong; they've got nothing to do with us anymore; now they're Swedes, all of them—drooling, deaf and dumb Swedes … thirty years have passed and I'm thinking: must be grown-ups now, if they lived through it … moreover, they aren't drooling, maybe they can hear well, too—thoroughly reeducated … the old have nothing more to hope for, those kids, all …”

  I don't have the ability to comment on French style, but with Céline, I get the impression that he writes in a way that, contrary to what I had imagined, presents a serious subject in a light and straightforward manner—and I like this. I had copied this passage on one of my cards a few days before, and was translating it far into the night, when I realized Father was standing beside me, having snuck up without my noticing—which is another reason this passage, in particular, remains in my heart. Father doesn't dare touch my letters, but he readily picks up the books I read, or the reference cards I make, and looks at them. He does this all the time, and it has irritated me since I was in kindergarten. And that night, while I was copying down some more passages from the book, he picked up a few of the cards and said, “Hmm … ‘the old have nothing more to hope for, those kids, all …’ How true.” His voice was so unusually earnest and sad that. I couldn't make a face at him for having read my cards without asking me.

  The next day. however, Father brought me volumes one and two of Céline's Novels, from the shelf of the Pléiade editions he especially treasures, and said, “The appendices and annotations should come in handy for the slang and the identities and backgrounds of the models. Take them, they're yours. And you can use volume three and the other reference books too, if you need to.” I was actually very grateful for his giving me the two Pléiade books, which would have put too heavy a burden on my meager allowance.

  My interest in Céline, in the first place, had been aroused by my meeting an American writer on an errand I once ran for Father. Though I personally believe I chose to major in literature independently of Father's occupation, I have to admit that the occasion has influenced me in many ways.

  When I was still in my second year of senior high school, Mr. K. V., a very well-known writer in the United States, came to Japan. Father interviewed him on a TV talk show, and Mr. K. V., when publishing its transcript in a literary magazine, said he wished to donate the proceeds to a hospital for atomic bomb survivors in Hiroshima. In return for his kindness, the publishers said they would pay Mr. K. V. more than the usual fee. But they would first hand the money to him in a special envelope, and after this, he would make the donation. Father said he would gladly act as go-between for Mr. K. V. and the hospital. But then he started saying that he, being the bashful type, would rather not stand in the limelight, and so it turned out that I would go to the ceremony to receive from Mr. K. V. the envelope that would go to the hospital. As I waited in the lobby with a man from the publishing house, Mr. K. V. emerged from the elevator, a tall man with a dignified, winsome head on his shoulders, like a scientist you might see in a cartoon. I had practiced saying, in order to receive the envelope from him, “I shall forward a voucher to your publisher in the I United States.” I thought receipt would have sounded too weak, so I decided, without consulting anyone, to use roncher, a word I had found in a Japanese-English dictionary. The word must have rung amusingly odd in Mr. K. V.'s ears, for though he didn't burst out laughing, he vigorously rolled his large eyes.

  Mr. K. V. then went to the bookstore in the corner of the lobby to see if they had a pocket edition of his works, but unfortunately he didn't find any. “They have a good selection,” he said ruefully, but so seriously that neither the man from the publishing company nor I could help laughing. Encouraged by his sense of humor. I produced a Penguin edition of a Céline book for which Mr. K. V. had written an introduction. Father had told me to look it over before meeting him, and I got him to sign it. The introduction included an illustration of a tombstone that looked like the graffiti of a mischievous boy. The outline sketch he drew next to his signature, of a girl with a small placard hanging from her neck with VOUCHER! written on it, was the same as that of the tombstone, which turns out to bear the writer's pseudonym, his real name as a doctor, and the years of his birth and death: Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Le Docteur Destouches / 1894–1961.

  I carried the inscribed book home, impressed by the fact that Mr. K. V. was a gentle and refined American. I made a brief report to Father, gave him the envelope, and continued talking in the kitchen with Mother about my impression of Mr. K. V. Father, who promptly set about sending the money to Hiroshima, heard me with his sharp ears and happily said, “Yes, K. V. is a very decent man.” Reading Mr. K. V.'s introduction to the book he had inscribed for me, I felt that decent, the English word Father used, was the perfect adjective to describe him.

  The last passage in Mr. K. V.'s introduction also aroused in me a desire to read Céline. It touched upon an essay Céline, as a doctor, had written in 1924, a treatise on a nineteenth-century Hungarian physicist, entitled “The Life and Work of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis.” Mr. K. V. wrote: “It was written at a time when theses in medicine could still be beautifully literary, since ignorance about diseases and the human body still required that medicine be an art.”

  Young Destouches penned his essay on Semmelweis with zeal akin to hero worship. Semmelweis was a Vienna hospital obstetrician who devoted his life to preventing the spread of childbed fever. It was largely the poor who were victims of the disease, for in those days people who had houses, which is to say decent dwellings of their own, chose to give birth at home. The essay tells of those times.

  “The mortality rate in some wards was sensational—twenty-five percent or more. Semmelweis reasoned that the mothers were being killed by medical students, who often came into the wards immediately after ha
ving dissected corpses riddled with the disease. He was able to prove this by having the students wash their hands in soap and water before touching a woman in labor. The mortality rate dropped.

  “The jealousy and ignorance of Semmelweis's colleagues, however, caused him to be fired, and the mortality rate went up again.

  “The lesson Destouches learned from this true story, in my opinion, if he hadn't learned it from an impoverished childhood and a stretch in the army, is that vanity rather than wisdom determines how the world is run.”

  I immediately asked Father about this medical treatise, whereupon a look of surprise, which itself he appeared to be relishing, suffused his face. I don't blame him, though, for then I didn't know a word of French. Still, I think he decided to give me his prized Pléiade books because he remembered my asking him about the treatise. Before this, too, when he went to France on some business he had, he bought me, as a souvenir, a Gallimard book entitled Semmelweis (1815–1865), thèse. I put this book on my bookshelf without reading it, and it's still there where I put it. When looking back like this, though, it becomes clear that Father does seriously consider the things I inquire about.

  I was already a sophomore, and had started taking courses in French literature, when Father gave me the treatise he had gone to the trouble to buy me. So if only I had tried, I would somehow have managed to read it. But I didn't, and there were psychological reasons for this. To begin with, I had recurrent nightmares after reading about the treatise in Mr. K. V.'s introduction. Hands that touch a corpse full of holes, gnawed away by germs that appeared to the naked eye as small bugs; and fingers, wet, slimy, and glimmering with black blood and pus. They take the form of the arms of a doctor of obstetrics you might see in a TV movie, and gloveless and bare, they come closer between my raised knees. …