A Quiet Life

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “All right, then,” he said, “let's swim together every Saturday, from three. For thirty minutes. I'm always free then. … All right?”

  “All right. That's three to three-thirty, thirty minutes.” Eeyore replied, happy with the recurring numbers.

  “How should we pay you for the instruction?” I asked.

  “Please don't.” Mr. Arai said. “I'll be doing it for my own pleasure.” The girl with the spindle-shaped thighs, the color of persimmons with a strong reddish tint, again made a burp-like noise—which this time, I thought, was a warning to Mr. Arai to think twice.

  “That's very kind of you,” I said, “but you're going to coach my brother, which isn't easy. …”

  Just then, the man opposite us, who had been lying on the tier like an inanimate object, with a towel over his head and face, and was profusely perspiring from his armpits, crotch, and everywhere—the perspiration spattering on the floor—raised his upper body to sit up.

  “Never mind the fee,” he said. His moonface, which had lurried beet red, was smiling at us, and he didn't bother to wipe the beads of sweat that were dripping from his flat pug nose. “Mr. Arai works here part-time, but he has Saturdays free. What he does all day Saturday is kill the body with training. Some light coaching should do him good, help him get his kinks out.”

  Mr. Mochizuki of the Social Committee! Phis man had been lying in the drying room with a towel over his face long before we had come in. His appropriate counsel had therefore come after he had heard everything Mr. Arai had said and duly sized up the situation. Addressing the huffed-up girl who was sitting beside Mr. Arai, Mr. Mochizuki said, again with a smile, “Training now, Mika-chan? Or will you be teaching beginners?” The girl completely ignored him, but he retained his friendly countenance, and positioned himself to lie down again when the two doors of the room simultaneously opened. Three or four people, the unusually fat woman first, entered through the door from the pool. Four or five men entered from the door to the locker rooms. Mr. Mochizuki was roughly restrained from lying down hy a diminutive man with a mustache.

  “My, oh my, Mr. Mochizuki!” the man said, with an effeminate hut sharp tongue. “Do your lying elsewhere! Can't you see this place is getting crowded? Go get yourself some exercise. Swim. Do something. It's not. good for you to just drip with sweat. It's bad for the body.”

  “I wonder why,” Mr. Mochizuki said, as he sat up again, looking apologetic but still smiling.

  The mustached man, who spoke the way women do, then said to the fat woman, “Mrs. Ueki, have you gotten rid of some of your weight? You'll be disqualified as a woman if you don't get some of that blubber off you!”

  “That's going a bit too far. Such insensitivily!” was the sentiment that seemed to unite everyone in the drying room. Eeyore, ill at ease, also hung his head down. But Mrs. Ueki herself firmly nodded back, and didn't seem to take any of it very personally. The room was soon filled with conversation, but Mr. Arai clammed up, hugging his knees, which he had pulled up to his chest.

  Mr. Arai's behavior was not, however, something that surfaced above the fresh atmosphere of the room, which was now full of people. In the middle of the room was a metallic barrel-shaped device filled with black stones that radiated heat—a heat source for sauna effects. I think—and a woodwork frame enclosing it. There was also a narrow space between the frame and the tiers, where we were seated. Some people started warm-up stretches and what not. One man even lay flat on his back on the floor right in front of our eyes. He then crossed his feet, brought them to his abdomen, and assuming the form a genie would take when entering a bottle, started spinning his ankles. Having to bear this sight right before his eyes, Eeyore turned to me with a grin, a reserved one, which seemed to say, “Spare me!”

  “Well, Mr. Arai has some more training to do,” Mr. Mochizuki said to Eeyore, standing up. “Let me take you to the locker room now. You can take a bath, or get warm again in the sauna room there, and get dressed.”

  The place where Mr. Mochizuki had been sitting was wet, as though he had violently emptied a bucketful of water. Yet even while he was perspiring so profusely, he had been mindful of Eeyore. Realizing that Mr. Mochizuki was trying to help us newcomers, the effeminate mustached individual stopped needling him and sent us off with caring eyes. This was most likely the result of Mr. Osawa having done a lot of spadework, talking to people whenever he could, in the lobby or in the locker room, to ensure that things went well for Eeyore.

  I took a quick bath and, without even drying my hair, went out into the lobby to carefully watch the entrance to the men's locker room. Before long, Eeyore spiritedly emerged from the swinging door that Mr. Mochizuki had pushed open for him. He courteously bowed to Mr. Mochizuki, who went back into the sauna room. To celebrate Eeyore's success at his first swimming lesson, I got each of us a can of hot black tea at a vending machine, and we drank together.

  Just as we reached the bottom of the stairs of the club building, about to walk to the station, Eeyore made a bombastic gesture with a strained effort to stifle his joyous surprise. In the already fallen dusk, through the wide windows facing the sidewalk, we saw the glimmering swimming pool on the first floor of the building. Lessons for adults had already started in the large pool, but some of the lanes bad starting blocks with signs reading TRAINING LANE on them for regular members who had their own training regimens. In one of them, a swimmer with the entire lane to himself was fiercely practicing the breast-stroke. For every lap he did, he moved a float on the marker, which may have been bow he calculated the distance he swam. Alter a minute's interval to catch his breath, he savagely plunged his shoulders into the water, and again pumped away. His shoulders split the water, and his wet muscles glittered like those of a marine animal. Eeyore quickly noticed that this merman was none other than Mr. Arai.

  Eeyore and I leaned against the steel sash of the glass window and rapturously watched Mr. Arai and the shimmering water around him, which mirrored the swimming pool lights. He repeatedly went through the motion of hugging the water with a menacing force, and when he raced to the end of the lane near where we were watching him, he stopped, heaving his shoulders to catch his breath, like an ailing man, and moved one float on the marker as though he were rolling a log. Yet the strength of his legs—which you saw each time he immersed his whole body in the water, kicked the wall, and sprang off—was alien to the controlled, graceful beauty you saw in a young athlete. It was even coarse, and savage. … It didn't communicate the wholesome joy you feel when you see an athlete in motion. You felt more as though you had been made to witness a self-flagellation. I suddenly understood what “killing the body” meant, which dampened my spirit.

  “Eeyore. shall we go?” I said. “I feel guilty about us watching Mr. Arai without his knowing it.”

  Eeyore appeared to suffer no lingering attachment either, and moved away from the steel sash.

  * * *

  The following week, after Eeyore's music lesson, I told Mr. Shigeto and his wife about Eeyore having taken up swimming. I told them it was formal training, something quite different from what Father had tried with him before, since now he had a competition swimmer for a coach.

  “There's no better way to learn than to receive formal training,” Mr. Shigeto said. “With your stature, Eeyore, I think you'll look magnificent doing the crawl, if you learn to swim well. And, of course, swimming's good for you. You may find your practice sessions hard, but I hope you'll keep at it.”

  “I've tried many things so far,” Eeyore replied, “but from now on, let me keep at it in the water!”

  Mr. Shigeto and his wife, and I too, heartily laughed, although we knew that Eeyore, as usual, had intentionally said it off-key. As though to remind Eeyore of the difficulties he encountered in his music lessons, however, Mrs. Shigeto added, “You mean in the water too, don't you?”

  I had already written to Mother that Eeyore had taken up swimming. I never imagined, though, that while I was telling Mr. Shigeto and h
is wife the same thing I had written in my letter, my parents in California were panicking because of one line in it: he has a wonderful coach, Mr. Arai. On second thought, though, something had struck me as weird about Mr. Mochizuki's demeanor, too, when he saw Mr. Arai emerge from the locker room with Eeyore.

  Outstripping the wind, a letter from Father reached me in reply to mine. Such a prompt response was unprecedented, for none had ever come within ten days. But this one had come before Eeyore was to have his third session with Mr. Arai. It so happened, Father added, that a sociologist, friend of his was returning to Japan from a conference at Berkeley, and so he had entrusted him with the letter to mail me by special delivery from Narita. Though Father had started the letter calmly, it immediately revealed his anxiety, and I read it with tension. The first thing I understood from it was that he had discerned circumstances which, however pressing, prevented him from directly talking to me on the phone. The letter started with words that told me he was happy Eeyore had taken up swimming.

  “… But now. about his coach. It never occurred to me that Mr. Arai, with whom I am also acquainted, had returned, and so he was not at all on my mind when I thought of introducing you and Eeyore to the athletic club. And to be quite honest. I was shocked to know that he is coaching Eeyore. There was quite an involved and serious rumor about him when he left the club five years ago. I intend to make an overseas call, and talk directly to Mr. Shigeto about it, explain things to him, and ask him to go to the club to inquire about the situation. Machan, I hope you won't take offense at my doing this without first discussing the matter with you.

  “This could be, should I say, undue worry on Mama's part, but after hearing about the rumor in question from me, she asked me to convey this to you. She says that even if Eeyore is to receive instruction from Mr. Arai, she would want you to abide by the principle that you meet with him only where other people are watching. … As for his compensation, I will write Mr. Osawa and ask him to bill it to our home together with our membership fees.”

  I read this letter with a heavy heart. It left me with a negative feeling toward Father and Mother, which to be very frank I had allowed to develop in me. I was also at a loss as to what to do about Eeyore's coming session, which was going to be the next day. But then Mrs. Shigeto called.

  “Ma-chan, about Eeyore's swimming practice tomorrow,” she said, “how about finishing Eeyore's music lesson before that, and then go to the club with Mr. Shigeto? K-chan recommended the club to him a long time ago, and he bought a membership then. For a while, he got so involved in swimming that, when we went to Warsaw via Moscow, he plunged into that heated open-air pool in the snow, the one in which Muscovites swim from early in the morning. He is now what the club calls a ‘dormant member,’ but he called them and found out that all he needed to do to restore full membership was to pay this year's facilities fee. You should see him in his swim-suit, the one he wore at the spa in Czechoslovakia—he's another Esther Williams!“

  So after the music lesson, Mr. Shigeto accompanied us to the club. When he emerged from the men's locker room after helping Eeyore change, I laughed to myself, for his swim suit, looked like one of those marathoner's outfits with the pants and athletic shirt attached to each other. At the same time, though, I felt it must have flattered him—he must have even looked gorgeous in it—when and where he had worn it as the latest style.

  We walked down the hallway past the drying room but did not enter it, which would have been Mr. Arai's usual way of going to the pool, and went down the flight of stairs to the pool. Going down the stairs, Mr. Shigeto's barefoot steps were firm. The lower half of his body was so hefty and sinewy that, in comparison, Eeyore's legs—and even Mr. Arai's legs, for that matter—looked modest. Eeyore was walking beside Mr. Shigeto, and Mr. Arai was waiting for us behind the glass doors to the full-time members' pool. Mr. Arai had been unfriendly toward Mr. Shigeto, and toward me too, when I introduced them to each other, but his white teeth and his rose-pink gums showed when he smiled at Eeyore. He immediately started doing warm-up exercises with Eeyore, and so all we could do was stand at a distance, and, feeling like pupils forsaken by their teacher, repeat the movements that he was demonstrating to Eeyore.

  Like the week before and the week before that, children taking lessons in the large pool were creating an excitement that reverberated throughout the natatorium. And in the pool where you could do high dives, middle-aged women in aqua suits floated in silence, slowly and gropingly moving their arms and legs in the water. We entered the full-time members' pool, where Mr. Arai and Eeyore practiced in the lane farthest from the entrance, while Mr. Shigeto and I watched from the lane next to theirs. The pool was practically empty, save for a few swimmers, all adult females, one of them the corpulent Mrs. Ueki, hanging on to a lane marker, dejection suffusing her classically featured face.

  “This exceeds by far what I heard! Mr. Arai's coaching!” Mr. Shigeto exclaimed. Then, taking a break from his observation of Mr. Arai's instruction, he removed his glasses, placed them on the edge of the pool, and started off with an older Japanese-style lateral stroke. Without glasses, Mr. Shigeto looked like a samurai. His old-fashioned strokes made ripples that formed behind his large ears and flowed gently around his chin. On the return lap he did the trudgen stroke. Seeing him do these two strokes, both of which are done with the eyes above the water, I understood why he showed no interest in Father's goggles, which I had brought for him.

  When I started off, doing the crawl, he immediately realized my level of ability and followed me, controlling the speed of his trudgen stroke and maintaining the distance that, separated us, so I could continue with my laps. I did three laps this way, but given my physical condition, Mr. Shigeto's easy pace was taxing, and I had to stop for a rest. When I raised my body to look back down the lane we were swimming in, I saw no Mr. Shigeto. I was bewildered for a moment, but I soon saw him emerge from underwater with his right arm extended straight before him—perhaps another old-style Japanese swimming technique—holding a yellow swim cap, which he handed to Mrs. Ueki in the adjacent lane. The expression on her face was one of despondence, yet she gestured to Mr. Shigeto, and to me as well, that she wished the best for Eeyore, who was practicing hard.

  Eeyore was now trying to swim on his own from about the middle of the lane. Mr. Arai was shouting instructions next to his ear, and was himself nodding at each word he emphasized. Eeyore—his head of short-cropped hair covered with a swim cap and looking so much larger than Mr. Arai's—also repeatedly nodded as though to demonstrate his resolve.

  Pushed at the shoulders and waist by Mr. Arai, Eeyore floated and started swimming with uneven but large strokes. He didn't lift his face to breathe, but he swam to the end of the lane, effortlessly resumed his upright posture, and appeared to desperately look about for Mr. Arai, who he seemed to have difficulty spotting through his goggles. Mr. Arai gently threw himself forward into the water, butterflied—though he rarely did this stroke—to his pupil's side, and praised him for his accomplishment. Both Mr. Shigeto and I vigorously applauded. …

  When Eeyore was commuting to the secondary division of the special-care school, he once went swimming at the club with Father, and fell into the pitlike pool, which had a net over it the last time I saw it. When they got home that day, Eeyore looked meek and gentle, as though he had been caught doing some mischief. By then, however, he had regained his spirits. Father, though, looked on the verge of tears as he reported the whole story to Mother. These, he said, were the words Eeyore had spoken to comfort him on the train home: “I sank. From now I shall swim. I think I shall really swim!”

  Time has passed since then, but just as he had promised Father, Eeyore now really swam. I thought I should write to Father in California and let him know this. After all, he was in a “pinch” so serious—something I couldn't identify—that Mother had left Eeyore here, to accompany him to America and stay at his side. The news that Eeyore had swum should encourage him, like the words he had spoke
n on the train coming home after almost drowning. …

  I told Mr. Shigeto about this as he continued to carefully watch Mr. Arai, who was making Eeyore go over the arm movements. Mr. Shigeto gave a reply that revealed his full insight into my motivation.

  “Ma-chan,” he said, “I thought you'd be angry at K for discussing things with me without consulting you first. But you aren't a stickler for things like that, are you? That's the best form of filial piety toward a man of K's disposition.”

  We went up to the drying room, and there was Mr. Arai, sitting as always, with downcast eyes, beside his training gear. Eeyore, who sat next to him that day, with a serious look on his face, also remained silent. I saw this attitude as one befitting people who had just finished a disciplined workout, though for Mr. Arai it would be only a short respite before his “body-killing” program. I was also proud of them because both gave off the air of people who frequented the pool with a definite goal in mind. Their demeanor sharply contrasted with the relaxed atmosphere of the drying room when occupied by people like Mr. Mochizuki, the perspiration-dripping man, and the effeminate but sharp-tongued, mustached individual, who I'm starting to have a hunch is the proprietor of a beauty parlor.

  After a while, Mr. Shigeto, sounding like he wanted to get at least this across, broke his deferential silence, and said, “Eeyore, you swam very well. You listened closely to Mr. Arai's criticism and instruction. You even swam an extra fifteen meters just before coming out of the pool! It's amazing what you did.”