by Kenzaburo Oe
Pinned down, and utterly helpless, I suddenly found myself free, standing by the bed in blank surprise. Eeyore, with power suffusing every fiber of his body, like when he's angry at a barking dog, had his hands clasped around Mr. Arai's carotids, and the two, entangled together, cascaded down between the bed and the sofa. … Eeyore had exited Mrs. Kurokawa's condo to the road, and then entered Mr. Arai's unit through the front door. As soon as I realized this I was running to the door, which was still open, and I fled outside without even putting my shoes on. …
The direction in which I ran, trying to get back on the road we had come on, turned out to be wrong, and I found myself on the block of the Women's Community Hall and the Elderly Citizens' Welfare Hall, where there were neither any lighted houses nor passersby I could ask for help. I slipped and fell as I panted and raced up the slope with its sturdy, cemented-pebble slabs, and just like that little girl in our neighborhood, I wobbled on my knees to get away. I even sobbed and cried. When at last I was on my feet again, I was seized with the bloodcurdling thought that I had fled without Eeyore, that I had left him in the hands of a person like Mr. Arai, who could kick at, and break, his ribs. I cried out loud as I thought of Eeyore, who had been forsaken by Mother and Father, and by me too—undoubtedly an “abandoned child”—yet was fighting bravely to save me. …
Despite all this, I somehow managed to get back on the street that ran along the railroad tracks, and heedless of the penetrating stares of the passersby—it was drizzling, I had no umbrella over my head, I was barefoot, and my knees were bleeding—I walked back toward the health club. Feeling helplessly desperate, I thought of asking Mr. Osawa to come to Eeyore's rescue. But as I passed and happened to peer up the alley we had taken when going to Mr. Arai's condo—the road right beside the club building—I saw Eeyore walking with Mr. Arai, who was carrying the bag and umbrella I had left behind. I stood there, rooted in fear, but Mr. Arai, upon recognizing me, handed my belongings to Eeyore, and leapt back on the road he had come, as if he were jogging.
I walked in Eeyore's direction, and he hurried toward me, squinting his eyes as if to peer into the drizzling dark, and said with a calm and gentle voice, “Are you all right? Ma-chan! I fought!”
The next day, I started running a fever again, and I couldn't get up for some time. I couldn't even write to Mother, though it bothered me that I didn't. All the while I was in bed, O-chan did a great job not only with the household chores but also with various other things he had searched out that needed to be done. As for things that concerned him personally—such as going to the university to check the bulletin boards and see whether or not he had passed his entrance exams—he did them after taking Eeyore to the welfare workshop. O-chan locked the front door so that I could sleep without being disturbed. Returning home with the makings for dinner, he busied himself in the kitchen with this and that, and at long last he peered in through my door and said. “Sister, thank you for your cooperation.” It was an impersonation of his younger self, but with an adult voice that was nothing like the clear, crystalline voice he had when he passed his elementary school entrance exams. “Thanks to you, I passed.”
O-chan had gone to pick up Eeyore, and later, hearing in mind the time difference, made, an overseas call to our parents in California. Eeyore was beside him, probably thinking he would substitute for me, since even if I could have gotten up and walked to the living room, given my unstable emotions my voice might have become all teary. So after O-chan had made his sort of passing-the-examination report, Eeyore switched with him and said, “Ma-chan was in big trouble, but I fought!”
This prompted Mother to get O-chan on the phone again. He, sounding irritated, bluntly but correctly related to Mother an account of what had happened, as I had briefly related it to him. He also reported to her that, after listening to my story, he had sort of contacted Mr. Shigeto, upon whose advice he had called the health club and discussed the matter with Mr. Osawa. It seemed that Mr. Osawa was taking action to prohibit Mr. Arai from coming to the club. For the time being, Eeyore wouldn't be swimming, but what the body has learned it won't forget, so when he resumes, he'll swim all right. I was in bed with a headache, but my fever seems to have gone. Soon I should be able to recover the quiet life I love. In other words, Mother need not worry about us here. …
But when Mother heard this on the phone, she got to worrying, and before the week was up, she was already back in Japan. What first shocked me was that, during her roughly six-month stay in California, something had made the texture and movement of the skin on her face project the impression of a nisei woman in her early sixties. And though Mother herself had decided to go with Father in order to help him cope with his “pinch,” she now embraced not so much a cold attitude as one that placed a clear distance between herself and Father—perhaps because she had decided that, for her part, she had done all there was to do and could do no more. She did say, objectively, that he might stay another year at some UC campus, for toward the end of last year, through the auspices of some friends at Berkeley, he had received the Distinguished Service Award; and, though not because of this, he could expect a grant from the Japan Foundation if he earnestly asked for one. And just about this time, when Mother returned to Japan, a freelance photographer who had signed a contract with a Japanese magazine had taken some pictures of Father, several of which had been forwarded to us. Some showed Father in the shade of a California live oak tree on the UC campus, standing in his black-collared raincoat with ornamental cuffs on it, his eyes closed and his hands cupped behind his ears; others depicted him lying on a slope studded with oak trees that had trunks as big as elephants' feel, looking up at a shoot of grass right in front of his nose, one that looked like a wood sorrel grown tall. …
“I didn't know the man could pose before a camera,” O-chan said in astonishment, a sentiment I shared.
“I don't think there was any posing as such,” Mother said. “He simply wasn't aware that there was a photographer looking at him when the pictures were being taken. About this time, he almost always had the same expression on his face when in the faculty quarters, and said nothing for days on end. He hasn't written you for some time either, has he? He was stirred to action, as if he had just awakened, when he had to deal with that swimming coach, but it didn't last long. Besides, he's found himself some new reading matter to concentrate on. … The place we stayed at had several rooms, and because he kept reading in his bedroom, day in and day out, he forgot that I had come with him. There were times he even prepared his own meals, and ate them alone.”
“I wonder if he'll be okay, with so many live oaks, and branches he can hang from,” O-chan said, although reservedly. I had told him about what Mr. Shigeto had said about Father.
“I don t think we need to worry about that,” said Mother. “Basically, I returned because that worry has gone. He's found a wonderful professor on the campus. He takes private lessons from him once a week, for four hours, and he's thoroughly engrossed in them. He's pouring all his energy into preparation and review, and that's why he's so easily distracted.”
“Is this professor a priest?” I asked.
“Why? … He's a specialist on Blake. Papa's now reading his Prophecies. ‘The Four Zoas,’ mainly. He's using a facsimile version. But despite all the time he spent reading Blake, it seems he was able to go just so far by self-study, and had no way of knowing how the Prophecies had been rewritten, let alone know the importance of their revision. He was grumbling to himself that his failure to fully understand Blake's vision of rebirth, too, was due to his half-baked study methods.
“I couldn't help him read Blake, so I was ready to come back. Our life on this side is important, too. … Before Papa met us”—I thought this a rather strange expression for Mother to use—“from the time he was fourteen or fifteen years old, he'd been living alone in a boardinghouse. And this was how he managed to surmount the ‘pinches’ that came at the various stages of his development. I've learned this time that,
in the end, he's the type of person who has to deal with his pinches' this way. In any event, if he's so determined to cope with them by doing things his own way, I think there's no other place to do it but there, where he can learn about Blake. …”
Of course, Mother hadn't given up on Father restoring himself to us, which you might say is a matter of course, she being his wife and all. But I have sometimes thought that, if a person of her character had done her level best for six long months in her life with Father, just the two of them together—and had, from this experience, come to reconsider their relationship—then whatever conclusion she had arrived at must be one that indeed couldn't be helped. … One morning, some ten or so days after her return, Mother said that she had finished reading “Diary as Home,” which she had borrowed from me. I was watching her make up her face, amazed at her skin, which was recovering with such vigor that it seemed to be at one with the swelling of the buds on the cherry trees along the street in front of the station. And she suggested that I send the diary to Father in California.
“Because,” she said, “you've written not only about Eeyore, of course, but about O-chan, and yourself, too … and even about me, which I didn't expect; and it reads as though we were living one life together. If Papa reads this, he might remember he has a family, though it be in his typically serious, yet off-key fashion. He might come to realize that, just because he's rowed himself out into the stormy sea of a ‘pinch,’ it's shameful to be so absentmindedly concerned with only himself. … In her last letter to me, Grandma wrote that Papa, after being spirited away in the forest, suddenly couldn't remember his own name. The other children got a big kick out of this, and teased him whenever they needed a laugh, saying, ‘Hey, you there! What's your name?’ If he reads ‘Diary as Home’ he might relearn the names of his real family.”
I never imagined that Mother would utilize the “Diary as Home” this way, this diary that I continued to write in the midst of our real-life ‘pinches.’ I thought I had been impartial in my writing, but I was anxious about Father reading it. While trying to suppress this sensation, I found myself again shouting in my heart. Hell, no! Hell, no! Nevertheless, I went out to look for something to send it in. When I returned and was about to do the packing, Mother made another suggestion.
“Ma-chan,” she said, “‘Diary as Home’ sounds bland and dull. How about giving it a title that best describes your life over the past six or seven months?”
“I haven't got that sort of talent in my small, round head. … But Eeyore, you're a master at titles. Can you think of one for me?”
Eeyore, who was lying on his stomach on the dining room carpet, writing music on staff paper—with a composure I never saw in him while Mother was away—took his time, and then replied, “How about A Quiet Life? That's what our life's all about!”
*Ibid., pp. 260–61.
Kenzaburo Oe was born in 1935 in the remote mountain village of Ose on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four main islands. He began publishing short stories while studying French literature at Tokyo University and won the coveted Akutagawa Prize for “Prize Stock” when he was twenty-three.
Since that time, Kenzaburo Oe's prolific body of novels, short stories, critical and political essays, and other nonfiction has won almost every major international honor, including the 1989 Prix Europalia and the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature. His many translated works include A Personal Matter, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, The Silent Cry, Hiroshima Notes, and Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids.
Kenzaburo Oe resides in Tokyo with his wife and three children.