A Quiet Life (15 page)

During Eeyore's next lesson, after he and Mr. Shigeto had gone into the music room, I talked intermittently with Mrs. Shigeto, and ended up telling her about the
dropout
incident. But I didn't speak with the same sense of depression I had felt when thinking to myself about it. Had I been feeling that heavy-hearted, I think I would have chosen another topic. Eeyore, however, had said something funny on our way there, words that unfettered my heart, and I was prompted to tell her what had happened, as I rode the momentum of this heart.

As for the words Eeyore uttered, I'll just copy what I wrote in “Diary as Home.” The Shigetos' house is in a newly developed residential area along the Keio railway line. It stands halfway down the slope from a high ground that leads into a hollow. The station is level with the high ground, and most houses from about where the decline begins have wire-fenced lawns with golf-practice nets hanging over them, flaunting a higher status than the houses in the hollow. And as a rule, there is a dog in the garden.

That day, as Eeyore was retying his shoelace—I had told him it was loose—a spitz in the garden across the road started yelping like crazy, while running about as though it had gone berserk.

“It's really only timid dogs that bark like that,” I said to Eeyore before he got angry at the dog and scared the life out of it. “They're weak dogs. You could even feel sorry for them.”

Eeyore raised himself and, probably because there was still a good four or five meters to the fence, he called out to the yelping dog with composure, “Ken, Ken!”

“Oh? Do you know him?” I asked.

Eeyore let my question hang in the air, and nonchalantly started walking.

“Today I just thought I'd call him ‘dog’ in Chinese,” he said.

I laughed so loud the dog's yelping turned into a timorous whimper. Going down the road, side by side, I felt that Eeyore had blown away the despondent feeling that had been with me the past few days.

Mrs. Shigeto sank into thought as she listened to me speak of the
dropout
incident. On the dining table, where she sat opposite me, were paper and scissors, and a tube of paste. She was very carefully doing some handwork, and when she rested her hands and raised her eyes, she presented her opinion in the form of two blocks of convincing thought. First she asked me how Eeyore had taken it, if I had detected any sign of hurt in him.

“He appeared to like the sound of the word then,” I replied. “But I don't know how he felt afterwards; we never talked about it. … If he'd asked any of his instructors what it meant, they would've written something to that effect in the welfare workshop home-correspondence notebook. No, I don't think he asked.

“The incident has left me so depressed that perhaps it's my dejection that's affecting him. My younger brother is the take-things-as-they-come type, and it doesn't seem to matter much if our parents are here or not. Yet even
he
remarked that I must have many tilings to be anxious about. Perhaps Eeyore sensed my anxieties, and maybe that's why he tried to cheer me up with his Chinese version of
dog.
”

Mrs. Shigeto relaxed the skin of her feverish cheeks into a soft smile only toward the end of my reply, hut from what she said, after tightening the skin again, I realized that her face had flushed simply because she was angry.

“Ma-chan,” she said, “the little relief I find in what you told me, if I can call it that, is that you apologized for Eeyore before the girl called you
dropouts
and not afterwards. I wouldn't have gone so far as to slap her in the face, but if I'd been there, I would at least have made her take it back. I wish you had. It's very important for a human being to take such action.

“I told you about the time Mr. Shigeto and I traveled around Europe with our cat, didn't I? We got to Warsaw Airport on a Polish airliner from Dubai on the Arabian Peninsula. Out of an oven, then straight into a refrigerator. We were all shivering as we wailed, but our luggage just didn't come out. Then we saw a government official, clad in a suit you could tell was tailored in England, ordering a porter to pick out his suitcases, while luggage for the general passengers was being held up. Mr. Shigeto, as a Japanese visitor who could speak Polish, went up to the gentleman and asked if doing such a thing was socialism. I think it's important to have this kind of courage.”

“But this girl was only a middle-school student,” I said. “A child yet, and cute, too. …”

“All children are cute, Ma-chan,” Mrs. Shigeto rejoined. “And cute as they may he, they have certain traits, as yet hidden, that will manifest themselves when they become adults. What I do every time I see a child is to picture him or her in middle age, from whatever outcropping of hidden character I perceive in the child. By doing this, I understand human beings better. What you should have seen, in the girl you say looked cute, was a middle-aged woman with a nicely featured
face and a shapely figure, but a discriminatory character. I believe there was a lot of meaning embedded in her disparaging of Eeyore and you as
dropouts
.”

Dejected, I felt I was going to
robotize.
I knew that my attitude toward
the
girl, who in the bus had appeared so much the teacher's-pet type, had been servile. And Mrs. Shigeto's words echoed even more forcefully in my heart, for until then I'd been thinking that, compared to how I had reacted to the word, Eeyore's reserved way of enjoying the ring of
dropouts
in his ears had even been noble. Mrs. Shigeto asked me no further questions, probably because she had clearly seen through my plight.

After Eeyore's lesson, the
dropout
topic; cropped up again, this time with Mr. Shigcto entering into the discussion. Mrs. Shigeto began by recapitulating our experience in the bus. Eeyore clearly remembered and vigorously kept nodding his head, and when she came to the part about his satchel hitting the girl's chest, he looked very sorry. Then she reminded her husband about what he had done at Warsaw Airport, to which he, in turn, supplemented her words by telling us what
she
had done there.

“This lady here,” he began, “knew very well that summer in Europe could often be very chilly. So after putting a kerchief she'd brought with her around the basket we kept our cat in, she lent a hand-woven muffler to a little girl who was sitting beside her. She's very kind to little girls.”

That day Mrs. Shigeto continued with the work she was doing, even after Eeyore joined us, and asked me to bring in the cookies and tea in her stead. She was preparing a draft of a handbill the size of a small notebook, by making a collage of letters she had clipped from an English-language newspaper and other publications. She was going to make copies on a duplicating machine installed at some twenty-four-hour
supermarket. Its content was directed toward the chairman of the Polish National Council who would be visiting Napan, and it protested the oppression of the country's poets and writers.

“Why don't you give some copies to Ma-chan to send to K?” Mr. Shigeto said. “There are quite a few expatriate intellectuals from Poland who work on the various UC campuses, like Milosz, for one. I'd like K to know what some Japanese are doing for them.”

“K-chan is apathetic,” Mrs. Shigeto said emphatically, which made me, and Eeyore too, feel sad. “We've known of Chairman Jaruzelski's visit for quite some time, so I asked K-chan if he'd do something to have the Japan P.E.N. Club protest his coming here, but he didn't do anything. I guess he feels a little guilty about it. That's why he didn't come here himself to ask you about Eeyore's lesson, but got Ma-chan to do it. Don't you think so?”

“K's already issued so many statements, enough to make him sick, all of them ineffective,” Mr. Shigeto replied. “Jaruzelski is coming from poverty-stricken Poland to request economic aid of a filthy-rich Japan. At a time when the nation welcoming him has one careful eye directed toward the U.S. and the E.C., while the other's exploiting business opportunities in Poland. Don't you think K shied away from making a statement because he knew it would fall on deaf ears?”

“The privileged few may know it's of no use,” Mrs. Shigeto said, “but those of us with no name have to give it all we've got: that's my policy. … Mr. Shigeto, could you look over the direct-appeal part for me, the part in Polish? A few copies might fall into the hands of some members of the delegation, you know.”

“Anyway, we'll ask Ma-chan to send some to K. He may feel a bit relieved to know that some people are trying to accomplish
what he couldn't,” Mr. Shigeto said, reading the draft as soon as he got it. “He may suffer a few pangs of guilt for not having done anything, hut that can't he helped. … I think the Polish here is very good.”

“Well then, Ma-chan, I'm going to ask you to send K-chan a few copies when I get it duplicated.” Mrs. Shigeto said, happily retrieving the draft. Putting an end to the talk about the handbills, she brought up the
dropout
topic again.

“Of course,” she said, “I'm angry at the girl who called you
dropouts
, but that doesn't mean I worry ahout the kind of person she'll turn out to be. A girl like her is bound to become a fine middle-aged woman who lives robustly in everything she does.

“My feelings go out to those who people of her kind hurt by calling them ‘dropouts.’ And I wonder how we can become more aware of the unique existence of
dropouts
as individuals. A case in point—I may be jumping to conclusions—but I admire the composure in Eeyore's attitude.” (“Thank you very much!” Eeyore happily broke in; to which Mrs. Shigeto gave the rather incoherent reply, “Please don't mention it! The pleasure's mine!”)

“As a matter of fact, Ma-chan, I consider myself a
dropout.
I've been one since I was a young girl, I was one during my previous marriage, and I'm one even now with Mr. Shigeto. … I'd never thought in terms of
dropout
, but I say
dropout
here because it: happens to be the word in question. You see, I feel that I was born a
nobody.
I've lived all my years feeling like this, and I'll live a few more feeling the same way, then die the death of a
nobody.
(Reservedly, so as not to interrupt Mrs. Shigeto's talk, Eeyore, who is sensitive to death, the word itself, sighed “Hoh!”—which took Mrs. Shigeto by surprise, prompting her to say, “Oh, Eeyore! I'm sorry if I caused you alarm.”)

“My thoroughly ordinary head thinks that, so long as you refrain from privileging yourself in any manner and live as a
nobody
, you'll have a certain amount of leeway,” she continued. “And within its limits, you exert as much energy as you can. Within my limited capacity, exerting energy is not much more than, as Mr. Shigeto just reminded me, lending a muffler to a shivering, tired girl.

“But once you set your mind to living the life of a
nobody
, I feel that—sorry Eeyore, I'm going to frighten you again—even when it's time to die, you can go to zero with some leeway. Which is to say, you return to zero from a point practically next to zero. Isn't being anxious about your soul after death, or about eternal life, privileging yourself? Compared to an insect, for example. … Wasn't Abraham the patriarch of the chosen people who made a special contract with some celestial existence? Even in Poland, it's not just the higher-ups in the communist hierarchy who are privileged. Aren't the Catholics there also privileged?—though in a mundane sense they may now be underprivileged. …”

“You
are
an anarchist, aren't you—and one who's got absolutely nothing to do with faith …,” Mr. Shigeto observed, blinking his eyes in amusement. “But I think your handbill supports the Catholic masses in Poland, too.”

“I stand on the side of the
nobodies
there,” Mrs. Shigeto said. “I can't support anybody else. I'm a
nobody
down to the marrow, and I rejoice in this. … But Ma-chan, when I look through the eyes of a
nobody
, I seem to get a sharper picture of the reality of K-chan's ‘pinch.’”

Taking what Mrs. Shigeto said as something she had carefully thought about and wanted to convey through me to Father himself and to Mother as well, I summarized her subsequent comments in “Diary as Home.” I knew that I was in no position to say anything about Father's “pinch,” let alone do anything
to help him overcome it, but if I was going to forward Mrs. Shigeto's handbills to him, I thought I ought to enclose a letter, which would be a verbatim copy from the diary, of the ideas about Father that she had earnestly put together. Another reason I chose to do this was because I feared that, if I sent Father only the handbills, he wouldn't take them seriously, which wouldn't be fair to Mrs. Shigcto. Besides, they would be more meaningful if they came with a letter explaining her thoughts about him, and more so if these thoughts were tied to something within herself.