A Quiet Life (30 page)

“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!”

K
enzaburo 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.