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CHAPTER 1

a quiet life

This all happened the year Father was invited to be a writer-in-residence at a university in California, and circumstances required that Mother accompany him. One evening, as their departure drew near, we gathered around the family table and had our meal in an atmosphere slightly more ceremonious than usual. Even on occasions like this, Father is incapable of discussing anything important concerning the family without weaving in some levity. I had just come of age, at twenty, and he started talking about my marriage plans as if they were a topic for light conversation. I had never been much of a talker, and more recently had fallen into the habit of not disclosing my private thoughts to him. So while the table talk now centered on me, I merely listened to it, though attentively.

"At any rate, present your minimum requirements," Father, who had been drinking a beer, suddenly said to me, undaunted by my reticence. Expecting only a perfunctory reply, however, he kept glancing at me with his somewhat impatient smile. Quite inadvertently, I brought myself to tell him about an idea I had now and then entertained.

"My husband has to be someone who can afford at least a two-bedroom apartment, since Eeyore will be living with us. And I want to live a quiet life there," I said, the blunt tone of my own voice ringing in my ears.

I detected bewilderment in both Father and Mother the moment I closed my mouth. Their first reaction was to smother what I had said with laughter, as if to suggest that my idea was merely an amusing, childish fantasy. But this is the way conversation in our family usually proceeds, the way Father orchestrates it, his forte. Eeyore, as my brother is called, is four years older than I, and he works at a welfare workshop that employs people with mental handicaps. Now if I were a new bride, and were to bring someone like Eeyore along to live with us, how would my young husband react? Even if I had told him about my plans before our marriage, wouldn't he simply dismiss them as strange and irrelevant? And then, on the very first day of their life together, his new brother-in-law, a giant of a man, shows up at the small apartment he had gone to such trouble to find — how surprised the inexperienced young man would be.

Sensing that there was some serious motive behind my parents' jocular conversation, I felt tense and hung my head to avert my eyes. What I said may have sounded unreasonable, but having said it, it became all the more important to me.

"I've been told all along that I don't have a sense of humor, and I quite agree," I continued, unable to stay quiet any longer. 'Maybe there's a hidden message in what you're saying. ... In any event, that's what I think. I can't conceive of marriage in concrete terms yet, because I don't have anyone particular in mind. I consider all the possible situations, but run into a dead end, no matter where I start, and that's why I think this way.

"The present conversation, too, tells me that my obsession is ludicrous ... for I don't think anyone would marry me with Eeyore along. ... Anyway, Papa, Mama, you're not telling me how to actually get around that dead end, are you?"

This was all I said, though I was abundantly aware I needed to elaborate. Every so often I revert to my childhood habit of standing beside Mother, as though in attendance, and talking to her while she puts on her makeup in her bedroom. I spoke to her the next morning this way, picking up from where I had clammed up the evening before. I had sort of — to use my younger brother Ochan's pet phrase — rehearsed what I would say to her. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that something had made me rehearse it subconsciously....

I, too, was disappointed with what I had said the night before. I probably would have been better off saying nothing at all. I retreated to my bedroom, but sleep evaded me. I thought about all sorts of things, and with frayed nerves, I was seized by the premonition of a terrible dream, a nightmare in which I saw myself standing all alone in an empty, desolate place. An awareness of the reality that I was still awake lingered within me, and mingled with the dream. I remained in this state of mind — sad, lonely, detached — knowing full well that my body was lying on the bed.

In time I realized that behind and to the side of me in the dream stood another person with feelings the same as mine. Without turning around to look, I knew that this was the Eeyore-to-be. This Eeyore-to-be, who at any moment would step out obliquely from behind me, was an attendant to a bride, and the bride was me. Primly dressed in my wedding gown, I stood lonely in that desolate place with the Eeyore-to-be as my attendant, with no idea who the groom was. Dusk was setting in on that vast, vacuous wasteland. Such was the dream I dreamt....

Deep in the night I awoke. And as I recalled the dream, the loneliness welled back up in me with a vengeance, and with such vividness that I could no longer lie in the darkness of my room. So I went upstairs and turned on the night-light, which Eeyore uses so as not to stumble when he goes to the bathroom, and entered his room, through the door which he lets stand ajar. I bunkered down at the foot of his bed, wrapped my knees in the old beat-up blanket I had unconsciously brought with me — an act reminiscent of my childhood behavior — and listened to the sound of his heavy, deep-sleep breathing, which seemed to surpass the norm for human lungs. Not an hour had passed when, in the pale darkness, he got out of bed and quickly went out to the bathroom just across the hall, He took not the least notice of me, and I felt all the more lonesome.

The loud gurgle of urination seemed to last forever, but when Eeyore returned, be came to me. Like a big dog nuzzling at his master, he crouched and pushed his head against my shoulder and sat down beside me with his knees drawn up, apparently intending to sleep that way. I suddenly felt so happy. After a while, like a discreet adult stifling laughter, yet with a soft, pure, and childlike voice, he said, "Is everything all right with Ma-chan?" Feeling utterly whole again, I helped him back into bed, waited until sleep revisited him, and went back to my room.

The fall semester abroad was about to start, and this took place the last day of summer, just one day before their departure. Father was reading the paper on the sofa by their over-stuffed, heavy-looking suitcases when he suddenly exclaimed, "Eeyore's got to start doing something for exercise again! Like swimming!" He was addressing neither Mother, who was working in the kitchen, nor me: rather he sounded like he was talking to himself after a lot of painful deliberation.

"Exercise? I'm a very good swimmer," Eeyore would have replied after a moment of belated thought, evoking laughter from everyone in the family — if, as usual, he had been there beside Father, lying flat on his stomach on the carpet, composing music.

Had Eeyore been there, Father's words would not have come rolling down on me, like a log or something, and just remained there. Eeyore is the buffer in the family — he's not wholly unaware of it — and he plays his role humorously.

But Eeyore wasn't there when Father suddenly mentioned exercise. If I remember correctly, I had already returned home after taking him to the welfare workshop in the morning, and was helping Mother clear the breakfast table when Father, the only one who had slept in, blurted out those words about exercise as he put down the morning paper. As I said, I felt weighed down by an unknown, loglike object. Then, when I started tidying up the living room, soon after Father had gone up to his study, I saw, in the morning paper he had left sprawled on the table, an article reporting that a mentally retarded youth had assaulted a female student at a camp school. The assault appeared to be motivated by sex.

I think the belligerent sensation, the Hell, no! Hell, no! that welled up in me, was not really a spontaneous reaction but one I had prepared all along. As a matter of fact, I had recently given vent to it on a number of occasions with those very words — words that Eeyore calls "rough" and reprimands me for using. Still, all too frequently, for some time now, my eyes have caught headlines decrying such sexual "outbursts" by mentally handicapped people. The newspaper we subscribe to, in particular, seemed to be running a covert campaign against such people, and these accounts appeared so often, as in that day's morning edition, that I once suggested to Mother that we take a different paper. Yet Father had reacted with good grace to the paper's campaign denouncing the "outbursts," as though he believed that they were actually taking place. And without even a word about the article, he had stammered that Eeyore should take up something for exercise — an attitude I found repulsive, annoyingly depressing at best.

Eeyore is definitely at a sexually mature age. I see many robust boys, in their twenties like Eeyore, while commuting to classes and on campus. I won't say this for all of them — in particular, I don't at all feel this way about my fellow volunteers — but now and then I detect in a boy's stare a radiation that seems to emanate from something sexual deep inside him. And all those sexy weekly magazine ads that hang everywhere in the commuter trains!

But if Father, from such general preconceptions, had worried about "outbursts 'from Eeyore — in the same way the newspaper reporter worried about them — and had claimed that exercise a necessary measure (!?) to prevent them, then wouldn't there be something "banal" about Father that comes from his not seeing the facts clearly? I think I was reacting against this.

There was some talk at Eeyore's welfare facility, too, of several incidents that had almost been "outbursts." But according to what I heard from some of the mothers who had come to pick up their children, these "outbursts" were moderate, even merciful, compared to the glares of robust, able-bodied youngsters. Still, who could have known, as I quietly listened to them from my seat at their side, that a voice rang in me so loud as to almost make me cry, Hell, no! Hell, no! In any case, nothing had happened that should have involved the police.

When Eeyore first began commuting to the welfare workshop, I merely accompanied Mother when she took him there; and I recall there was practically nothing near the building at the time, just vacant lots. But since then, many wood-frame apartment houses with beautiful facades have mushroomed in the area, and it's often dangerous to cross the street with those structures blocking the view. So if there had been an assault, surely the new residents would have begun a movement against the welfare workshop.

One windy day early this spring, on my way back from the welfare workshop, where I had taken Eeyore, I turned at the corner of a fenced-in used-car lot to walk along a side street of the always wretchedly busy Koshu Boulevard. Since attendance for the day had been taken and the absence reports had already been submitted to the center office, I knew the boy I had seen wasn't one of Eeyore's workmates. But this seemingly mentally retarded boy had pulled down his pants to his knees to expose his pure white buttocks and was fondling his genitals while gazing at the grimy cars beyond the fence. "My, oh my!" exclaimed Mrs. A, one of the mothers who was walking back with me, a take-charge type of woman, quick in making decisions and taking action. "Ma-chan, you stay right here," she said, "Mrs. M and I will go first!" Having brought me to a halt with these enigmatic words, she briskly headed toward the boy.

Three other women, who happened to be abreast of us on the other side of the street, also began to move to censure the boy's behavior. Reaching him first, though, Mrs. A made him pull up his pants, and helped him with the satchel he had left on the side of the road. She made sure which direction his school was in, and wasted no time sending him off. The three women, left standing there with no opportunity to voice their complaints, reproached us over their shoulders as they resumed walking.

This is what Mrs. A, who had started toward the station, said when I caught up with her: "If those neighborhood housewives hadn't been there, and if we didn't have to worry about people mistaking the boy for one of ours, I'd have let him do it to his heart's content!"

It was then Mrs. M's turn to say, "My, oh my!" Like Mrs. A, she said this in consideration of a young girl's presence, but in my heart I concurred with Mrs. A. And this made me repeat to myself, Hell, no! Hell, no! for I had blushed and even become teary-eyed, which seemed somehow indecent, and I gritted my teeth in anger.

While it is not my intention here to fault the boy in any way, I have never seen Eeyore engaging in the act — at least not where the eyes of a family member might spot him. We also know that, unlike the boy, he has never done it elsewhere; and to be quite honest, I have a hunch he won't ever do it. I must confess, though, that my feelings regarding this matter are mixed, for the thought that he will never do it doesn't necessarily ease my mind, much less make me feel happy....

Eeyore has a fundamentally serious streak in him, which makes him reject all sexual playfulness. Father prefers light-hearted banter about such things, though Mother says he was seriousness personified when he was a student, that his facetiousness is a second nature he acquired with great effort. Eeyore, however, is of the exacting, stoic sort. So I wonder if, when he hears "'peck," which is frequently uttered in our house, he consciously endures the word, however much he dislikes it.

"Peck" is Father's four-letter word, which lends itself to levity like silk off a spool. I know this usage isn't found in the dictionary, but Father uses it like a wild card, so to speak. Still, if I were to stand in Father's defense, I would say that I understood his need to invent it, for if any impropriety involving sex were to arise, some situation he himself could not well cope with, it would be in his own best interest to treat it more like a scandalous joke than as an embarrassing predicament.

I recall something that happened to Eeyore when he was in the secondary division of a special-care school for the handicapped. One day, at home, he was, as usual, lying on the living room carpet, listening to FM radio and composing music. And then he turned on to his other side, and he did so in such an awkward manner, thrusting his hips back, as it were, with obvious embarrassment. Father saw this and said to him, his voice louder — at least as I heard it — than necessary', "Eeyore, your peck's grown. Now go to the bathroom!"

So off he went, wobbling like a woman you might see in a hospital with something abnormal about her underbelly. I thought of his grown "peck" hurting as it brushed against his underwear, and I wished to help him in any way I could. But at such times Eeyore became extremely defensive — to the point that he would have pushed my hand away had I tried to do anything. Mother said she was helpless as far as the grown "peck" was concerned.

There were also times when we would come face to face with Eeyore's "peck." Eeyore has always worn diapers when going to bed. As he grew, the vinyl covers they had in the neighborhood stores became too small for him, so whenever we happened to go downtown, Mother and Father looked for something larger in the department stores. An instructor at the special school said he wanted all bedwetting problems solved, and suggested that we get Eeyore up at night, between eleven and twelve, and take him to the bathroom. Mother usually did this, sometimes Father, but I took care of everything when Father was away traveling and Mother was too tired to get up. In those days I was up anyway, preparing for my high school entrance exams.

When you turned on the light, Eeyore would immediately awaken, but he wouldn't spontaneously initiate any movement. Seeing him lying there, his form heaving under the blanket, you would think he was a bear in hibernation. You would start by stripping off the blanket, and find him sprawled out every which way. Then you began taking off his pajama pants. While still lying there, totally inert, he would do his bit, making subtle movements to help you with the task.

If his diaper was still dry, you would use it again after taking him to the toilet, so you would carefully remove its adhesive tape to keep its folds and creases the same. You could tell immediately by its sodden warmth if it was already wet, but when you made it in the nick of time, you would be as happy as a hunter who had bagged some game.

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Excerpted from "A Quiet Life"
by .
Copyright © 1990 Kenzaburo Oe.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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