A Quiet Life (10 page)

I didn't think I could tell her about Father's “pinch.” I only told her that, although Eeyore did in fact compose a piece he had titled “Sutego,” he didn't appear to be suffering the emotions of an abandoned child while working on it. And when it was completed, he was eager about the chords in the final part, and seemed more concerned about the technical results than about its theme.

Because Aunt Fusa had parked the car on one of the topographical overlooks of the delicately undulating mountainside, we could see, after climbing a little farther up, the whole valley below our eyes like the bottom of an earthenware mortar. Upstream the river was as tortuous as the road, and its water sparkled brightly at every short bend. Upriver some distance was a thickly wooded hill of tall, straight cypress trees that protruded like an appendage of the forest, and there a thick congregation of age-old cedars rose fiercely high above the cypresses. Among those trees, quite out of character with the
forest, stood a boxlike, concrete structure with a tall chimney. Plumes of white smoke suddenly rose from the chimney with force. Aunt Fusa gazed down on this smoke with a stern expression, and appeared to he immersed in thought.

Alone, I kept looking up at the sky, blue as ever without a trace of the late-autumn shower it had just rained down on us. Confronting the sun, I sneezed: a blessing in disguise, for it unfettered Aunt Fusa from the thoughts that bound her, of Eeyore's “Sutego” or of Great-uncle being burned at the crematory, though most likely a mixture of the two.

“So the sun makes you sneeze, too, Ma-chan!” she said, vigorously raising her head and turning it toward me. “When K-chan was in middle school, he once read a magazine article about that. So he thought of an experiment to see if there was actually any relationship between the sun and sneezing. With only a limited number of subjects, he had me look at the sun every morning, which was no easy task for me. In those days, K-chan was a science nut, just like O-chan.”

Aunt Fusa squinted her eyes and gazed at the sun in the western sky, and then sneezed a cute, sneeze. We continued to laugh for a while. I then decided to ask her something.

“I guess this happened when Father was even younger,” I began. “I heard that after he read about St. Francis, at the water mill where he took some wheat to have it ground, he seriously worried about whether he should immediately begin doing something concerning
matters of the soul.
”

“That's right. It's a true story,” Aunt Fusa said. “You see down there where the river forks out into two streams, one shining, the other shaded? The water mill is quite a distance up that narrow, darker one, and K-chan came back tightly clutching the bag of flour to his chest, and his face was all white. Fearing that a neighborhood St. Francis of Assisi might appear out of the shade of a nearby tree and lure him to engage
in matters of the soul, he began to shed tears, and his eyes looked like those of a raccoon dog. …

“From what Father said in the lecture, I understand that you told him he looked like a white monkey. …”

“He's embellished his memory a bit because this concerns him personally. A raw-boned raccoon dog, a runty raccoon dog: that's what he looked like. … But I expect he's lived his life ever since in fear of the day he would have, to abandon everything in order to dedicate himself to
matters of the soul.
At least that's the kind of person he was while he lived with us, until he graduated from high school. He used to get so depressed when his friends invited him to go with them to study the Bible in English. …

“Big Brother was also very much concerned about this. He worried whether K-Chan would join some religious organization in Tokyo, though he didn't mind political parties. And once he lamented that if this ever happened it would spell the end of K-chan's future, in a social sense. Come to think of it, though, both Big Brother and K-chan were pitiful young men who were constantly hounded by
matters of the soul.
But one of them has already turned into white smoke, without doing anything about
matters of the soul
. …

“In connection with this, ‘The Marvels of the Forest,’ the legend Grandma spoke of when she was talking about Eeyore's composition, is a story Grandma's mother once related to K-chan. Or perhaps I should say that K-chan unearthed the strange legend with his power. The science-minded child that he was in those days, he tried interpreting it all sorts of ways. He once even said that ‘The Marvels of the Forest’ may have been delivered to Earth by a rocket from either the solar system or from the universe beyond it. Anyway, he said that civilization may have started on this planet with this as its genesis. I've always been a simple-minded girl, and so I imagined a
shoal of children from some faraway star, packed like sardines in the ‘Marvels of the Forest’ rocket, being abandoned here on Earth. And I used to get so lonely. …

“When you think of it, though, don't you feel that Eeyore and I share a similar vocabulary of imagination somewhere? And K-chau's probably behind it all. I felt really lonely, thinking about the ‘Marvels of the Forest’ rocket, probably because he bad said something to the effect that we were interplanetary abandoned children. I wouldn't be surprised if he's directed remarks of a similar vein at Eeyore. And then having done something so careless, he himself leaves for California with Oyu-san! It may surprise some people, but that's the kind of person he is.”

Grandma and Eeyore had been gently leaning their backs against the stone wall that retained the persimmon patch above them on the upper side of the road. Then Grandma briskly pulled her small shoulders away from the wall. She raised her right hand, in which she again held her cane, and waved at us. Until then, I had thought that both Grandma and Eeyore had been looking in silence at the forest, the sunlight and its reflections on the red-orange foliage of the persimmon trees. But evidently Grandma had, all the while, been very patiently conversing with Eeyore. Half tripping, we ran to her, and heard her voice emphatically ring out.

“The title of ‘Sutego’ in full,” she called out, “is ‘Rescuing a Sutego. Eeyore-san and his co-workers at the welfare workshop clean the park every Tuesday, don't they? He's told me that some of his co-workers once found an abandoned baby there and saved it. Eeyore-san has set his heart: on saving such a baby if ever he finds one while he's on duty. That's what he had on his mind while composing his music, and that's why the piece was titled ‘Rescuing a Sutego.’”

“Ah, so that's what it was, Eeyore!” I exclaimed. “Yes, I remember that occasion, when they saved a baby while park cleaning. I should have remembered it as soon as I heard the title … but it was so long ago. So that's what it was all about, Eeyore. So it's all right for the melody to be sad. Alter all, it's about rescuing a
sutego
!” I said, savoring a sensation of quiet happiness.

“Oh, so that's what it was!” Aunt Fusa repeated. Her way of understanding the situation was the same as mine, but in her own characteristic manner, she crowned this understanding with a conclusion. “If we think of all the people on this planet as being abandoned children, then Eeyore's composition expresses something very grand in scale!”

the guide (
stalker
)

I
saw Tarkovsky's
Stalker
, a movie my younger brother O-chan videotaped for me from a late-night TV broadcast. Eevore, for a change, watched it with me all the way to the end because its music was interesting. It was a kind my ears weren't used to hearing, though, and to me it sounded Indian. As the movie neared the end, there was a scene in which a mysterious child used the power of her eyes to move three glasses of different sizes. You could also hear the rumble of a train and see the effects of its tremor. While the screen still showed the child's face, Eeyore, who was lying at my feet, flat on the carpet, as usual, raised his body and heaved a sighlike “Hoh!?” In the earlier half of the scene, a dog had become frightened when it sensed the eerie strength—let me call it this for the moment—of the child's eyes, and perhaps Eeyore had reacted to its whining, for more than anything he hates dogs that yelp. Soon after this, when the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven's Ninth resounded from the sound track, Eeyore
straightened his back and began conducting it, in all seriousness, and with great vigor too.

The film was a good three hours long, and it left me exhausted, so preparation for dinner turned out to be simpler than what I had planned. O-chan and I sat at the table, where the dining itself was over very quickly, and talked about the movie, with my role in the discussion being basically that of a listener. The night before, despite his preparations for college entrance exams, O-chan had gone downstairs now and then until the movie was over, to check if the videotaping was going all right. And every time he did so, he spared some time to watch parts of it. He couldn't do much about the commercials, but figuring I wouldn't like it, he did erase the commentary—”It ran a good five minutes”—by the somewhat heavy, energetic movie critic I had once seen costumed as an American police officer in a weekly magazine photograph. In a way, though, I would have liked to listen to what a person of his kind had to say, comments by someone who appears to have very little to do with the general atmosphere of
Stalker.

To summarize, I believe this is what O-chan said at dinner. I can't in all places reproduce his exact words because I often became distracted, when my thoughts wandered to other things. In any case, this is how he began. “I hardly ever watch movies, and I wasn't watching
Stalker
very closely either, but it set me thinking about something. … What did you think of it, Ma-chan?”

“I don't think I have what it takes to make an overall comment,” I replied. “But in the grassland scene, for example, you have these people huddled together? With a host of other props placed unobtrusively at some distance from them? And this scene goes on and on. With scenes like this, I feel like I'm looking at a stage performance where you can watch each actor or
actress any way you like. These scenes are good for people like me who don't think very quickly.”

O-chan
sort of
—to use his pet expression—lent a thoughtful ear to what I said, and then he made this comment: “It seems to me Tarkovsky portrayed a village that had instantly perished when a huge meteor or something fell on it. You could even see it as a village like Chernobyl after a nuclear reactor accident. Of course, with all its radioactivity, you'd be in a sorry plight if somebody took you there now, but I liked the way the guide led his clients, how he zigzagged forward, while hurling into the fields ahead those nuts with the ribbons tied to them. It brought back fond memories of the exploration game we played in Kita-Karuizawa when we were kids, when we followed our own rules, never doubting them, always believing them to be serious promises. Come to think of it, I've gotten old. …

“And I also liked the scene where the guide, who is physically and mentally much stronger than the professor and writer he escorts to the Zone, becomes the most exhausted, and a number of times he falls flat on the bare ground and lies there gasping in agony. It reminded me of the orienteering meets I took part in when I was in high school. While running around, I'd slip on some grass and fall, and as though it'd been my good fortune to be there, I'd lie there and exaggerate my fatigue, while clinging, as it were, to the bare ground. I'd be doing this for myself, while nobody was watching, and I would feel I was gelling a better grasp of how the earth and I related to each other, and even of my own material body.

“I can't comment on the movie with the kind of formula where one says, ‘On the whole, isn't Tarkovsky trying to say something like this?’ This, however, is
sort of
what I thought. The ‘end of the world’ will come. It won't come today or tomorrow.
Most likely, it won't come in our time. But it will come creeping along, slowly, as if it didn't want to. And we'll go on living, as if we didn't want to, because all we can do is wait in fearful uncertainly. Now if things were really like this, wouldn't it be natural for us to want to snatch a preview of this ‘end of the world’ that's so slow in coining? This, after all, is
sort of
what I think the job of an artist is.”

Though I thought that my younger brother was truly smarter than me, I sometimes found myself listening only vacantly, for one of the earlier scenes, the one showing the guide's wife in agony, kept running through my mind. The scene had stunned me, for although the guide's wife appeared to be a married woman suffering pangs of lust, as in those “adult movies” you inadvertently see previewed in theaters, she was actually suffering from
matters of the soul.
After all, when the prideful O-chan slips and falls on the grass in his orienteering meets, it's not just physical fatigue that causes him to hug the bare ground, is it?

The guide's wife is a beautiful woman who conceals a dark passion within. Her whole figure, too, is beautiful when, for instance, she endures her suffering by falling and writhing on the floor, as if she were having a fit. Allow O-chan to analyze my unwitting association of this woman with an “adult movie” actress, and he would probably say it's because she possesses a breathtaking carnal beauty. Though I couldn't imagine myself ever having such a beautiful body, I was, in fact, filled more with respect, for her than with envy. Moreover, the words this beautiful woman spoke so despairingly to her husband, who had but to herd his charges to a dangerous Zone, captivated me. “Our marriage was a mistake.” she says, “and that's why an ‘accursed child’ was born to us.”

The guide, who has managed to return from the Zone safely, and is exhausted, is also in despair, for he has learned that his
clients hadn't wished for their souls' happiness, which was to be given them in the Room in the center of the Zone. All in all, he's a serious man—serious to the point of being almost pitiful—who believes the “zone” could put degenerate mortals back on their feet. After the guide's wife takes him to bed and lulls him to sleep, she suddenly turns to look straight at us, as though replying to the camera in an interview, and starts telling us her innermost thoughts. Whether or not this is a common technique employed in movies of this kind, I don't know. Even though my mother's father was a movie director, and my uncle is one now, like O-chan I have seen only a few movies. Anyway, I really liked this scene a lot. The woman recalls that, as a young man, her husband had been the laughingstock of the town. He had been called a slowpoke and a ne'er-do-well, and at the time of her marriage, her mother had objected that, since the guide was accursed, no child they had could be normal. The woman says she chose to marry the man despite all this, because she preferred a hard life with its few happy moments over a monotonous one. She confesses she may have started thinking this way after the fact, and had glossed things over, but in any event she says she presumes this is what led her to marry him. Here I wanted to cry out, “No, lady! You haven't glossed over things! You've always thought this way! And I believe your way of thinking is correct!”