A Quiet Life (7 page)

With meat-colored streaks of rage remaining on his cheeks and neck, Mr. Shigeto let his head fall and sat at the table, in his usual chair. I helped Mrs. Shigeto carry the black tea and cookies she had made, following her instructions, which she gave with a dignity I hadn't noticed in her until then. Nevertheless, she too appeared to be grieving over “Sutego,” Eeyore's composition. We had our tea, which normally Mrs. Shigeto serves me and Eeyore when his lesson is over, in dejection, huddled together as though the three of us were abandoned
children, and wailed in this state until Eeyore came out after playing his newly completed piece to his heart's content.

After a while, because of his strong sense of responsibility, Mr. Shigeto took it upon himself to explain the backdrop of his emotional reaction. He elaborated on what he thought of Father and Mother leaving for California, and on the situation of their having done nothing—whatever their intentions might have been—about Eeyore feeling so forsaken that an expression such as “abandoned child' would enter his mind. I think he wanted to fill me in on things I didn't know very much about: his long friendship with, and personal understanding of, Father.

“…It's from K himself that I First learned of this ‘pinch’ he's in. He never said anything more about it, though, and later I heard the details from Oyu-san. Its direct cause, she said, was probably that the novel he was writing wasn't going well, which means that the matter lie's been contemplating as the core of his recent theme has entered a difficult stage. If the problem could see a solution in the form of a novel, K would be able to maintain a little distance from the problem itself, and then be able to cope with it. K's a writer who's shaped his life this way. Now, for someone like me, who can only brood when encumbered with a problem, the lengths to which K endeavors to invent a writer's lifestyle sometimes bore me, frankly.

“But looking at it the other way around, having trouble with a novel means to K that a certain period of his life—the whole time he spends structuring, writing, and then rewriting a novel—has come to a full stop. Perhaps it'll remain at a full stop, and he'll be deadlocked forever. K's the type who can't put aside a work he's having trouble writing. That's the way he writes. … But I understand the immediate cause of his ‘pinch’ this time was the lecture he gave, “The Prayers of a Faithless Man.” So behind all this, in a way, is a hilariousness that's typical of K.

“I don't think the lecture was scheduled to be televised,” I said. “An upperclassman in the French literature department when Father was going to college asked him to lecture at a women's university, and it just so happens that another former classmate of his, in the same department for that matter, videotaped it, and this got broadcast.” Depressed as she was, Mrs. Shigeto faintly smiled when I said this. She probably thought that I had been trying to be fair to Father.

“Yes,” Mr. Shigeto said, “and the fact that he hadn't intended it to be on TV was all the more reason he talked so candidly, and so all the deeper the dilemma he's fallen into.

“I watched the program, too. In it, he said that in his life with Eeyore, he had experienced moments in which, even for a faithless man like himself, he felt in his heart a movement, for which the only description was ‘prayer.’ In line with this, he talked of his own childhood. Now if everything he said in that lecture is true, then K's lived all his life—from about the time he was eleven or twelve—in fear of those who profess faith.”

“Father puts his spirit of service to work and tries to make his lectures interesting, but I don't think he says anything untrue when he talks on important matters. Grandma in Shikoku, too, said it was after the wheat-flour incident that he started suffering from insomnia, and this was the onset of the insomnia that has since then frequently revisited him. Something Grandma told me, but which Father didn't broach in the lecture, occurred about the time he learned there was a Christian church in Matsuyama. I understand it was very mystifying, the way he became obsessed with the church. The clan is deeply connected with Buddhism, and it even has its own temple. But Grandma feared he would go to the Christian church by himself, and so she didn't give him any money to make such a visit possible. Then early one morning he left the
house without telling anybody. He walked the long trail through the mountains, and at night, when he reached some place near the city, a policeman stopped him. After this, he stopped talking about
matters of the soul
, as though nothing had ever happened. I hear he's even talked about what happened as though it were something to laugh about, telling people that when the policeman stopped him, he, the child that he was then, pleaded with the officer, as a last resort, to call up the church for him, and that when the policeman did call, whoever answered the phone told him the boy should be sent straight back home, which put a total damper on his spirits.”

“The nuance of the story I heard from K is a little different,” Mr. Shigeto said. “He told me that the portals of churches even in rural Japan were like the gates of impenetrable castles, and the matter-of-fact way he had been denied admittance had come as a relief to him. He said it had assured him that in church there were men who dedicated their entire body and sold to their faith, and that these men were piously engaged in
matters of the soul
. He realized then that it was only natural for them to refuse him, for he was not yet able to abandon everything in order to devote himself to
matters of the soul
. And he was relieved. Evidently, ever since he had furtively read a magazine article on St. Francis of Assisi, at the water mill he spoke of in the lecture, the one deep in the forest where he said the family had their wheat ground, he got to believing that, in order to dedicate himself to
matters of the soul
, he needed to first abandon everything and experience religion. You know, don't you, that St. Francis himself founded three separate levels of monastic orders? But K was only a child then, and he got to thinking that, unless he completely gave up all worldly attachments, he couldn't do anything regarding
matters of the soul
. … He sometimes blurted out that
everything you did would be flagrant hypocrisy—
mauvaise foi,
he said, as the French students back in our college days used to put it—if you tried to do anything concerning
matters of the soul
without having discarded all attachments to the mundane world, all earthly desires.

“Simplifying things, you could say that K's just added on years of survival without changing a bit, and after reaching his fifties he inadvertently ended up speaking his indiscreet thoughts on
matters of the soul.
So actually, some people with faith quite bluntly told him that they would sanction his faith at face value, no matter how hypocritical it was. Didn't this cause him to lose his cool? K knew he wasn't anywhere near
matters of the soul.
So he reflected upon himself and realized that, so long as Eeyore was by his side, he had a loophole through which he could easily get away with his hypocrisy—which may be exactly what he feared. And perhaps this is why he left for California, to detach himself from Eeyore: reason enough to leave Eeyore behind, however heartrending it would be for them both: and sufficient reason, at the same time, for Eeyore to feel abandoned.”

“Eeyore has a mysteriously sensitive side to him, so that may be how he's perceived it. And perhaps because he couldn't express it in words, he let his music say it.”

“Not perhaps, but undoubtedly. He's even put it very clearly in words: ‘Sutego.’ You can't pretend that you didn't see it, or that you didn't hear it.”

“What exactly do you think Father's ‘pinch’ entails? From what you told me now, I wonder if he's going to end up…”

“Hanging from a branch of California live oak, one just right for hanging—spurred to the act by taking things too seriously, and everything compounded by the depression of encroaching old age … isn't this what Oyu-san is fearing?”

“Mr. Shigeto, I can understand you being upset out of worry for K-chan, and because of Eeyore's music,” his wife said in
admonition, imparting an even stronger expression around her eyes, which, instead of a smile, were lined with severe wrinkles. “But you're only intimidating Ma-chan with the things you're saying. If K-chan's in a ‘pinch,’ what you ought to do is explain to her how you think he could get back on his feet. Ranting like that won't get anybody anywhere. If you know K-chan so well that you can say he might hang himself and all that … you could do better by saying, for example, that he could use this opportunity to take up religion….”

“I can't know about other people, really,” Mr. Shigeto retorted. “The same obviously goes for my understanding of K,” he parroted, while repeatedly blinking, and turning red with a flush that was different from before. “… Speaking of faith,” he continued, “I think it would be harder for K to embrace a faith than to hang himself. For all these years, he's done his best to distance himself, as though with out-thrust arms, from people who have faith.

“I know he'd be offended if he heard me say he'd done his best. I think the question for him is, how is a faithless person to cope with life, staying on this side of the fence? This is where he believes he can find something upon which to establish a literary career. You know, don't you, how often he talks of Yeats? This goes way back, to when he was very young. You hear him mumbling this to himself from time to time, don't you? ‘The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work, / And if it take the second must refuse / A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.’
Raging in the dark:
that's what it is. But right after he entered the French department in Hongo, he got hung up on the heavenly mansion; he got the Christian paradise into his head, and so fervently sought for his place there that he even volunteered to do menial chores at a monastery. As I've said a number of times, his
paradigm of faith is built upon his childhood experience of having imagined St. Francis of Assisi bidding him to devote himself to
matters of the soul.
This means that, unless he abandons everything, and possibly enters a monastery—one that's not too highly institutionalized—he'll never be able to arrive at a faith that gives him true peace of mind. But what he'll have to do then, more than anything else, is to abandon Eeyore! Eeyore's correct in sensing the anxieties of an abandoned child.”

“Come, come, Mr. Shigeto. Ma-chan's already nonplussed, and she's all but crying. Is this what gives you pleasure? Making a poor, helpless girl like her cry?”

A redder flush appeared around Mr. Shigeto's blinking eyes and on the tip of his nose, which made him resemble a liquor-loving tailor or cobbler in a European fable—which, in fact, is what I thought about to stifle rny tears.

“K is basically of a halfway character. The trouble is, on the more conscious level, he can't stand halfwayness. That's the kind of odd guy he is. By this I mean … he believes that he could never enter into a faith only halfway. But being halfway about it, he can't keep from contemplating what it means to pray. Worse yet, he's unscrupulous in talking about it. So in the end this ‘pinch’ of his is something he himself invited.

“Oyu-san told me that soon after the lecture was televised, K quite unexpectedly received a letter from a Catholic priest he'd held in high esteem. Coming from such a person, it must have been a very serious letter. The priest wrote that he deemed K already a member of the flock. This was a powerful punch for him. K had believed that he'd always been writing from the side of a man without faith, as though thrusting his arms toward the territory of people with faith. But if he'd already unwittingly crossed over to their side, as the priest wrote …
Don't you find this a fearful but intriguing summons? The problem, though, is that K himself is blind to the whereabouts of true faith. It's pathetic.”

“Really, faith is something Father never talks to me about. He's never said anything to me about the church my university is affiliated with, neither in jest nor as a topic of serious discussion. He once attended a service at the cathedral there when an old friend of his, a literary critic, passed away, but he didn't say anything about the funeral mass when he came home. All he did was read, for several days, the many books he had bought at the bookstore next to the church.”

“Mr. Shigeto,” his wife put in, “is faith in general really important to K-chan? I never thought it mattered to him all that much. Compared with K-chan, I've always thought that you were in every way poorer at heart.”

‘Preposterous!” exclaimed Mr. Shigeto. as if to dispel his bewilderment. “But that reminds me of when we were at college. A class had been canceled, so to kill time, we sat by the water fountain in front of the dorm, and chatted as we gnawed at a dry loaf of bread. All of a sudden K blurted out that salvation or damnation of the soul was immaterial to him, that all that mattered to him was whether or not there was life after death. He said he didn't care if he went to heaven or hell, because neither could be more fearful than absolute nothingness; salvation and damnation were one and the same if the only thing out there was total nothingness. It was infantile logic, but it made sense. Anyway, in those days, this was what K kept thinking about.

“But then H, you remember him, don't you, Ma-chan, the guy who became editor after graduation but died of leukemia? H, the level-headed cosmopolitan, needled your father, saying, ‘You've got it all wrong, K. What lies beyond us is not, I
think, a choice of one or the other. Rather it's been arranged for us to choose one of three. Heaven and purgatory can be lumped together as one. Then you have hell. And the third choice is absolute nothingness. Now should you go to the third place—absolute nothingness—over heaven or hell, which fortunately already exist—well, then, you end up at a place that's tantamount to your not being born. This, too, should appall you.’ When K heard this, he became so disheartened that I couldn't bear to look at him….”

Then Eeyore came walking along the hallway from the music room. A somewhat unusual nervousness seemed to tighten his large-featured face. He showed Mr. Shigeto the sheet music he had brought with him, the whole page of which was full of erased and repenciled notes, and he waited for Mr. Shigeto's reaction, which is to say that he ignored both Mrs. Shigeto and me, even though I had primly greeted him. Taking a relaxed breath, the “Sutego” composer pointed to the array of notes—long, thin ones which Father says look like bean sprouts—toward the bottom of the page, and emphatically said, “This part wasn't very good. But I've already corrected it!”