A Quiet Life

My introduction to Kenzaburō Ōe, and it is a mighty one. It begins so slowly, okay, so quietly, and then mounts and mounts in layered complexity as almost clinically it focuses on one and then another character in a very small social grouping comprising a family (K-san the father who is a novelist, the mother, the brain-damaged older son Eeyore, the daughter, and the younger son); their friends, the Shigetos; and the members of the local swim club. The parents' departure for America, ostensibly for the father to take up a writing residency but really for him to deal with his depression, provides the pretext for Ma-chan the daughter's keeping of a diary, which will inform the parents of all that is happening back home. The diary-as-home will eventually become the novel A Quiet Life. Ma-chan appears at first quite simple; she elicits sympathy for her horror at remaining single and unloved because she will have to look after her disabled brother after her parents die. Even at the beginning of the novel, however, we glimpse an admirable knot of stubbornness in her, vocalized internally as Hell, no! Hell, no! Who saves whom and who destroys whom, who is the Christ and who the Anti-Christ, remain open questions until the very end when the very attractive local competitive swimmer Mr. Arai turns up, with his "armor of muscles." The ethical challenge posed by the novel, however, is not so crude. Articulated by the wonderful Mrs Shigeto, the question is whether we can think of ourselves as nobodies and still act for good. Or inversely, to act for good and still think of ourselves as nobodies.

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