Free A Quiet Life by Kenzaburō Ōe Page A

counter, I saw Aunt Fusa—she looked like she had added on a few years—waving at us from beyond the glass partition. Beside her stood a giant of a man, who looked like a fresh sumo recruit. I assumed he must have been Shu-chan, who had visited us once, when he came to Tokyo on his high school excursion. When our baggage came out on the conveyor belt, Eeyore, like another sumo wrestler, vigorously lifted it, taking one deep breath and exclaiming “Yoishoh!” and then carried it for me. Aunt Fusa, who had circled around to the exit and greeted us there, looked sad and serious with the shadow of Great-uncle's death on her face, but the lines around her pale eyes were those of a smile. After obligingly taking the suitcase from Eeyore, the big man, who indeed was Shu-chan, started walking ahead of us to the parking lot. He made the suitcase look like a toy box, carrying it with his arms thrust out at an angle that maintained space between his torso and the case.
    “He teaches at a middle school,” Aunt Fusa said, as she walked along next to Eeyore and me, exiting the building into the truly dazzling light, “but he's become much more sober, to the point that he's even stifling.” The way she quietly said this suggested to me the presence of a nostalgic levity beneath the level to which her feelings had sunk.
    “Oh,” I replied, politely.
    I was in middle school when Shu-chan came to Tokyo on his high school excursion, and in those days, I understood sober to be a generic term referring to suave-looking youngsters. SoI said to Mother, “If anybody is sober, it's Shu-chan!” Father heard me and got a big kick out. of it, in the inconsiderate manner so typical of him, and called Aunt Fusa to tell her what I had said. This was what had transpired in connection with sober.
    Once out of the city area, the well-paved but upward-climbing road continued, on and on. It appeared to wedge its way into a chain of mountains, and the autumn-tinted, broad-leaved trees on the slopes beyond the now-parched rice paddies, and even the forests of cedar and cypress higher above them, glowed calm and bright in the noonday sun. It was through such rural, festive scenery that we sped on, in a small two-door car, with Shu-chan and Eeyore in front, their seatbelts tightly fastened, and Aunt Fusa and me in the back. Treating me the way she would a full-fledged adult, Aunt Fusa told me about how Great-uncle had taken ill, about the pain he had suffered and his last moments. Hefty as both of them are, Shu-chan and Eeyore together looked like a towering wall before us, yet they, too, lent a polite and reverential ear.
    What I found most impressive with what Aunt Fusa told me, of course, was the part that pertained to Father. And I feel that. Aunt Fusa herself spoke to me especially from that angle. She said that by the time Father had gone to see Great-uncle in the hospital, on the pretext that he was making a courtesy call before leaving for California, Great-uncle had already been taking morphine shots, which made him delirious and drowsy even during the day. Father entered Great-uncle's sickroom, but because all he did was sit deep in the low sofa beside the bed in utter dejection, Aunt Fusa said to Great-uncle, “K-chan's come to see you,” to which Great-uncle's knee, the one he had drawn up under the blanket, quivered as if in frightful surprise.
    Later, according to Aunt Fusa, Great-uncle let his bare toes touch the floor, saying that his leg was heavy, which in turnmade Father's whole body quiver, for he saw when the middle toe should have been on Great-uncle's right foot. Didn't K-chan, who is always shocked when he sees such mutilation of a family member's body, feel rankly enervated just thinking of Big Brother suffering the last stages of terminal cancer and dying? And so did he not, after learning from the doctor about how long Big Brother had left to live, choose to turn tail and fly to California? “… I'm not the only one