Free A Quiet Life by Kenzaburō Ōe Page B

guessing as much,” she said. “Grandma feels the same way, and she understands these things.”
    “It seems that Father told Mother about Great-uncle's toe. He was always thinking of Great-uncle. He felt indebted to him for putting him through college, while Great-uncle himself lived in the forest doing the manual labor that had cost him his toe. The lost toe was a great shock to Father.”
    “I feel so sorry for K-chan and Big Brother.” Aunt Fusa said, her voice sounding angry. When she started talking of how Great-uncle had breathed his last, Eeyore restlessly moved his upper body, secured with the belt of the passenger seat, and clasped his hands in prayer. This startled Aunt Fusa.
    “Eeyore does that, and bows in deference, whenever he sees a familiar name in the obituaries,” I explained. “When a musician or a sumo stable master dies, for instance.” To this Eeyore firmly nodded.
    “…Oh? You've returned to calling him Eeyore again, Ma-chan. Grandma just loves that name. How nice. She'll be relieved to know she can freely call him Eeyore again.”
    Indeed, in our family, the vicissitudes the name Eeyore has undergone is a story in itself. After enrolling in the secondary division of the special school for the handicapped, Eeyore came home one day after a week of dorm life and training, and when Father called him Eeyore, his usual nickname, he didn't answer. This threw Father into such a dither that we dared notutter a word. After a while, O-chan, who sensed Eeyore's aspiration for independence, discovered that he wished us to use his real name. So we all started calling him Hikari-san, and Grandma followed suit, in her letters and on the phone. But in time we started calling him Eeyore again, and he appears to suffer no discomfort over this. There was a time when Mother became concerned about this, more than ever before, and worried if his frequent fits of epilepsy weren't causing him mental regression. For one fit of epilepsy, she said, is believed to destroy on the order of several hundred thousand brain cells. …
    Without touching on the part about the effect of epileptic fits on brain cells, for Eeyore was in the front seat listening, I briefed Aunt Fusa on what had made us stop calling him Eeyore for a while, and how we came to use this name again. Aunt Fusa, apparently immersed in quiet thought, said: “I think Eeyore's desire for independence was most prominent when he was in secondary school. Because Shu was the same. But both now possess a most admirable calmness that goes with their age.”
    It struck me that Aunt Fusa had been very rapidly working her head over all manner of things, even the mental regression that Mother worried about, and that she was also encouraging me. However, she fell silent immediately after she said this, and didn't say anything for quite some time, apparently a character trait she shared with Father.
    We drove through a tunnel that had been bored near the top of a big pass, and wound down a tortuous drive into a resplendent ravine matted with the golden and crimson foliage of autumn. When we came out on the flat, wide topography that formed the basin of a town, Aunt Fusa explained that the place had served as a distribution base for all outgoing produce and products from the entire region, and also for the culture that came into the area. We drove on farther, along asparkling shallow river and into the forest where only a few houses lined the narrow road. And in the distance, on the slope on the other side of the river, we saw the few large and small houses of the village where Father was raised.
    In front of Father's childhood home were rows of leafy hamboo trees, floral wreaths to be used at the funeral ceremony, and equipment for votive lanterns. The sight of men in black suits that didn't seem to fit their bodies, busily going about their work, was imposing. Aunt Fusa told Shu-chan to pass them. Sensitive to anything that has to do with death, Feyore very