Read Online A Quiet Life by Kenzaburō Ōe - Free Book Online Page B

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, Ithink, 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!”
    Mr. Shigeto reread the part Eeyore had pointed at, likewise the parts that preceded and followed it, with an expression that was not that of a specialist on Eastern European literature, as when he turns his face to me, but one more typical of a musician. All the while, it seemed as though the common language of music was shuttling between Mr. Shigeto's head and Eeyore's, as Eeyore eagerly waited. The moment Mr. Shigeto acknowledged the validity of the changes Eeyore had made, Eeyore's face fully blossomed into a bright smile. And with the eraser and pencil he had brought in his pocket, he started erasing and rewriting some of the notes on the cleancopy he had given to