In a piece of remarkable serendipity, I happened upon A Quiet Life at Powell's just after reading Claire's post about the authors she planned to read for the Japanese Literature Challenge. Knowing the lady has taste, I picked it up and started reading. I got through the first chapter in the store, bought it, came home and devoured the rest of it over the course of three days, letting it eclipse any other reading I might have been doing. I've been reading a lot of the bizarre and macabre lately, and the understated, minimally-drawn yet intimate realism of A Quiet Life felt like exactly the contrast I needed at this moment in time. It's always such a gift to happen upon something so precisely calculated to resonate with my mood at a particular juncture, and when it happens I always try to welcome it with open arms. Two things really made this book for me: the quality of the writing, and my warm liking for the main character, Ma-chan. The plot, which is apparently an artful mixture of fiction and autobiography, concerns the three adult children of a famous Japanese author, K, who retreats to a temporary post at UC-Berkeley to deal with one of his recurring existential crises (which he calls "pinches.") His wife accompanies him, leaving the three kids, the eldest of whom (Eeyore) is brain-damaged, to fend for themselves. They are all making their ways through that liminal space between adolescence and adulthood, and the quietly-narrated events of the year or so in which they live alone in their parents' house serve to deliver them a bit closer to realizing who they are as human beings. I've seen several reviews that claim this book is essentially written from Oe's (or K's) own perspective, and only "ostensibly" narrated by his daughter, Ma-chan, who is used as something like a smokescreen. I didn't find this to be the case at all. Ma-chan, for me, is vividly her own person, and I feel a great deal of wamth and tenderness toward her. It's been a while since I've read a book whose main character I flat-out liked as much as I like Ma-chan. She's struggling with all the universal difficulties of being 20 and figuring out what kind of adult she's going to be, and, as a young Japanese woman, she's been socialized in the importance of filial piety, respect for her elders, and some degree of submissiveness. These things are genuinely important to her; she's no cultural revolutionary. At the same time, there is a core of confidence and vehemence to her that coexists with her diffidence. She is honest with herself about her growing consciousness of faults in her parents, particularly her father, and of the feelings those faults arouse in her. She sees herself as "a coward" in social situations, yet she finds the courage to do a wide variety of scary things - call attention to an assault on a young girl, care for her brother, write her college thesis on a writer everyone says she is too female and inexperienced to understand. When she encounters attitudes and actions that she doesn't like, she may not say anything out loud, but her inner refrain of "Hell no! Hell no!" articulates her strong selfhood. As a side-note: Ma-chan is writing her undergraduate thesis on Céline, who she was inspired to read after meeting Kurt Vonnegut (K.V. in the novel) and having him autograph a volume of Céline's work for which Vonnegut had written the introduction. Coincidentally, I also came to Céline's first through Vonnegut. I think this must be pretty common for American readers who read Céline at all - after all, Vonnegut is extremely popular, and praises the French writer in one of his most famous books, Cat's Cradle - but it was yet another endearing connection with Ma-chan. Above all, I love Ma-chan's thoughtful intelligence. Not only does she cultivate a loving and observant relationship with Eeyore, but she thinks deeply about the ways in which people interact with the mentally handicapped. She and her siblings (and their parents) live a rich life of the mind, conversing about films, novels, and philosophy in a way that is real and profound without ever seeming ostentatious. Despite the difficulties in Ma-chan's relationship with her father, I felt so tenderly toward them both for the way they respect each other's intelligence and do their best to help each other along their diverging paths.I don't have the ability to comment on French style, but with Céline, I get the impression that he writes in a way that, contrary to what I had imagined, presents a serious subject in a light and straightforward manner - and I like this. I had copied this passage on one of my cards a few days before, and was translating it far into the night, when I realized Father was standing beside me, having snuck up without my noticing - which is another reason this passage, in particular, remains in my heart. Father doesn't dare touch my letters, but he readily picks up the books I read, or the reference cards I make, and looks at them. He does this all the time, and it has irritated me since I was in kindergarten. And that night, while I was copying down some more passages from the book, he picked up a few of the cards and said, "Hmm ... 'the old have nothing more to hope for, these kids, all ...' How true." His voice was so unusually earnest and sad that I couldn't make a face at him for having read my cards without asking me.The next day, however, Father brought me volumes one and two of Céline's Novels, from the shelf of the Pléide editions he especially treasures...One of the things that struck me about A Quiet Life was how enigmatic the supposedly autobiographical character - the novelist/father K - is to all the other characters. Wherever Ma-chan and Eeyore go, people are speculating about the cause of K's "pinch." His old friend Mr. Shigeto thinks that K is having some kind of religious crisis - that his all-or-nothing "lack of faith" (K perceives a necessity for sacrificing all worldly entanglements in order to be a "person of faith," and he has chosen instead a family and material success), is throwing him into a metaphysical quandary. Ma-chan's aunt, with whom the main characters converse while attending K's brother's funeral, theorizes that K was frightened by the looming reality of his brother's death, and ran away to California in order to avoid dealing with end-of-life issues. Ma-chan herself wonders whether her parents have retreated to the United States in order to repair damage done to their relationship over the years - damage partly caused by K's attitude toward Eeyore. Ma-chan's mother suggests that K's "pinch" may be caused by his feelings of inferiority and failure as family patriarch, which were touched off when he was forced to call a professional plumber to sort out a sewage problem. In the midst of all this theorizing, K himself comes almost to resemble a blank canvas, onto whom each character projects their own interpretation of his actions. Even his name, K, while possibly short for "Kenzaburo," is also familiar to Kafka fans as the shorthand for "everyman." I wondered whether this blankness was a comment on the traditional, patriarchal family structure, in which the father is supposed to be removed and inscrutable, and is therefore left without any confidantes. It also occurred to me that the reduction of palpable selfhood in K, which allows all the other characters to project their own theories onto him, is a good approximation of severe depression, in which the sufferer often feels less and less "like himself" the longer the malady continues. Compared with this sliding into a lack of self, Ma-chan's refrain of "Hell no! Hell no!" seems even more remarkable, as does Mrs. Shigeto's insistence on standing up for the basic human dignity of oneself and all the other so-called "nobodies" with whom one lives:"Ma-chan," she said, "the little relief I find in what you told me, if I can call it that, is that you apologized for Eeyore before the girl called you dropouts and not afterwards. I wouldn't have gone so far as to slap her in the face, but if I'd been there, I would at least have made her take it back. I wish you had. It's very important for a human being to take such action."I strongly recommend this understated story of figuring out what actions are important for human beings to take. A big thanks to Claire for putting me on Oe's track; I anticipate enjoying more of his novels in the future.
Kenzaburo Oe’s literary universe is so close to his real life that the limits between both of them are not clearly recognizable. In “A quiet Life” the depiction of his family and especially his family matters is made through his “fictional” daughter, a very sensitive narrator and too mature a personality for a 20-year-old girl. Although the narrator is supposed to be Ma-chan, since most of the stories consist of discussions and opinions about the father, an implicit author Oe, as a reader you can never abandon yourself to the idea of a non-Oe Kenzaburo narrator. When I first read the summary of Oe’s works –family and a mentally-disable son- I was surprised that such limited theme could warrant someone a Nobel Prize. But after reading only one of his books, you get to find out that the family and the disable son are only the starting point of something more transcendental, i.e. philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary theory, politics, etc.I like the structure of this book. It consists of different chapters, each one a unity in itself but related to each other chronologically and thematically. All of them start with a reference to Eeyore, the son, and a problem or difficulty; for a while that character stops being the centre or “buffer of the family” –as it’s called by Kenzaburo-, and other characters, like Ma-chan herself, the youngest brother O-chan or the Shigeto’s get focused more clearly; but all chapters end up with a reference to Eeyore, as if trying to close the circle. The same way -thanks Massa for helping me realize this- on a higher level, the whole book also get its own closing when the end culminates Ma-chan’s initial statement that she would like to marry a man who can afford a two-bedroom apartment.This book is post-modern because: 1) there is a premeditate confusion between reality and fiction, 2) there are not absolute truths or simple explanations for the characters’ behaviour, and many opinions by that many characters, show the complexity of itself –the father’s “pinch” and its possible reasons is the best example and, I think, the heart of the book-, 3) it’s a pastiche of different documents and narratives: letters, diaries, literary and cinema criticism, political opinions…Something surprising for me is Oe’s depiction of his daughter’s attitude toward sex, especially regarding her brother’s. At the beginning it’s not completely verisimilar her apparent naiveness, although it could just be a credible negation of the facts by an inexperience young woman. Her behaviour at the end is connected with a Japanese tradition of teaching women submission and abnegation, plus her already commented wish at the beginning of the book.Punishment is another interesting topic to be considered in the book, with its different characteristic both in the Japanese and Western societies.Personally, I think Kenzaburo Oe is a great scholar, very well-read, connoisseur of the Western culture, and able of creating an artificial but elegant language when writing; although maybe he lacks the contact with the not-elitist world, the down-to-earth, Japanese salary-man OL society, which makes his works a little bit dull and his family attractively claustrophobic. Anyway, something of a not so high-brow culture in his books would also be appreciated.If you are into easy-reading best-sellers, don’t even open this book; but if you like scholarly written essays, psychoanalysis, philosophy and can appreciate the complexity of the structure in a post-modern book, go ahead: you will have fun.
What do You think about A Quiet Life (1997)?
Oe Kenzaburo is known for writing about family affairs with honesty, warmth, and compassion, and A Quiet Life is no different. He takes the most ordinary occurences and creats something original - something special. His portrait of family relationships is painstaking, as his writing reflects well-developed characters.Ma-chan, the daughter and her older brother are the central characters in this family story set in Tokyo. Ma-chan finds herself as the head of the household, when her parents move to America for her father's job. Her older brother is disabled, but possesses an exceptional gift of musical composition. She cares for him during their parents' absence, which sees her develop emotionally. She courageously accepts this responsibility, which is not an easy one. Over the course of days and weeks the two become closer as they learn and mature through their personal burdens and mutual dependence.This is an unique look into a Japanese nuclear family, where promise, anxiety, disappointment and joy are tasted and shared for an enriching reading experience.
—Gertrude & Victoria
"The ‘end of the world’ will come. It won’t come today or tomorrow. Most likely it won’t come in our time. But it will come creeping along, slowly, as if it didn’t want to. And we’ll go on living, as if we didn’t want to, because all we can do is wait in fearful uncertainty. Now if things were really like this, wouldn’t it be natural for us to want to snatch a preview of this ‘end of the world’ that’s so slow in coming? This, after all, is sort of what I think the job of an artist is.”“A Quiet Life” is a fictional autobiography of the time when Oe moved to United States for a sabbatical and left his family alone in Japan. Story narrated by Oe’s daughter who by chance became responsible for looking after his handicapped brother as well as her self. This book is the story of how lonely modern human is, free from all traditions and boundaries but without any alternative to fill the gaps in their lives. Having a handicapped kid had an undeniable effect on Oe’s life, books and his way of thinking. This book shows that how he was also occupied with worries about the future of social life in the modern era. So maybe the solution for this problem is what the two kids did to overcome their loneliness: amused themselves by film, literature, music and art. “Neither death nor suffering,” he had written, “could be as serious as I believe them to be. Both are very common, and I must be deranged to treat them as though they deserved my special attention. I must try to be saner.”
—Amir
I picked this up because I was looking through a used bookstore for a new Murakami, and when they didn't have any, this was both Japanese, and a Nobel Prize winning author. I was hoping that it, too, was magical realism. The fact that it wasn't was more of a disappointment than it should have been. Despite that, I enjoyed the book. It's slow, meandering to the point eventually. But that should be expected, given the title. I enjoyed the fact that each chapter had a theme, in a more pronounced way than usual, it seemed to me. Halfway through the book, I was beginning to think that there was no overarching plot, just a series of short stories about the same characters from the same time period. That turned out not to be true, but it worked well. There was an awful lot of... for lack of a better word, we'll call it ekphrasis. The characters spend a lot of time discussing various works of art, including Tarkovsky's film Stalker, a novel by Aitmatov and several classical composers. They're more often in the form of discussions about the meaning of such art, which sometimes comes to a conclusion and sometimes doesn't.One thing that really disconcerted me, though, was the ambiguity about just how (quasi-)autobiographical it was. The main character is a young-twenties girl, taking care of a younger brother and older, disabled brother while their parents were away because the father (only ever referred to as K) was invited to teach at an American college for a while. K, a famous novelist, often fictionalizes real-life events (which winds up being a crux for the novel), and is very proud of his disabled son, a composer. Kenzaburo Oe, the author, has three children, including one who's a composer, and he has taught for a while at Princeton. Not knowing anything more than that, I have absolutely no idea where his own life ends, and his fiction begins.
—Andrew
