David's Reviews > A Quiet Life

I was a little disappointed. "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away" was a 1972 rewrite of 1969's "Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness", and here we have "A Quiet Life", 1990's rewrite of 1983's "Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!"

I preferred the original. "A Quiet Life" is not narrated by a fictional Kenzaburo Oe but by a fictional Kenzaburo Oe's daughter. The fictional Kenzaburo Oe is enduring a "pinch" and has left for California. His wife, feeling that she must, has gone with him. Ma-chan has been left in charge of the brothers.

Now, for veracity, I don't think Kenzaburo Oe lets his fictional daughter be as profound or as interesting as the fictional Kenzaburo Oe we met in "Rouse Up ...". Which is a shame. A good example of this is the treatment of the erections Eeyore springs when his nappy is changed at night. This experience disturbs "Rouse Up ...'s" fictional Kenzaburo Oe. He then dreams that a sexual Eeyore appears as the monster from William Blake's "The Ghost of a Flea", confronting his father in the family kitchen with a post-ejaculation hard-on. From this experience, fictional Kenzaburo Oe thinks about his son's dreams, whether he can dream, and if he can't, how he, as his father, could try to ensure that his boy's first dream would be a good one. Interesting stuff, huh?

But in "A Quiet Life", where Ma-chan changes the diapers and discovers the hard-ons, we learn that she copes quite well. She's a quiet person, struggling on. And then the boy seems to stop having erections anyway.

Wasn't it more fun with William Blake and scary dreams?

"A Quiet Life's" Ma-chan does have some interests that influence the way she thinks about their life. The Russian arthouse sci-fi "Stalker" (which is based on Roadside Picnic) and the work of Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Ma-chan remembers meeting Kurt Vonnegut, whose foreword appears in some editions of Journey to the End of the Night).

But with all of the William Blake in the earlier version and with Kenzaburo allowing himself to go nuts, I found "Rouse Up..." more enjoyable and touching.

Also ... I'm not convinced that in any universe the people who know Kenzaburo Oe talk about him as much as they do in this book. He or Eeyore were all anyone ever spoke about. It was good that lots of the characters were saying "Fictional Kenzaburo Oe really needs to man-up and stop abandoning his family." But it would also have been nice if someone had said "Can we have ten minutes where no one talks about fictional Kenzaburo Oe, please?"

The swimming pool: the fit young men in "Rouse Up ..." were from Yukio Mishima's Tatenokai. In "A Quiet Life", a fit young man at the swimming pool, aspects of whose life (something about a love murder on a cruiseship?) fictional Kenzaburo Oe has included in an earlier novel, tries to attack Ma-chan! Is there a crossover? I wish someone would write an English language biography of Kenzaburo Oe!

Some music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4e3pI...