Read A Quiet Life for Free Online

now should show this, but it seems my character naturally leaves me empathizing with Mother, while I always feel remote about Father. I think I can trace this sentiment back to my childhood, when I saw him always preoccupied with Eeyore and felt that he wasn't really interested in either me or O-chan. Yet fairly recently, Father and I have had several opportunities to talk at some length, and this time, as far as his stay in Californiagoes, he writes to me quite copiously. Still, I often find his letters sitting there unopened on the dining table where I put them. Mother's letters, though. I can hardly wait to open, and I read them with delight.
    From Mother's letters, I feel that, she's been trying to convey to me more about Father's “pinches” than she did when they were here. “When I thought about it,” she wrote in one of them, “I had to admit that Papa's depression—I use this word although I don't like it—started with the sewer-cleaning incident. Don't you, Ma-chan, feel the same way?”
    The sewer-cleaning incident. I remember very well, occurred in February this year. The drainpipe connected to our kitchen sink gets clogged up once or twice during the winter. When this happens, Father promptly goes to work with a gadget consisting of some metal bars covered with synthetic resin, which used to be part of the fence around our flower bed and were now connected together with hemp twine—a tool he had made himself. Some fatty substance and mud hardens in the drainpipe, and encrusts it like some kind of brown mortar. Father wields this untrustworthy gadget of his, which looks unreliable even to the casual eye, and goes at it with dogged resolve, until he finally succeeds in opening up a channel for the water to flow. This done, he thoroughly scours the entire pipe to allow the sewage to run more smoothly. When through, he washes his hands and feet well, yet the stench of the sewer is still on him when he starts reading a book on the sofa. And his entire prostrate body, like the sewer stench, clearly gives rise to a sense of satisfaction, however small. …
    Father has the habit of obsessing over things like this, and he never misses an opportunity for an experiment. When he passes a drugstore and sees an ad or something for a can of drainpipe-cleaning chemicals, he jumps at it. One morning,seeing the breathtaking results of the chemicals he had poured into the pipe the night before,, he was beside himself with happiness. All of us had to go out and see the wonder before going to school or the welfare workshop. This was actually the genesis of the sewer-cleaning incident. Above the pipe that runs from the kitchen sink to the back of the house, then along its course all the way to the main sewer system, is a sequence of metal drain covers marked 1, 2, 3 … n. And what needs cleaning is the whole length of the pipe between lids 1 and 2, 2 and 3, and so forth. On the day the chemicals finally succeeded in loosening up the sewage, the mortarlike globs that the powerful acids had washed out had accumulated under every cover. Father kept furiously ladling out the globs, like an excited farmer reaping his bountiful harvest.
    Though Father was very elated at this stage, he appeared to already have sensed an ominous, obscure anxiety, for he had correctly suspected that more globs had been washed away into the long pipe that led to the main system, beyond the last cover, as he then thought it, within our lot. … Our fears turned into reality, and the next day water from the sewer gushed out from that very cover. Father's tool no longer served its purpose, and a team of sewer specialists had to come in with a lot of heavy-duty equipment.
    The sewer servicemen seemed to have formidable trouble, too. But soon, beneath the dirt, Father found one more cover beyond the one he had thought was the last of the series. Under this cover was a sievelike device that prevented all solid waste from entering the long pipe. This screen