A Quiet Place - Seicho Matsumoto (Spoilers)

 

The opening chapter of A Quiet Place describes a meal between businessmen and civil servants.  Geishas are present. Geisha (or geiko) are professional entertainers who attend guests during meals, banquets and other occasions. They are trained in various traditional Japanese arts, such as dance and music, as well as in the art of communication.  This odd mix of duty and indulgence defines the responsibility and entitlement of the Japanese male.  Words and gestures are circumscribed by careers and business. A Quiet Place centers on dedicated government bureaucrat Tsuneo Asai, a section chief in the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. It's told in the "eyes" of Tsuneo Asai. He is a company man working his way up the ladder. Rung by rung. Coming from humble background and being dedicated to his education and his passing the entrance to civil service has encompassed his entire life as the primary purpose. Always the primary core to his actions. He is in his mid-forties, and has been successful in his career, knowing how to kowtow to the fast-track superiors that come and go in the department, and with decent prospects for advancement -- at least as far as his background will allow within the limitations of the still extremely rigid Japanese system of the early 1970s. He knows his place, and the importance of appearances -- and he craves stability. The unexciting aura of the first chapters capture the personality and lifestyle of Asai, who is an unexciting man. When his first wife passed away when he was thirty-four he was married again within a year, to Eiko. The novel begins, however, with Eiko's death -- a hard blow for Asai, they were married for seven years now.  Asai was more or less satisfied with his marriage, convinced: "he and Eiko were perfectly in tune". Sure, they didn't have a very active sex life -- but Eiko didn't really seem to be into it, and given her health situation Asai was understanding, and sex wasn't such a big deal for Asai anyway .

Eiko had a heart attack. She had had one previously, so it isn't a complete surprise, but she generally took care not to overly exert herself and Asai does have questions. It takes him a while to really look into the circumstances, but he does find it hard to explain to himself what she was doing walking on a rather steep road far from home. Asai was away on a business trip when it happened, but when he returns home he discovers her body was found in a shady part of town – what was she doing so far away from their house? As he begins to investigate, he finds out his wife has been leading a secret double life. He believes his life to be a respectable, if rather ordinary one while his marriage is solid. The fact that his wife died in a disreputable part of town is almost incomprehensible to him.  Various factors play their part in what follows.  These include ignorance, fate, paranoia, ego, timidity, incompetence, self-destruction and irony. All these factors are affected by how the characters understand the boundaries in Japanese life and their obligations.  The extent to which each factor determines the outcome is not obvious. Asia's social standing is of primary importance to him as is his position at work. Nevertheless, slowly but surely, Asai finds himself in circumstances completely alien to him. He begins to lose control of the situation which leads to an inevitable but tragic conclusion.

Looking back, however, it's pretty clear he didn't really know his wife very well. He had his role -- his job, above everything -- and she her supporting one (though disappointingly she didn't socialize as helpfully as his colleagues' wives knew to); beyond that, he left her to her own devices, and didn't ask much about what she did or how she spent her time. Eiko was active in a haiku-writing club -- and apparently very talented -- The middle of the book has extremely intense and deductible sublime conclusions for some amusing parsing to a haiku. Haiku composed by his departed wife; haiku composition was her hobby. Asai looks into this a bit as he can't quite let go of wondering about why his wife died the way she did. There are several secluded hotels up the street from where she died, and Asai can't help but wonder whether she was on her way to one of them, for an illicit rendezvous. Could she have been having an affair ? When Tsuneo goes to apologize to the boutique owner for the trouble caused by his wife’s death he discovers the villa Tachibana near by, a house known to be a meeting place for secret lovers. As he digs deeper into his wife's recent past, he must eventually conclude that she led a double life...Asai can't keep himself from digging -- though for months he doesn't really get anywhere. But eventually the pieces fall into place, and Asai figures out exactly what happened. He enlists the services of a detective agency, and these provide some of the necessary background information, and suddenly it all makes sense.

Although we never encounter her in the present, the character of Asai’s deceased wife is a rich one—she was a seemingly humble, dispassionate woman who Asai realizes too late actually had strong desires and talents. She practiced the writing of haiku and, while Asai assumed this was just something for a housewife to engage in as a pastime, he learns after her death that she was a talented poet who was envied by other haiku artists who knew her work. People who knew her remark to Asai how beautiful and desirable she was becoming as she reached her mid-30s, when he always thought of her as average looking. And then, there’s the fact that she was having a whole lifestyle unknown to him, involving the two mystifying people from the strange neighborhood and possibly a secret romance. Asai’s investigation, along with details he learns from a private detective he hires, leads him to focus squarely on two people who might have had some role in his wife’s secret existence and death: a woman who runs a high-end cosmetics shop in the neighborhood, this store being the place Asai’s wife allegedly stumbled into while suffering the heart attack; and a man who lives in the area and has business, and possibly personal, relations with the shopkeeper. Asai becomes convinced that these two people were players in his wife’s private life and that they may have played roles in her death—or they at least know more about all of this than they are telling. He begins investigating them closely, to the point of stalking them.… He suspects his wife of having an affair, which indeed he confirms. Asai follows his wife’s paramour by train to the sanatorium where his wife is a patient, and in the woods a short walk from the train station, he kills Konosuke Kubo by bashing his skull with three rocks. He sets off in the dark, walking back to the train station to return to Tokyo. One car only comes along the country road, stops, picks him up and takes him to the train station.

Everything develops seamlessly. Asai resumes his dedicated occupation at the Ministry. Then comes a request for Asai to address the farmer’s union of the prefecture where he killed Kubo and was given a lift to the station by two farmers. No drama, no histrionics. A story of the composed face of honor as it slowly crumbles from unseen cracks. Asai's Achilles heel is his job and reputation, which he values above all else -- a vulnerability that leads to the threat of his complete downfall. Backing himself into a corner, Asai keeps taking actions that further complicate his situation -- right down to the irony of how the story is wrapped up.  The final act is rushed and horribly contrived. Out of nowhere, Asai does something rash and out of character that tries to give the book an unearned crescendo that instead ends up baffling. Following that is the forced introduction of two characters in an attempt to create an unconvincing dramatic finale. This is a terrific, short book by one of Japan’s literary treasures.

What was essentially the story of a hunter --flips into one of Asai as the hunted. For a while we expect the criminal to be the victim. The crime is a consequence of when manners are forgotten, when temper rules. What follows is fate, and timid obedient men can shape fate as much as the confident and the assertive. ‘Manners maketh man’ Manners can mean self-effacement and missed opportunities but they can also determine what follows.  Manners inform decisions, and decisions determine subsequent events. 

 In A Quiet Place, Matsumoto uses the mystery of Asai’s wife’s death as a means of exploring things like: the kind of relationship that can happen between a couple whose marriage was set up by a matchmaker; the friction between a civil servant’s career aspirations and personal life when there is some upheaval in the latter; and the prevailing temperaments and attitudes of various people from his country. Also, in the relationship Matsumoto shows Asai to have had with his wife, coupled with what he learns about her after her death, he brings out a universal truth key to many human alliances: that the people we know, even those closest to us in our everyday lives, might be leading double lives unknown to us.

The story provides an insight into the layers of duty and social obligation (giri) found in many aspects of Japanese society, from spousal relationships to interactions with corporate and government organisations. The theme of giri plays a recurring and important function in the writing, dominating multiple interactions among the characters and essentially driving the story forward at every turn.

Note too that an action that sets the plot in motion at the start of the novel, is also key to the ending. Matsumoto was an originator of the form in that country. This is before tech, I-phones, Internet- all of that.  41st of 2021.