Many moons later...

I did run top to try to understand what's up with my emacs.  I came to
the conclusion that what makes it grow is exactly the thing I want to
use this old notebook for; that is, Japanese and Asian text processing
with Unicode.  The top results are online[1].

Later I'll try anthy instead of quail-japanese, but my guess is that it
won't help too much.  So I found an old EDO module in our equivalent to
Ebay to increase my laptop's memory.   70MiB should be more than enough
for shikigami to edit Japanese text files.

As for QEmacs, I couldn't even compile it  :)

References:
[1] http://leoboiko.8x.com.br/misc/emacs-top
--
Leonardo Boiko