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Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature, 1994

(A Profile of a Remarkable Japanese Writer)
Anne Bayer
Think about a fatherless 10 year old boy in a remote mountain village in
Japan. The war in the Pacific has been raging for four years. At night, the
boy can hear the drone of enemy B-29s. He dreams again and again that Emperor
Hirohito is flying across the sky like a gigantic white-feathered bird. The
emperor dominates his waking thoughts as well. Every day, like his classmates,
he is called by the ethics teacher to the front of the classroom and asked
what he would do if the emperor commanded him to die.

The answer is always the same: “I would die, sir. I would cut open my
belly and die.”

The boy fears the emperor as a living gold and knows that if he dare
even glance at a portrait of His Imperial Majesty his eyes will burst into
flame. Then, in the middle of August, Emperor Hirohito himself comes on the
radio and announces the Japanese surrender. The emperor’s voice is not that
of a god but an ordinary human being. At that moment, the boy realizes
everything he has been taught is lie, For Kenzaburo Oe, it’s not only the end
of the war. It’s end of innocence.
JAPANESE LITERATURE
Nearly half-century separates that summer day in 1945 and that autumn on
in 1994 when Oe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. During the
intervening years, he would, in his words, “exorcise demons” by turning out
some two dozen novels as well as hundreds of stories and essays.

In it press release, the Swedish Academy lauded Oe for the “poetic

force” with which he created “an imagined world, where life and myth
condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.”

Oe is the second Japanese to win Nobel in literature. The other,

Yasunari Kabawata, was awarded the prize in 1968. Their work could hardly more
be unalike. An editorial in the Asahi Evening News called Kabawata “rooted
deep in the Japanese tradition.” Oe’s writing has none of Kabawata’s
classical elegance and understatement.

Instead, Oe makes the Japanese language, according to translator John

Bester, “does something for which it was never intended.” Oe’s long dense
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sentences are jammed with images that one reviewer has likened to “tiny
nightmares.” A good example of what Oe calls his “grotesque realism” is his
1972 novella, The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, which he wrote as

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an angry parody of Yukio Mishima two years after that writer committed hari-
kiri. The story begins:

Deep one night he was trimming his nose that would never walk again
into sunlight atop living legs, busily feeling every hair with Rotex rotary
nostril clipper as if to make his nostrils as bare as a monkey’s, when
suddenly a man, perhaps escaped from the mental ward in the same hospital or
perhaps a lunatic who happened to be passing, with a body abnormally small
and meager for a man save only for a face as round as a Dharma’s and covered
in hair, sat down on the edge of his bed and shouted, forming – What in
God’s name are you? What? What?

In Japan, Oe’s detractors have said that prose “reeks of butter,”

meaning he has debased Japanese by blending in western influences. Certainly
the list of western writers he says have influenced him is long and eclectic,
ranging from Rabelais, Dante and Blazac to Poe, Auden and Kerouac.

Others depend his curious amalgam of east and west. Says American critic
Josh Greenfield, “he is touted by the Japanese as their answer to Miller,
their send-up on Sartre, their oriental version of Henty Miller.”

Many of the adjective used to describe his work – somber, sardonic,

whimsical, complex, and tormented – apply equally well to the writer himself.
“He does maintain a very solemn pose,” concedes Jonh JAPANESE LITERATURE
Nathan, one of the
Oe’s translator, “but the other side is that the guy can be a wild man.” A
skilled linguist, Oe tends to toss in a lot of French phrases when speaking
Japanese, and while he comprehends written English down to the very last
nuance, his spoken English, reports longtime-sufferer Nathan, “is no great
pleasure to the native ear.”

The three winners of the literature Nobel just prior to Oe – Nadine

Gordimer, Derek Walcott, Toni Morisson, all write in English, so there was
speculation that the 1994 award would go to someone from Europe or Asia.
Though for several years Oe had heard rumors that he might be a candidate,
he’d always shrugged them off to a joke. The evening phone call from Swede
was a total surprise and completely total. “The nest morning, red-eyed, from
a flurry of late-night congratulatory calls, Oe held an impromptu news
conference in front of his house in Suburban Tokyo. He credited the late
modern literary giants Kobo Abe, Shohei Ooka and Masuji Ibuse with creating
the way to the Nobel Prize. Oe said he believed his award would raise the
status of Asian literature. He also said that Japanese writer’s quite poor
but that the $930,000 award money “should be enough to buy numerous books.”

Among the well-wishers was Oe’s 92 year-old mother who still lives in
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his native village. “My mother strict me,” he said, “but last night, for
the first time in decades, I heard words from her uttered in a positive way.”

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Although Oe insists he writes for Japanese readers rather than

foreigners, on the whole countrymen would rather revere him than read him.
Over the years his work has become increasingly pedagogical and convoluted. A
case in point is Oe’s bizarre 1967 novel, Football in the First Year of
Mannes, available in English as The Silent Cry. Calling it one of Oe’s major
works, the Swedish Academy attempted a thumbnail synopsis. “At first glance
it appears to concern an unsuccessful revolt, but fundamentally the novel
deals with knowledge, passions, dreams, ambitions and attitudes merge into
each other.”

Admits one of his Japanese publishers, “I’ve made a stab at any number
of his books, but each time I quit partway through.” Hiroko Ohashi, a
graduate student in Tokyo, recently wrote to some American friends, “To be
honest with you, I remember that I could not enjoy reading Oe’s novels. He
employs a too difficult style and vocabulary for me to keep reading. I gave it
up. The majority of Japanese, I think, have read Yukio Mishima’s and
Kawabata’s works. But few have read Oe’s works. I swear I will read his
novels next year!”

It seems that many of Hiroko Ohashi’s fellow citizens have equally

noble intentions. Within days of the Nobel announcements, it was practically
impossible to find a single one of Oe’s books in the shops. His publishers
JAPANESE
immediately ordered new printings. Although his work has LITERATURE into
been translated
more than ten languages, only a fraction is available in English, a situation
that will certainly change soon.

One of the Japans most formidable intellectuals, Oe has long been a

standard-bearer for disaffected generation that came of age during the postwar
American occupation. A self-proclaimed radical humanist, he repeatedly has
called on Japan to account for not owning up to the atrocities it committed
during the war. He chides his countrymen for lacking “a concept of
tolerance,” opposes Japan’s military buildup, and champion’s universal
nuclear disarmament as well as a host of environmental causes.

It is customary for Japanese Nobel Prize winners to be granted the

Imperial Order of culture, but when the offer of the government- awarded honor
came from the Education Ministry, Oe immediately turned it down. To do
otherwise would mean giving tacit approval to the Imperial System, and Oe
refuses to recognize any authority that that democracy. “I have been thinking
that I will not accept any decoration from the state to the end of my life,”
he told reporters, then added for emphasis, “And it is my wish to decline any
posthumous honors.” The Nobel Prize, he made clear, was acceptable because it
came from “the people of Sweden,” not from the government.
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In his homeland which so prizes politeness, one simply does not snub
state authority, but Oe’s gesture of protest was met mainly with puzzled
indifference. “I think it’s everything, Oe told The New York Times, and
“that the reaction is general to my trying my life to my principles was for
people to say I’m old fashioned. It says a lot about current attitudes in
Japan.

A single book happened upon at an impressionable age can make all the
difference. What fired the youthful imagination of Novelist Gabriel Garcia
Marquez was reading Franza Kafkas’ Metaphorphosis. For teen-age Joseph
Brodsky, whose own poetry would win the Nobel Prize, it was a Russian
translation of Robert Burns.

For Kenzabro Oe, it was Japanese edition of Mark Twain’s Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn, which he read for the first time at the age of 14. For years
it was his favorite book. What impressed him most was Huckleberry unwavering
moral courage, his refusal to betray his friend Jim despite knowing it meant
going to hell. According to John Nathan, the heroes Oe cares about in
Americans novels – Alexander Portnoy, Holden Caulfield, Huck FiHnn et, al –
are all sickened by their experience of ‘civilization,’ driven on a quest
for salvation in the form of personal freedom beyond the borders of safety and
acceptance.

JAPANESE
In his early writing, Oe’s own fictional characters LITERATURE
rail against the
emptiness of existence, the deadening sense of ennui that set in after the
war. Not having Huck’s freedom to “light out for the territory,” they turn
to sexual perversion as their form of salvation. His novel, Homo Sexualis, yet
to be translated into English, is about J., a playboy whose homosexual
escapades have driven his first wife suicide. He courts disaster by going into
crowded subways and ejaculating against the raincoats of young women. Finally
J. pulls himself together, reconciles with his family and is promised a good
job. He’s about to get into his Jaguar when instead he finds himself running
headlong into subway station. He boards a train and ejaculates against a high
school girl. Arrested and led away, J. weeps “tears of joy.”

At times the sexual proclivities of Oe’s

antiheroes have gotten their creator in trouble. In 1961, for example, a
magazine printed a story of his in which a rightwing terrorist masturbates
while fantasizing about the emperor. Conservative extremists were outraged.
One incensed reader went looking for the publisher of the magazine. He wasn’t
home, but the publisher’s maid was killed, and Oe, like Salman Rushdie after
him, was forced into hiding.

Oe made his first trip to the U.S. exactly 3o years ago, when he spoke
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on the aftermath of Hiroshima at an international writers’ seminar at

Harvard. On his return to Japan, the American publishing house of Alfred A.

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Knopt was eager to bring out his first English translation. But when Oe
learned that Barney Rosset, founder of the less illustrious. Grove Press, was
also interested, Oe jubilantly opted to go with Grove. He already was an
admirer of Rosset for his stand against literary censorship and especially for
winning the right to publish D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover.

When Oe return to U.S. in 1968, he got to witness Rosset in action. This

time the publisher – abetted by another of Oe’s heroes, Norman Mailer - was
fighting to allow the allegedly pornographic I Am Curious Yellow to be shown
in movie theaters.

Later Oe wrote an essay about an American called Huckleberry Finn Goes

to Hell. In it he portrayed Rosset as a modern-day Huck Finn and opened with a
description of Rosset barreling down to the courthouse, Oe beside him, and
cursing the “desolation into which American society had fallen.”

In 1991, the Rossets flew to Tokyo to pay the Oe’s a return visit. Oe
insisted in picking the couple up at the airport. He set out in plenty of time
but on the way came upon a group of demonstrator protesting the treatment of
students in China. Oe got out of the cab, joined the demonstration, delivered
a pro student speech in front of the TV news cameras, and arrived at the
airport more than three hours late. Oe was extremely apologetic, but Rosset
took the long wait philosophically. “I didn’t mind,” he said, “because I
JAPANESE LITERATURE
knew at the urge to get involved in a cause was something he couldn’t
control.”

The third of seven children, Oe was born into a prominent samurai family
on the island Shikoku, southwest of mainland Japan. Particularly in his later
work, Oe’s childhood village, its geography meticulously described, is
picture as a sort of Eden surrounded by a primeval forest. Characterized by
one critic as “a group of eccentric rustics,” the same villagers turn up in
novel after novel. This “venue of myth and history.” As Oe calls it, has
frequently been likened to Novelist William Faulkner’s imaginary Yoknopatapha
Country.

In 1954, Oe came to Japanese capital for the first time to attend Tokyo
University. Shy and withdrawn, he was so self-conscious about his provincial
accent that he developed a stutter. He took a room in a boardinghouse near the
campus and at night would down whiskey and tranquilizers and write. Eventually
he entered the university’s Department of French Literature and wrote his
graduation thesis on the novels of Jean-Paul Sartre.

His first published story, An Odd Job, which appeared in the

university’s literary magazine, was about a college student who works part-
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time rounding up and destroying stray dogs to be used in laboratory

experiments. In it Oe perfectly captured the world-weary alienation felt by

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him and may of his contemporaries. As the dogs stand tied to stakes, the
student muses:

“And who could say the same thing wouldn’t happen to us? Helplessly
leashed together, looking alike, hostility lost and individuality with it –
us ambiguous Japanese students. But wasn’t much interested in politics. I
wasn’t much interested in anything. I was too young and too old to be
involved in anything.

His first collection of stories came out while he was still an

undergraduate. It included The Catch (American readers will find it under the
title Prize Stock), which won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s highest award for
new authors. An allegory of lost innocence, that story takes place during
World War II and is narrated by a young boy living in a village much like
Oe’s. A black American airman crashlands and is captured by the villagers.
The narrator and his friends are utterly transfixed by what seems to them “a
rare and wonderful domestic animal, an animal of genius.” The black soldiers
takes the narrator hostage and is hacked to death by the boy’s father. The
boy’s sense of betrayal, his rude expulsion from childhood, echoes Oe’s
early disillusionment with the emperor.

His first novel, an extended version of The Catch, was published the
same year. Memorably titled Pluck the Flowers, Gun the Kids, LITERATURE
JAPANESE it concerns a
group of boys, this time juvenile delinquents, and the brutal treatment they
receive when evacuated to a farm village during the war. The novel established
Oe as the foremost young writer in Japan.

In 1960 he married his wife, Yukari, the daughter of a well-known

writer, Mansaku Itami and the sister of movie directot Juzo Itami. That same
year, Oe became a leading campaigner against the revision of the U.S. Japan
Security Treaty, which called the perpetuation of American military bases
throughout his country. He also went to Peking as part of Japanese delegation
that met with Chairman Mao and Chou En-lai. In 1961 he travelled to Paris and
interviewed Sartre, who three years hence would decline the Nobel Prize.

In the summer of 1963, Oe underwent two shattering experiences. Though

one had nothing to do with the other, Oe would link them in his writing. Oe’s
wife gave birth to a son with a congenital abnormality of skull. An operation
to repair it left the infant brain-damaged. In August Oe travelled to
Hiroshima to take part in the Ninth World Conference against Atomic and
Hydrogen bombs. A year later he published two books simultaneously: Hiroshima
Notes, detailing his encounters with the physically and emotionally scarred
survivors of the A-bomb, and A Personal Matter, his landmark novel about a
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young man whose son is born horribly disfigured, seemingly the result of a
ruptured brain.

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Written when Oe was not yet 30, A Personal Matter I won the prestigious
Shinchosha Literary Prize and has come to be thought of as a classic of
postwar Japanese fiction. Overcome with horror and shame, the protagonist,
Bird, wait for his baby to die. He thinks about running away to Africa. He
takes up with his ex-mistress. Hungover, he goes to the cram-school where he
teaches English literature, vomits in front of the class, and is fired.

When after several days the baby still alive, Bird takes it to an
abortionist to have it killed, changes his mind, and return the infant to the
hospital. The doctors discover that the outlook isn’t as bleak as they’d
thought – the baby only has a benign tumor. They operate. Bird gets a new job
and takes up his life as husband and father of a child who, at worst, will be
retarded.

The novel is not to be taken as fact. Oe and his wife immediately and
whole-hearted accepted their son, refusing to follow their doctor’s
recommendation that the infant be allowed to die.

When Grove Press brought out the English translation in 1969, reaction
in this country was mixed. Critic D.E. Enright called the happy ending “a
miserable fraud.” The Washington Post’s reviewer Geoffrey Wolf wrote that
the book “reeks of omit and spilled whiskey. Its surreal characters are all
vegetables, cut off from history and hope. They JAPANESE
define LITERATURE
themselves by
despair.” The New York Times deemed A Personal Matter “something very close
to a perfect contemporary novel” Oe’s prose said “Life was as direct and
frank as an ice pick.”

Over the last three decades, a dominant theme in Oe’s fiction has been
the young father and his brain-damaged son. In his deeply moving novel, Teach
Us to Outgrow Our Madness, a father rides his “idiot son” on the handlebars
of his bike each day to a Chinese restaurant where they invariably share an
order of noodles inn broth and a Pepsi. (A phot of Oe bicycling with his son
on the handlebars is on the cover of the American paperback of A Personal
Matter.) The father sleeps with one arm extended towards Eeyore’s crib and is
convinced that he experiences whatever physical pain his son is feeling.

While the boy in the story is named from the “misanthropic” donkey in
A.A Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, Oe’s own son whose real name is Hikari
(Japanese for “beam of light”), is nicknames Pooh after the big-hearted Bear
of Very Little Brain. Shortly after Pooh was born, Oe had two tombstones
placed side-by-side in the cemetery of his own village. He has said repeatedly
that when Poo dies, he will die. Living in a society which prefers that
disabled people be institutionalized and kept from public view, Mr. and Mrs.
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Oe have chosen not to send their son away. They also have two younger

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children: a daughter, Natsumiko, who works at Sophia University, and a son,

Sakurao, a Tokyo University graduate student.

Now in his early 30s, Hikari (Pooh) possesses, in the Swedish Academy’s
phrase, “paradoxical riches.” Though his language skills are those of a
child, he has an extraordinary gift for music.

Several years ago, after the first two compact discs of Hikari’s avant-
garde music came out, his parents took him to Austria to visit Mozart’s
birthplace. A week before Oe won the Nobel, Hikari held his first concert,
attended by 2,000 enthralled fans. One admirer calls his music “incredibly
beautiful and pure, like crystal.”

Every afternoon, Oe goes to pick up Hikari at the sheltered workshop for

handicapped adults where he makes clothespins. At home father and son write
and compose respectively in the same room. In a newspaper interview, Oe paid
tribute to his son by saying that the novels had been written from the mind
only but Hikari had taught his father about the heart.

Early last fall he announced that he would cease writing fiction when he
finished the trilogy he was working on. The trilogy, Flaring Green Tree,
included A Letter to a Fondly Remembered Year, an autobiographical novel in
which the main character realizes his dream of never JAPANESE LITERATURE
leaving his native
village on Shikoku. Becoming the Nobel’s latest honoree only strengthened the
“inner voice” that old Oe to write no more novels but instead to “undertake
a comprehensive view of what you have accomplished.”

OE, IN TURN, IS SPENDING THE year – 50 th anniversary of the Japanese

surrender – reflecting on the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, reading the
17th century philosopher Spinoza and searching for a new form of writing with
which to express himself. As he told The Asahi Evening News the day he won the
Nobel Prize, “I am a man who does not know any other way of life but
literature.”

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