Volume 3 | Issue 3 | Article ID 1742 | Mar 28, 2005 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus

In the forest of the soul: Oe Kenzaburo at 70

Maya Jaggi

In the forest of the soul: Oethe surface of things." Although Nathan feels Kenzaburo at 70 Oe (pronounced oh-way) has been "undertranslated -- he's terribly hard to do", his work has reached more foreign readers since by Maya Jaggi his Nobel prize for literature in 1994.

When Oe Kenzaburo was 28, and already a cult Henry Miller likened him to Dostoevsky in his writer for Japan's postwar youth, his first child "range of hope and despair", while the late was born in 1963 with a herniated brain , a friend for 20 years, noted his pushing out of his skull, the "two-headed "extraordinary power of sympathetic monster baby" of Oe's later fiction. Corrective understanding", particularly across cultures. surgery threatened brain damage, and for a Who else, Said wrote in a public exchange of while the father longed for the infant's death -- letters in 2002, would repeatedly warn of the a "disgraceful" time, he later wrote in a "danger to Japan of too much imperial swagger fictionalised memoir, that "no powerfuland economic delusion?", a peril rooted, for Oe, detergent has allowed me to wash out of my in a failure to learn from the past. According to life". Yet a visit to Hiroshima to report on a the British novelist , he has peace congress, and encounters with atomic- "always been fascinated by what's not been bomb survivors, convinced Oe beyond doubt said about the Japanese role in the second that his child must live. "I was trained as a world war". writer and as a human being by the birth of my son," he says. Oe, who was 70 on Monday, is to revisit Hiroshima next month, to give a lecture Oe's commitment to Hikari (nicknamed "Pooh" marking the 60th anniversary in August of the after AA Milne's bear) inspired, over 30 years, a atomic bombing of that city and Nagasaki. Last unique cycle of fiction whose protagonists are June he co-founded the Article 9 Association, a fathers of brain-damaged sons. That experience group of Japanese intellectuals, all second pervades his complex vision, in fiction and world war survivors, lobbying to safeguard essays, of militarism and nuclear disarmament, from revisionist pressures the constitution that innocence and authenticity, faith andrenounced war. In December, the Japanese redemption. His translator John Nathan, prime minister, Koizumi Junichiro, extended professor of Japanese cultural studies at the the mandate of the Self-Defence Forces in Iraq, University of California at Santa Barbara, and Japan's largest overseas mission since 1945. author of Japan Unbound (2004), says that, like Natsume Soseki, the early 20th-centuryOe, who writes a monthly column in the daily modernist, Oe "created a language of his own, newspaper Asahi Shimbun, has long been a in the manner of Faulkner and few Japanese target of Japanese conservatives for scourging writers before him. He's excruciatingly self- the emperor system that survived the defeat of conscious and aware, painfully looking beneath 1945. He was physically assaulted while

1 3 | 3 | 0 APJ | JF lecturing at the university of Tokyo after classical music. Hikari's first CD sold 400,000 publication of Seventeen (1961), a novella copies, "better than any of my novels", says Oe, whose teenage terrorist was modelled on the "and I'm proud of that". Oe's English is heavily far-right youth assassin of Japan's socialist accented, but its rich vocabulary reflects party chairman in 1960. The Day He Shall Wipe lecturing bouts in the US. He reads in English, My Tears Away (1972) parodied the patriotic French, Russian and Chinese, but has a friend excess that led Oe's literary antithesis, Mishima on hand to translate as he slips into his mother Yukio, to commit seppuku (ritual suicide) in tongue. 1970 after leading a failed coup. Days after the Nobel, Oe was excoriated for turning down the Somersault (1999), his first novel after the Imperial Order of Culture on the grounds that Nobel, was published in UK paperback last he refused to "recognise any authority, any year. Though it was begun before the 1995 value, higher than democracy". A loudspeaker sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway by the truck broadcast threats outside his house, he Aum Shinrikyo doomsday group, there are recalls, "but my wife was brave enough to deliberate parallels between Aum and the shout back, 'You're wrong'". novel's apocalyptic cult, whose leader, Patron, has painfully disavowed his faith to avert a Oe and his wife, Yukari, live a "quiet life" -- the nuclear terrorist attack by followers. Some ironic title of one of his novels -- with Hikari in British reviewers thought the novel rambling at Setagaya, a suburb of western Tokyo with almost 600 pages, comparing it unfavourably tranquil streets and red maple trees. They also with Murakami Haruki 's non-fiction have a cottage in the mountains. Their walls in Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Tokyo are hung with Yukari's watercolours, Japanese Psyche (1997). But Fredric Jameson some of which illustrate her husband's work. in the Review of Books admired its They also have a younger daughter and son: "'late-style' simplicity, like the architectonics of Natsumiko, who works in a university library; a Bruckner symphony". Its translator Philip and Sakurao, a research scientist for an Gabriel, professor of modern Japanese agricultural company, whose wife is expecting literature at the University of Arizona, says Oe's first grandchild in the spring. Oe's exploration of a cult leader "living with the emotional consequences of renouncing his Hikari, aged 41, has autism, epilepsy and faith" resonates powerfully with the Japanese restricted vision. After exchanging greetings in who lived through the war and the subsequent English, he hunkers down to floor level to "renunciation of the emperor's divinity"; peruse CDs. He began to speak only at the age through Patron's "somersault", Oe revisits the of six, when he startled his father in the woods trauma and rebirth experienced by his by identifying birds from recordings he had generation. heard of bird calls. Though his use of language remains limited, he was awakened to Bach and Oe was born in 1935 in Ose, a remote village in Mozart, learned the piano (though he no longer the forests of Shikoku, a mountainous island in plays) and musical notation, and developed a western Japan. He imbibed folklore from his remarkable gift as a composer. According to grandmother and mother. When writing he Nathan, Hikari is the "only idiot savant in remembers his mother's voice and feels guilty, medical history with perfect pitch, able to saying "I must try to write more accurately and compose in his head without first improvising honestly". Tales of a saviour in the forest later on an instrument". Three CDs of hisinspired the redemptive saviours -- and false compositions were released in the 1990s, messiahs -- of Oe's fiction, where a mythical winning him a top award in Japan for western Shikoku recurs. According to Yamaguchi

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Kazuto, Oe's editor at the publisher Kodansha delinquents evacuated to a remote village in in Tokyo, the Shikoku forest is "always a wartime who are shamefully abandoned by sacred, innocent place for Oe; the birthplace of plague-fearing villagers. the soul". In 1960 Oe met Chairman Mao, whose writings Oe's father was killed in 1944, and his mother he admired ("I was proud of his being Asian"), saw a flash in the sky when Hiroshima was in Beijing and interviewed Jean-Paul Sartre in bombed 100 miles away on August 6 1945. Oe Paris in 1961 (a "charming intellectual who was 10 when Emperor Hirohito surrendered on kept quoting himself"). He marched with Sartre August 15. The shock of hearing the mortal and Simone de Beauvoir against the Algerian voice on radio of an emperor whom they had war. He demonstrated against the Vietnam war been taught was a living god deprived him of and joined the huge leftwing protests in Tokyo his innocence, as all values were upturned. in 1960 against the renewal of Japan's security "But for my experiences of 1945 and the treaty with the US. "I respected democracy and subsequent years, I would never have become a the constitution made possible by America," novelist," he has said. says Oe, "while I was against an America which rejects democratic principles." Yamaguchi says: The Allied occupation of 1945-52 brought "After the war, people looked to a hopeful benign GIs with sweets, but inspired an future. But Japan was subservient to the US. ambivalence towards the US that Oe has never Young people protested but were defeated, and lost. "I admired and respected English-speaking Oe expressed their anger and defeat; they'd culture, but resented the occupation," he says. found a hero for their generation." Currency reform had driven his family, wholesalers in banknote paper, out of business. Influenced by Sartre's existentialism and The fifth of seven children, he was the only one Rabelais's grotesque realism, and an American to go to college. At Tokyo University in 1954-59 tradition from Twain to Norman Mailer, Oe he studied French and earned a living from created anti-heroes who wallow in abject journalism, but his country accent impressed shame and disgrace, disgusted at "civilisation". on him his "always marginal and peripheral" In his short stories or the novellas Seventeen status, fuelling a sympathy with Japan's Korean (1961) and J (1963), they are lured by political minority, and the people of Okinawa, site of US fanaticism, but as likely to end up alcoholics or military bases, against which he campaigns. subway perverts. He twisted the staid Yamanouchi Hisaaki, a student friend, now conventions of the Japanese autobiographical professor emeritus of Tokyo University, recalls "I-novel" and assailed the "vagueness" of such him as shy but brilliant, with an "innocence he predecessors as Kawabata Yasunari (the 1968 probably retains to this day". Nobel laureate). Critics sneered that his prose "reeked of butter" -- Japanese purity sullied by His early fiction drew on his wartimewestern syntax. Nathan, for whom it trod a childhood. In the 1958 novella The Catch (also "fine line between artful rebellion and translated as Prize Stock) a boy's wondrous unruliness", says Oe's "entire stance was an friendship with a black American PoW -- a assault on traditional values". "splendid guest from the sky", says Oe- is destroyed by war. For Yamanouchi, the story is In 1960 Oe had married Yukari, the sister of his an "ironic picture of Japan's relationship with school friend Itami Juzo (later director of films America". It won Oe the Akutagawa prize at 23. such as Tampopo ). When Hikari was born in The same year, his first novel (translated as Nip June 1963, doctors said his only prospect was the Buds, Shoot the Kids), depicted juvenile as a "vegetable", and urged the couple to let

3 3 | 3 | 0 APJ | JF the infant die. In Hiroshima the next month, Oe innocence". found pro-Soviet or Chinese peace camps wrangling over who should have nuclear In the "idiot son" cycle, the Hikari figure is weapons. No one, he says, was supporting the variously named Pooh, Eeyore, Mori or Jin, hibakusha (survivors). He visited survivors in from the novella Teach Us to Outgrow Our the Red Cross hospital, where one doctor told Madness (1969), in which a man feels his son's him, "never despair or hope too much". pain through their fierce, inseparable bond, to Through the example of the doctors'A Quiet Life (1990) -- which Itami adapted for forbearance, Oe says, "I was encouraged about the cinema, with a film score based on Hikari's my own son," whose name means "light". compositions. In the surreal novella Aghwee the Sky Monster (1964), a composer who Oe's private and political "rebirth" wasallowed his infant to die is haunted by the reflected in Hiroshima Notes (1965), and the phantom of a "fat baby in a white cotton imaginative link he made between his stricken nightgown, big as a kangaroo". As the musician son and those afflicted by nuclear fallout and is assailed by his conscience, the baby becomes the novel that brought him international a giant spectre of all those who die young, recognition, A Personal Matter (1964). His anti- innocent of memories -including, perhaps, the hero Bird, a new father dreaming of escape to war dead. Africa, retreats into alcohol and adultery as he struggles with the dilemma facing hisOe has said his style has been to "start from my "monster" infant, till he resolves to rescue both personal matters and then to link it up with himself and his child. Nathan, its translator, society, the state and the world". His work, who found the book "vibrant, headlong and says Yamaguchi, "always has universality, powered by gorgeous energy", met Oe in though it appears on the surface to be personal Tokyo, and was surprised to find an "owlish, or private". In Rouse Up, O Young Men of the pudgy man" with a "round face, sloping New Age (1983), a father has obscene shoulders and soft belly. He looked absolutely nightmares as his son, Eeyore, stands on the meek." Later he discerned a "very private sense threshold of sexual maturity. Yet Eeyore is of humour, of the grotesque; like his writing, innocent. Rescued after an ordeal, he "looked he's hysterically funny." back at me blankly as always, as though unmoved, but tension melted from his face and The novel translated as The Silent Cry (1967), body and the soft creature that always deemed by the Nobel committee to be his appeared in this way rose to view with a masterpiece, opens with the narrator festering radiance that was blinding". Father and son are in a muddy pit, a stinking dog in his arms, after writing a musical on the "role of the weak in his idiot son has been institutionalised and a helping avoid the horrors of war". Oe says: "I friend has hanged himself naked. The narrator believe in tolerance, and how the weak can play and his violently action-prone brother ("my two a role in fighting against violence; that's my divided selves," Oe has said) return to their persistent concern. The present Japanese childhood home after the war but confront government wants to stand up with the banner clashing views of family history. After The of the strong. But after the defeat [of 1945] we Silent Cry, says his editor, "Oe lost half his could have stood up with the weak. That's what readership because the prose got soJapan should do: the weak are a value in complicated. He knows it himself, but later he themselves." Oe's novel shows fear of the tried to loosen up." Yamanouchi says Oe's prose vulnerable to be a projection of the darkness became simpler after the mid-80s, because "the within ourselves. Nathan, who translated the Hikari in the novels is an incarnation of novel in 2002, rates it among Oe's best work:

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"It's a very brave book, in the honesty with -- but I don't mind. I'm always happy to be with which he excoriates himself." him. I can be very lonely and fearful of people. But with my son I'm very free." Oe has described his relationship with his son as symbiotic. "Even today that's true," he says. Oe's fiction has increasingly explored a "Reading Blake, Yeats or RS Thomas, I'm yearning for the spiritual, though he does not always reading as the father of a disabled son." believe in God. The untranslated Flaming In Nathan's view, Oe has modelled himself on Green Tree trilogy (1993-95) is about Gii, a the son. "He even evolved a similar gait," he disabled healer, who becomes a saviour to his says. "Hikari, transformed by Oe's imagination people. But in the mid-1990s Oe vowed to stop into Pooh or Eeyore, has assumed a huge writing fiction, saying Hikari had now found his symbolic importance for his father as the own voice. He and his wife resolved to sell the embodiment of someone who can transcend house, he says, and "live in a trailer", while he everything baleful and problematic, and turn it read Spinoza. The Swedish award persuaded into something hopeful and redeemed. The him otherwise. "I have to be a Nobel laureate," archetypal and the real father want tohe says. Yet Oe, who does not own a car, found participate." the Nobel brought hazards. Hikari had an attack recently in teeming Shinjuku station, Before Hikari was born, says Oe, "I married my and "I couldn't make him sit or lie on a bench; best friend's sister, and had an ordinary he became a statue". A stranger asked, "Mr Oe, relationship. But everything changed with the what do you think of prime minister Koizumi?" birth of my son. My wife and I created an His failure to reply -- Oe mimes his entirely new relationship. Without her support, predicament with an outstretched arm around and without my son, I couldn't have continued an immobile son's shoulders -- provoked the as a writer." He has been accused of exploiting remark: "Oe's got so arrogant since the Nobel!" Hikari, but says no one in the family agrees. He wrings humour from the incident, but "Our relationship is a real one. It's the most shrugs helplessly. important thing: life comes first, and literature second." In the essays A Healing Family (1995), In his Nobel lecture, "Japan, the Ambiguous Oe wrote that Hikari's ability to express himself and Myself", Oe spoke of the "chronic disease" in music had taught his father about the of Japan's vacillation between Europe and Asia healing power of art. The book sold 300,000 since its 19th-century modernisation drive, copies in Japan. "People find hope in his which, in his view, led to the invasion of its writing," his editor says. neighbours. In a 1995 foreword to Hiroshima Notes, he wrote of the need to recast Ishiguro describes Oe as "genuinely decent, Hiroshima in the light of Japanese aggression. modest, surprisingly open and honest, and very Because the cold war nuclear deterrent loomed unconcerned about fame". Nathan reveals that so heavily, Ishiguro suggests, "it was easy to he can be "terrifying and curmudgeonly; he has see the Japanese as victims of the first and only a temper and cultivates an aloofness. But he's a use of nuclear weapons in warfare, who came fabulous teacher; he knows so much." "I have to represent what might happen to us all". The no discipline," Oe claims, "I'm very anarchic", rapid rebuilding of Japan as an ally against though he is an assiduous member of his communism played its part. Postwar Japan is a swimming club. At home he writes by hand in success story. Yet, Ishiguro adds, "from a moral an armchair, a board resting on his knees. "I point of view, some voices say it's long overdue have to take care of Hikari-san. Sometimes he to look at what Japan did in Asia -- where it's watches TV -- classical music or sumo wrestling still a running sore."

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"Regret and repentance for the war, and the earlier satirised, survived his failed 1970 coup determination that it should never happen and is released from prison after 30 years to again, are enshrined in the constitution," says lead a 21st-century cult. Oe, who has described Oe. "That's why I regard it as so important." He the function of the novelist as being like a opposes Koizumi's controversial visits to canary in a coal mine, is preoccupied with a Tokyo's Yasukuni shrine to the war dead, which return of nationalism in post-bubble-economy houses the remains of "class A" war criminals. Japan, where school children must now salute He also urges official compensation -- recently the national flag. "The power of the emperor denied in court -- for the wartime Korean sex culture is still alive," he says. "If someone could slaves known as "comfort women". These devise a clever way of combining that with the injustices, the source of flare-ups withyounger generation, there could be a powerful neighbouring countries, "have to be solved in a movement." formal way, between states", he says. "History must be looked at again. If Japan thinks trade Oe is very independent, says Yamaguchi, and prosperity are enough, that would be adding: "For people like Ishihara Shintaro, the totally wrong. I would like to live to see a final conservative, pro-military governor of Tokyo, reconciliation between Japan, and China and Oe is a pain in the ass." But for Hoshino v, a Korea." novelist in his 30s and winner of the Mishima Yukio prize in 2000, he exemplifies Since Somersault, Oe has published incommitment. "It's high time we look back to the Japanese two novels in a trilogy, Theera after the war," he says. "My generation has Changeling , and The Infant with a Melancholy to take up the themes Oe has been wrestling Face. The first novel fictionalised Oe'swith." Hoshino sees Oe as rewriting the relationship with his brother-in-law. "Itami was political works of his youth in the light of the always a very beautiful boy, while I wasn't," he "rise of extreme nationalism and yearnings for says. "He was intelligent, good and capable, militarism. He believes literature can act while I was regarded as suicide-prone. Yet I against that future by shedding light on the survived and my brother-in-law died." Itami psychology of those who want to be engulfed in threw himself off a building in 1997, five years it." after his face was slashed by yakuza gangsters, whom he ridiculed in a film. Speculation Oe admits to many fears, of "death, and followed about a possible mafia role in his concern for the future of my disabled son, as death. But Oe ascribes his suicide to media well as the future of Japan and the world, gossip about his alleged extra-marital affairs. especially Asia". Yet his son has taught him "He was an aristocratic type who tended to give resilience. "Every three to five years, a new up half-way through; he gave up living." difficulty came up, some unexpected symptom of his illness," he says, "but Hikari always In his previous works, says Oe, "there was overcame it. We dealt with it together." Some always hope and trust in the future. But now I years ago, Hikari's health deteriorated, and he see a dark wall in front of us." The final volume ceased composing. But in the spring of 2003, of the trilogy, Goodbye My Book , is being he began again. His fourth CD will be released serialised in the Japanese literary magazine in Japan this autumn at the same time as his Gunzo, and will be published this autumn. father's novel, "a far greater event than my Yamaguchi, the editor of Gunzo, describes it as 70th birthday. a post-September 11 novel about "catastrophic terrorism in Tokyo". Its hypothesis is that "I feel human beings can heal themselves; the Mishima, whose emperor-worship Oe had will to be healed, and the power of recovery,

6 3 | 3 | 0 APJ | JF are very strong in us. That's the most important Non-fiction in English: 1965 Hiroshima Notes; thing I've learned in my life with my son," he '95 Japan, the Ambiguous and Myself (Nobel says. "I am not a Christian, but sometimes I feel lecture); '95 A Healing Family. something very close to grace." This article appeared in , Oe Kenzaburo February 5, 2005.

Born: January 31 1935; Ose, Shikoku. Maya Jaggi is a journalist, critic and editor Education: 1954-59 University of Tokyo. whose profiles and reviews appear regularly in the Guardian. She wrote and presented the Fiction in English: 1958 Nip the Buds, Shoot BBC 4 TV documentary, : The Art the Kids; '61 Seventeen; '63 J; '64 A Personal of Reinvention (2003). Among those she has Matter; '67 The Silent Cry; '76 The Pinch interviewed are Edward Said, VS Naipaul, Runner Memorandum; '77 Teach Us ToNoam Chomsky, , Michael Outgrow Our Madness: Four Novellas; '83 Ondaatje, WG Sebald, Salman Rushdie, Wole Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age; '84 Soyinka, Carlos Fuentes, , (ed) The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the , and . She is the Atomic Aftermath ; '90 A Quiet Life; '99 editor of Women Bridging Cultures forthcoming Somersault. from Anchor Books.

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