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Oe Kenzaburo at 70

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Oe Kenzaburo at 70 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 Edward Said, 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 Kazuo Ishiguro, 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 London 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 2 3 | 3 | 0 APJ | JF 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.
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