convertinG hierarchieS An analysis of power structures in Ôe Kenzaburô's Pinch runner dossier Magne Tørring Master Thesis in Japanese (AAS), Spring 2007, Institute of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS), University of Oslo Index 1. Introduction................................................................................................................................3 On the writer......................................................................................................................3 On the text.........................................................................................................................5 Plot summary ....................................................................................................................8 Contemporary Criticism..................................................................................................10 Approaching Pinch runner..............................................................................................12 2. The peripheral individual: Mori and our children..............................................................18 Who is the peripheral individual?...................................................................................18 Our Children: beyond victimhood..................................................................................20 The disabled child in Ôe's writing..................................................................................21 No personal matter: Pinch runner as parody of A personal matter ...............................22 A personal matter: Neutralising monstrosity. ................................................................24 Pinch runner: Unleashing the monsters..........................................................................26 Structural violence..........................................................................................................28 Reevaluating the structure from a marginal perspective ...............................................30 3. Hidden centres: Kuromaku, emperor, father.......................................................................33 Pulling the strings: Big shot A........................................................................................34 The Lockheed Scandal....................................................................................................36 A conspicuously inconspicuous emperor........................................................................41 "Seventeen": Examining the shadow of the emperor system.........................................43 My tears: Resisting realism.............................................................................................46 Pinch runner: Getting familiar with the emperor............................................................48 4. Revolution! The problem of overcoming...............................................................................52 The background of the student movement .....................................................................53 The anti-Security Treaty protests....................................................................................55 What revolution? Against whom?...................................................................................57 Chûkaku and Kakumaru..................................................................................................60 The Tokyo University Struggle.......................................................................................62 "The essence of true revolution".....................................................................................65 The means for the task: Internalising power structures..................................................67 5. "Converting" the problem: Towards political imagination................................................71 Nuclear conversion: The order of plutonium..................................................................71 "Converting" hierarchies.................................................................................................74 Imagination......................................................................................................................77 Conclusion....................................................................................................................................80 Bibliography.................................................................................................................................84 Abstract ........................................................................................................................................89 2 1. Introduction If you ask a random Japanese person under the age of 30 if he or she knows Ôe Kenzaburô, you will, in my experience, be likely to get the reply: "Isn't he the father of Hikari, that disabled person who composes music?" Perhaps the person will also know that Ôe won the Nobel Literature Prize in 1994, as Japan's second laureate. Obviously, if you should happen to ask someone closer to Ôe's own generation, you would be more likely to come across someone who has actually read, if not particularly enjoyed, his work. Anything in the way of an opinion on his writing may sound like: "I prefer his earlier works, when he didn't write so damn complicated." And perhaps, as a way of conclusion: "But I love the music of his son." It seems that to some extent, Ôe Kenzaburô has been outshone among the general public in Japan by his son Hikari—who in spite of his heavy disability, has had success as a composer of classical music. However, when Hikari first became known, it was as a character in his father's fictional works. In the period between 1964 and 1976, Ôe Kenzaburô wrote a number of stories in which the pair of the father and the disabled son figures—in differing contexts, with different significance attached to the character of the disabled child. A constant trait, however, is the attempt to move marginalised individuals from their overlooked position in the peripheries, and into the centre of attention. In the words of the protagonist of The Pinch runner dossier, himself a father of a disabled child: "I'm not saying ... that our children should rule over the children who are different from our children. Only that we put them at the centre!" (Ôe, 1982b, p.47) In the novel, this vision become reality in a very concrete way—the father and son change ages, so that the child becomes the older and the father the younger. Considering the case of the real- world Ôe Kenzaburô and Hikari, it would seem that Pinch runner dossier was written in a prescient moment. On the writer Ôe has defined his ambition as a writer in the following way: "As one with a peripheral, marginal, off-center existence in the world, I would like to continue to seek—with what I hope is a modest, decent, humanistic contribution of my own—ways to be of some use in the cure 3 and reconciliation of mankind" (Ôe, 1995, p.128). As this quote suggests, he has constantly been concerned what lies outside the centre. Ôe was born in the periphery of Japan, in a small village called Ôse in Ehime prefecture.1 This was in 1935, during the age of Japan's expansion into Manchuria. When the war ended in 1945, Ôe was in his fifth year in primary school. His childhood was a time of great changes in Japan; as a boy, he experienced both the totalitarian, imperialist regime of the war, the change to idealistic, postwar "democracy", as well as the shift to conservativism during the Cold war. His literary activity started in the year after the outbreak of the Korean War, when he edited and wrote poems and critical essays for the literary jounal of Matsuyama Higashi High School. At the age of 19, he passed the entrance exam of Tokyo University, Department of Literature, where he majored in French Literature. In university, he wrote several short stories and plays, and in 1957, he won the May Festival Prize for the short story "An odd job"2. Soon he started to publish his stories in literary journals, and in 1958, he won the prestigious Akutagawa prize for "Prize stock" (Ôe and Subaru, 2001, p.180). His first long story, Nip the buds, shoot the kids3, was completed this same year, and in the years between 1958 and 1963 he wrote a number of novels and short stories. 1963 marks a turning point in Ôe's life and writing. Two events took place this year that would cause a distinct change in the thematic and political concerns of both his fictional writing and his essays. The first event was the birth of his oldest son, Hikari. He was born with a serious cranal defect; the diagnosis was encephalocele, or brain hernia (Cameron, 1998, p.6). The doctors informed Ôe and his wife that unless the baby underwent surgery, it would die. However, even if they could save the life of the child, there was a great risk that it would become a "human vegetable", incapable of even the most basic functioning (Cameron, 1998, p.6). This dilemma is reflected in two of Ôe's texts, "Aghwee the sky monster"4 and A personal matter5, both from 1964. Unlike the main character in these stories, Ôe did not hesitate to go through with Hikari's operation6 (Cameron, 1998, p.14). Hikari grew up, and in spite of problems like developmental delay, mental retardation, seizures, and visual problems, he showed a keen sensibility for sounds and music (Cameron, 1998, p.15, 33). The most obvious effect of Hikari's birth on Ôe's writing was the recurrent appearance of the disabled son as a character