When the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe was in Stockholm to collect the Nobel Prize in Literature in December, he told all who would listen that he would now withdraw from the arena of his success. Over and over, he told his polite audiences and interviewers, “I am going to stop writing fiction.” It was such a queer statement, and delivered with such calm and good cheer, that no one seemed to believe it. Oe is just sixty years old, in good health, and recognized as the leading writer of Japanese prose. The prize has accelerated sales of his books in Japan, and sent his foreign publishers racing to translate more of his novels and stories. Oe is neither tired nor depressed. He has never felt more at peace. His decision is more one of closure than of crisis. He is quitting fiction, he says, because the mission he set for himself thirty-one years ago—to speak somehow for his severely brain-damaged son, Hikari—is no longer necessary. Hikari, who suffers seizures, rarely speaks, and must be cared for at all times, has found his voice. He has composed some remarkable music for piano and flute—“like dew glittering on grass leaves” is how his father describes it—and has recently issued his second compact disk, “The Music of Hikari Oe, 2.”
“Sometimes my son thinks it is he who has won the Nobel Prize!” Oe said, delight creasing his face. “When journalists come to my house in Tokyo, they see him first and say ‘Congratulations!’ Also, Hikari has just put out this new music, and so, in a way, he has won the prize. My own work”—including the novels “A Personal Matter” and “The Pinch Runner Memorandum”—“is based on our life together, the communion with my son. So, if he thinks he has won, then he is right. It’s amazing to me that this boy, with such a profound handicap of the brain, can continue to deepen his music. For a long time, I felt that it was my role to express things for him, but now he can do it on his own. It turns out that I overestimated my role.”
In the near future, Oe plans to care for his son—Hikari, thirty-one, is the oldest of three children—and turn to study. In 1996, he may be resident at Princeton University. “I intend to read for three or four or five years and, if possible, discover a new style for my literature,” he said. “I do not yet have a definite conception of my literary future, the new form, the new types. But I do hope to write for children—or, at least, I hope the new style will be such that even children can appreciate it. I will write for children and for desperate old men—men like me.”
Winning a Nobel Prize means, among other things, a pleasant stay of about a week at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm and a flurry of ceremonies, congratulations, and requests. (It also means nine hundred and thirty thousand dollars.) Oe fulfilled his duties with unflagging charm. When he was asked by an obnoxious television anchor to “look into the camera when I go like this, and say, ‘Tonight! At quarter to eleven!,’ ” Oe did what he was told. Although he admits to having slugged writers in bar fights (“But just two in thirty-six years! Not too bad!”), he is a gracious man of good humor, joking with fellow-Nobelists in Japanese, English, and French. Oe’s work is often elusive, difficult, and dark, but there is nothing forbidding about his physical presence. He wears funky, wheel-like glasses and has a spiky haircut. His fabulous ears flare out magnificently, as if to catch the wind.
As we sat talking in Oe’s suite at the Grand Hotel one morning, his wife, Yukari, tended to Hikari, washing his face with a cloth, helping him on with a jacket. In the novel “A Personal Matter” Oe writes that his handicapped son soon began to resemble him, and while Hikari does look a bit like his father, he still bears the marks of his condition at birth: crossed eyes, a misshapen skull. Hikari (the name means “light”) is an adult, but the level of his speech, his father says, is as simple as that of a three-year-old child and does not improve. He suffers from epileptic fits. His eyesight is weak. He has trouble walking sometimes. As Oe spoke, he kept glancing across the room at his son and interrupting his thoughts to get up and help him. Like his wife, Oe is a completely devoted parent, and a grateful one: Hikari “illuminated the dark, deep folds of my consciousness,” he has said. Hikari saved his life.
Kenzaburo Oe was born in 1935 in Ose, a mountain village on the island of Shikoku; the village was long ago annexed to another town and erased from the map. When Oe was six, the war in the Pacific began. He lost his father and his grandmother. His first major story, “Prize Stock,” recounts the war years in a mythologized, almost primeval Japanese village, and the atmosphere is of an Eden disrupted by the shattering sight of a captured American aviator. “To us the black soldier was a rare and wonderful domestic animal, an animal of genius,” Oe wrote. “How can I describe how much we loved him, or the blazing sun above our wet, heavy skin that distant, splendid summer afternoon, the deep shadows on the cobblestones, the smell of the children and the black soldier, the voices hoarse with happiness, how can I convey the repletion and rhythm of it all?” The tone is of a lost world—a world of isolation and simplicity that was, in fact, gone forever by the end of the war. When he was eighteen, Oe took his first train trip, a journey to Tokyo, where he would begin his life as a student and as a writer. Oe wrote his first stories while he was studying French literature at Tokyo University and rose quickly to fame around the time of his graduation, after winning the Akutagawa Prize for “Prize Stock” in 1958. That year, he also published his first novel, “Nip the Buds, Gun the Kids,” about the wartime evacuation of fifteen reform-school boys to a village much like Ose. Oe could not have launched his career with greater speed or notice.
“In the beginning, I was a happy enough writer,” he said, in clear but hesitant English. “There was the shadow of the war and the American occupation, which caused anxiety in a young man from the periphery, but I was mainly happy. But by the time I reached twenty-five or twenty-six I lost all sense of identity, all the stability of feeling that I might have had before. For several years, suicide became a strong preoccupation. Then, in 1963, my son was born. This little baby was a kind of personification of my unhappiness. He looked like a baby with two heads. There was a huge growth on his head that made him look like that. This was the most important crisis of my life. The doctors made us decide whether or not to operate. Without an operation, Hikari would have died very quickly. With the operation, he might live, but with terrible, terrible difficulties. My son was born on the thirteenth of June, and I went to Hiroshima on August 1st. Hikari was still in the hospital. I was escaping from my baby. These were shameful days for me to remember. I wanted to escape to some other horizon. I’d been asked to do some reportage in Hiroshima, and so I went there, fled there, intending to talk to politicians and doctors and activists at an international anti-nuclear conference. I despaired of the political people and their talk and I quickly went over to the hospital, where the surviving victims of the bomb were being treated. There I met the director, its great doctor, Fumio Shigeto, and we talked for hours and hours. In my hotel room at night, as I edited the notes of what Dr. Shigeto was telling me about the perseverance of the atomic-bomb victims, I began to create in my mind a new image of the human being. It is difficult to explain, but my thinking was changing.”
Oe interrupted himself to look at his son, who was sitting at a table across the room. Hikari lifted a teapot close to his face and examined it from all angles, watching his own reflection curve, expand, recede, as in a convex mirror. He did this for a while and then looked up. Hikari smiled at his father, and his father smiled back. Oe turned away, finally, and went on with his story.
“And so on a Saturday, as I remember it, I told Dr. Shigeto about the situation with my son. He told me about a young ophthalmologist working under him. In Hiroshima, you see, many people were hurt in their eyes, from the atomic flash, from broken bits of flying glass. This young doctor, who eventually committed suicide, was in despair. He said to Dr. Shigeto, ‘What can we do? We know nothing about the effects of radiation. I do not know how to cure these people.’ Dr. Shigeto told him, ‘If there are wounded people, if they are in pain, we must do something for them, try to cure them, even if we seem to have no method.’ He told me this story, and I felt great shame that I was doing nothing for my son—my son, who was silent and could not express his pain or do anything for himself. And so I knew that I must face my baby, ask for the operation, and make every effort to care for him. I returned to Tokyo, and my son was operated on.
“As it turned out, the doctor was successful. Hikari could live on, and in Hikari’s presence I began to deconstruct my life. My work began to change, and I discovered a strong standpoint against suicide. Until then, I had been a passive person. My life had been dark and negative, with no thought toward the future. My wife is a deeply strong and independent person, and I was terribly ashamed of myself before her for thinking so darkly. Sometimes a writer will commit suicide despite having such a strong wife, and I was close to that, but with the birth of my son my heart opened.”
For more than two decades, Oe examined and reëxamined that birth and his own behavior with a pitiless eye, studying the situation, distorting it, turning it over to see all its possibilities. In Japan, where the handicapped are stigmatized more than in many other countries, Oe’s voluminous, even obsessive writing on the subject of a father and his damaged son was especially shocking. In a story entitled “Aghwee the Sky Monster” a father kills his deformed baby by feeding him sugar water instead of milk. When an autopsy reveals that the child’s tumor was benign, the father is visited by the ghost of his son. In the short novel “A Personal Matter” the father runs not to Hiroshima but to an old girlfriend—a “sexual adventuress,” who helps him plot the killing of his infant, the “monster baby.” At the last minute, the father abandons the plan and accepts—even embraces—the responsibility of his sick child. (“In life,” Oe told me, “I chose the path of ‘A Personal Matter.’ ”) And in a short story entitled “Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness” Oe describes the father’s unspoken communication—his absolute, even physical sympathy—with his son. The enormously fat father in the story experiences every hurt of his son’s, and tries, through speech and touch, to penetrate the shell of the boy’s outward silence, to nourish and protect him: “The fat man was convinced that he experienced directly whatever physical pain his son was feeling. When he read somewhere that the male celatius, a deep-sea fish common to Danish waters, lived its life attached like a wart to the larger body of the female, he dreamed that he was the female fish suspended deep in the sea with his son embedded in his body like the smaller male, a dream so sweet that waking up was cruel.”
Unlike that fictional dream, Oe and his wife have been unable to protect their son from unending ailments and indignities. “In these thirty years there have been many crises for my son,” Oe said, “but always we—Hikari, my wife, and I—try to meet the difficulties and transcend them. Every time we surpass one difficulty or another, we feel as though we are a little higher than we were before. We are ascending—like a staircase, somehow. When he is sick, we are all sick, and when he is cured we are cured.”
Oe and his wife are now able to talk with their son, and the development of that communication has been much as it is in some of the stories and novels—a slow and inexplicable process. “We created our communication step by step,” Oe said. “At first, Hikari was completely negative about communicating with me or with my wife. It was as if he were trapped inside his body. But we were always trying to reach him. When Hikari was four years old, we bought a recording of various birdsongs and played it over and over again. There would be a bird singing and then an announcer’s very neutral voice saying ‘This is a water rail’ or ‘This is a pigeon,’ ‘This is a blue jay.’ This went on for more than two years. We played it for him all the time. One day when Hikari was about six years old, we went to our cottage in the mountains. I was walking in the woods with him on my shoulders, and I heard a bird chirping. I didn’t know what kind of bird it was. Then I heard a voice saying—in Japanese, of course—‘This is a water rail.’ I thought I was hallucinating. There were no other people around. It was like a phantom. Then came another chirp and, again, ‘This is a water rail.’ It was Hikari! And he was right! So it seemed clear then that he was capable of learning. It turned out that when we played the recording he could identify all the birds: ‘This is a pigeon,’ ‘This is a blackbird,’ and so on. He knew the sounds of seventy birds. A kind of genius. And so my wife and I began to talk to him, at first, through the names of birds.
“Then my wife began to play recordings of Bach, Mozart, and others around the house—mostly for herself. But it became clear that even if we just played a snippet of one of the pieces—a Brandenburg Concerto, say—Hikari could identify it. His speaking has never really developed that much, but even though he cannot mature in speech—in language—his music always develops. Our doctor tells us that the brain is divided into two hemispheres, and the one side takes on the role of speech and the other the role of music. He says that in Hikari’s brain the halves are divided, with only the weakest connection between them. His musical side is the strong side.”
Hikari’s parents hired a piano teacher for him, but they soon discovered that the boy could not master the mechanics of playing. It seemed, however, that Hikari was writing down all the music he heard. At first, the teacher thought the music was fragments of Bach and Mozart, but rearranged, out of order. Then she realized that the music was in fact Hikari’s own. Two years ago, with the help of a pianist and a flutist, Hikari put out his first compact disk. His new disk has won an award in Japan—the most important award, his mother says, that the family has won all year. “You know, some Japanese critics say that I have somehow exploited my son,” Oe said. “But I have lived with him for thirty-one years. I am the expert in this, not they. I think I can understand him. He is not capable of reading my books, but I believe that, even if he could, he would not be injured. Of this I am sure.”
While the theme of the “idiot son” has been the most personal of Oe’s literary concerns, he is also known in Japan as a writer of engagement, a political presence. His best-selling book is “Hiroshima Notes,” a collection of essays and reportage published in 1965 on the aftermath and meaning of the atomic-bomb attacks of 1945. As a public figure, Oe resembles Germany’s Günter Grass, a literary provincial (Grass is from Danzig) lecturing his powerful nation on its authoritarian tendencies and the vacancy of its current politics and its cultural scene. Oe is especially quick to strike at the endurance of Japan’s imperial symbols. This fall, not long after greeting with unreserved pleasure the news of his Nobel Prize, he refused the Bunka Kunsho, the Order of Culture—an award bestowed by the Emperor. He did so, he told the Kyodo News Service, because “the Order of Culture does not fit well with the postwar democracy.” Soon he was receiving threats and public insults.
Oe is the remaining pillar of a postwar generation of writers that included Kobo Abe and Yukio Mishima, artists who came of age in a time of unusual intellectual vitality and political protest. (Abe died in 1993, Mishima in 1970.) That generation witnessed the physical and economic devastation of the country followed by its spiritual reëxamination and fantastic economic growth. The most dramatic event in Oe’s early political development was, of course, the war and the shock of its aftermath. As a schoolboy, he took turns with his classmates vowing that if they were commanded by the Emperor to commit suicide they would do it: “I would die, sir, I would cut open my belly and die.” The delusions of the war, of official Japanese culture and cosmology, vanished on August 15, 1945, the day Hirohito announced the unconditional surrender to the United States. In an essay entitled “A Portrait of the Postwar Generation,” Oe wrote of that day, “The adults sat around their radios and cried. The children gathered outside in the dusty road and whispered their bewilderment. We were most surprised and disappointed that the Emperor had spoken in a human voice. . . . How could we believe that an august presence of such awful power had become an ordinary human being on a designated summer day?”
While the Emperor was forced to renounce his role as deity, his centrality in Japanese culture did not fully recede. The crisis of psychology and politics continues even now. While Mishima gravitated to a theatrical right-wing nationalism, a pro-Emperor position, Oe wished for an end to all traces of imperial Japan. Michiko Niikuni Wilson, the author of “The Marginal World of Oe Kenzaburo” and translator, with her husband, Michael, of “The Pinch Runner Memorandum,” writes that one political event that weighed heavily on Oe came in 1960, when a seventeen-year-old right-wing fanatic, Otoya Yamaguchi, charged a public stage and fatally stabbed the leader of the Socialist Party, Inejiro Asanuma. Oe wrote a story, entitled “Seventeen,” that was based on that event, and the complaints and threats against the writer and his publisher were so daunting that the magazine it was printed in, Bungakukai, issued “Our Humble Notice,” apologizing for the story. “Seventeen” has not been included in Oe’s collected works. Oe reluctantly agreed to that arrangement, mainly because he feared for the lives of his publishers and their families.
For a long time, Oe kept quiet about the incident and wrote about other matters—especially his childhood village and, soon, his newborn son. Five years later, however, he used the occasion of an August 15th Memorial Meeting to talk about the imperial system, calling it an effective kakuremino, “a magic coat that can make the wearer invisible” and so permits the wearer (the Japanese people) to ignore the meaning of the war. In an article published later, he asked why it was that Japanese writers led a battle for the publication of a translation of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and yet did not come to the defense of “Seventeen” and its sequel, “The Death of Political Youth.” Oe wrote, “It is because both works concern not so much right-wing elements in Japan as everything that the Emperor system evokes.”
In the nineteen-sixties, Oe was friendly with Mishima, despite Mishima’s politics. But in 1970, when Mishima committed suicide—seppuku—as, Oe writes, a kind of aestheticized ritual of devotion to the Emperor and a call for a right-wing coup d’état, Oe rejected the act as a useless and vulgar attempt to create a bogus image of the Japanese writer. In 1972, partly as a response to Mishima’s suicide, Oe wrote an angry parody, “The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away.” The story is among the most difficult of Oe’s works, and vacillates between its anger at Mishima and a desire for the very sort of unclouded faith and sense of spiritual and national belonging that the suicide dramatized. In the end, Oe saw Mishima’s life and death as a botched attempt to embody Japanese identity not to the Japanese but to the world beyond. Later, in a conversation with the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro that was published in the magazine Grand Street, Oe said, “Mishima’s entire life, certainly including his death by seppuku, was a kind of performance designed to present the image of an archetypal Japanese. Moreover, this image was not the kind that arises spontaneously from a Japanese mentality. It was the superficial image of a Japanese as seen from a European point of view, a fantasy.”
For Oe, Mishima’s suicide was a peculiar form of Orientalism. In Edward Said’s study of the phenomenon of Orientalism, the Western colonial-adventurer journeys to the East and returns with a literary image of the Oriental: the Arabs, say, in T. E. Lawrence’s “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” or in Flaubert’s memoirs of Egypt. In Mishima’s case, it was the Japanese himself who created the distorted image, for a wide and admiring Western audience. When I asked Oe about Mishima, he threw up his hands and laughed at the memory of the Mishima craze in the West. “You know, I am fascinated by Ralph Ellison’s great book, ‘Invisible Man,’ and it applies to us—us Japanese,” he said. “When I speak of the Japanese as an invisible man, I mean it this way: you can see Japanese technology in Europe, you know all about Japanese economic power, you know all about the quaint tea ceremony; but these are all images, masks of Japanese modesty or technological strength. Mishima and Akio Morita, the head of Sony, are like the two poles of the perception of what is Japanese. The majority of Japanese images are masks. We followed and imitated Western philosophy and literature, but even today, more than a hundred and twenty-five years after our great modernization, the Meiji Restoration, began and Japan opened to the rest of the world, we are inscrutable in the eyes of Europeans and Americans. You can understand other Nobelists, they are available to you in the United States: Czeslaw Milosz, Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky. But there is not much of a Western desire to understand the people who make all those Hondas. I don’t know why. Perhaps we only imitate the West or are just silent in the face of European peoples.”
While Oe may set aside fiction for a while, he has promised to increase his involvement in the Japanese public arena, if only because that debate, he says, is now a “happy wasteland,” self-satisfied, money-crazed, unreflective. These days, Oe’s leftish political engagement is, for most Japanese who bother to pay attention, a quaint relic of the fifties and sixties. “When I began working as a writer, there was a great generation of independent thinkers—the postwar generation—but today the scene is empty,” Oe told me. The most popular younger novelists—minimalists like Banana Yoshimoto and Haruki Murakami—show little interest in the political engagements and complications of their elders; their fiction tends to have the flashy emptiness of a video game, and often sells in the millions. Oe is not dismissive of either Murakami or Yoshimoto, but is concerned that their work portrays and appeals to Japanese who are politically uninvolved and content to exist within a late-adolescent or post-adolescent subculture.
“I know that older generations always complain, but that is not quite it,” Oe went on. “The situation in Japan is more serious. My friends in the United States worry about the intellectual atmosphere in their own country, but I find that there are people there of great independence, outspoken, complicated. In Japan, our cultural life is very simplified. There is the mode of mass-media culture, and that is nearly all. We rarely hear from our thinkers and intellectuals. There is only the importation of new modes of philosophy from Europe, and it is rehashed, nothing deeper.”
As a reader and thinker, Oe has been immersed in Western literature since his childhood obsession with “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and the Swedish tale “The Wonderful Adventures of Nils,” by the Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf. As a writer, Oe hopes to reach a Japanese audience, and yet he works in a style that he calls “peripheral,” outside the mainstream that began with “The Tale of Genji” and runs through Mishima and the previous Japanese Nobelist in literature—the 1968 winner, Yasunari Kawabata. As Michiko Wilson has said, Oe’s long, thorny sentences and his themes of abnormality, sexuality, and marginality are outside the tradition of Japanese equipoise. Oe wants Japanese art to drop its tradition of stylized ambiguity, its vagueness, and help reveal the true faces of its people, without masks. His work has a gritty, grotesque quality, which makes him seem more akin to Mailer, Grass, or Roth than to many Japanese novelists. The literary critic who has been most important to Oe is Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian Rabelais scholar and theorist of grotesque realism. Perhaps this is why many Western readers, seeking in Oe the sort of exoticism found in Mishima’s “Runaway Horses,” go away bewildered, as if they had been cheated of reading a “genuine” Japanese writer.
It is in politics rather than in literature that Oe hopes for a Japanese exceptionalism. For many years, he has called for the continued demilitarization of Japan. He has criticized the government for sending the Japanese Self-Defense Forces on foreign missions, and has criticized foreign governments for pressuring Tokyo to do so. “The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth,” Oe said in his Nobel lecture—an event that fell, he was quick to point out, on Pearl Harbor Day. “To obliterate from the constitution the principle of eternal peace will be nothing but an act of betrayal against the peoples of Asia and the victims of the atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not difficult for me as a writer to imagine what would be the outcome of that betrayal.”
At the Grand Hall of the Swedish Academy, Oe devoted much of his lecture, “Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself,” to an analysis of Japanese inscrutability, a critique of the mainstream Japanese literary tradition, and an indictment of Japanese politics, but he also managed to incorporate in his speech personal matters, including a passionate acknowledgment of his debts to his family. Standing before his audience and a bank of television cameras, Oe recalled his boyhood in a “peripheral, marginal, off-center” village in a “peripheral, marginal, off-center” country, and how he had found inspiration in “The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.” As he read about the naughty boy who communicates with wild geese, Oe recalled, he had sensed two prophecies for himself in the book: “One was that I might one day become able to understand the language of birds. The other was that I might one day fly off with my beloved wild geese—preferably to Scandinavia.”
With a slight smile, Oe told the audience about his son, Hikari, and the way birdsong had moved him to human speech and, eventually, to music. And so, he said, “on my behalf, Hikari has thus accomplished the prophecy that I might one day understand the language of birds.”
Then Oe looked at the attractive woman sitting in the front row. Yukari Oe “has been the very incarnation of Akka, the leader of Nils’s wild geese,” her husband said. “Together with her, I have flown to Stockholm and the second of the prophecies has also, to my utmost delight, now been realized.” Three days later, on December 10th, the King of Sweden handed Oe the Nobel Prize medal. Not long after that, the family flew back to Tokyo, and Kenzaburo Oe began the next stage of his career: reading, not writing, and taking up the role of the father of a brilliant young composer. ♦
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