Kenzaburo Oe
taken from
Kenzaburo Oe was born in 1935, in a village hemmed in by the
forests of Shikoku, one of
the four
main islands of Japan. His family 
had lived in the village tradition for several hundred years, and no one in
the Oe clan had ever left the village in the valley.
Even after Japan embarked on modernization soon after the Meiji
Restoration, and it became customary for young people in the provinces to leave
their native place for Tokyo or the other large cities, the Oes remained in
Ose-mura. Maps no longer show the small hamlet by name because it was annexed
by a neighbouring town. The women of the Oe clan had long assumed the role of
storytellers and had related the historical events of the region, including
the two uprisings that occurred there before and after the Meiji Restoration.
They also told of events closer in nature to legend than to history. These stories,
of a unique cosmology and of the human condition therein, which Oe heard told
since his infancy, left him with an indelible mark.
The Second World War broke out when Oe was six. Militaristic education extended
to every nook and cranny of the country, the Emperor as both monarch and deity
reigning over its politics and its culture. Young Oe, therefore, experienced the nation's myth
and history as well as those of the village tradition, and these dual experiences
were often in conflict.
Oe's grandmother was a critical storyteller who defended the culture of the
village, narrating to him homourously, but ever defiantly, anti-national stories.
After his father's death during the war, his mother took over his father's role as educator. The books she bought
him - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Strange Adventures
of Nils Holgersson - have left him with an impression he says 'he will carry to the grave'. Japan's defeat
in the war in 1945 brought enormous change, even to the remote forest village.
In schools, children were
taught democratic principles, replacing those of the absolutist Emperor system,
and this education was all the more thorough, for the nation was then under
the administration of American and other forces. Young Oe took democracy straight to his heart. So
strong was his desire for democracy that he decided to leave for Tokyo; leave
the village of his forefathers, the life they had lived and preserved, out of
sheer belief that the city offered him an opportunity to knock on the door of
democracy, the door that would lead him to a future of freedom on paths that
stretched out to the world. Had it not been for the drastic change the nation
underwent at this time, Oe, whose love of trees is one of his innate qualities,
would have remained in his village as his forefathers had done, and tended to the
forest as one of its guardians.
At the age of eighteen, Oe made his first long train trip to Tokyo, and in the
following year enrolled in the Department of French Literature at Tokyo University
where he received instruction under the tutelage of Professor Kazuo Watanabe, a specialist on
Francois Rabelais. Rabelais' image system of grotesque realism, to use Mikhail
Bakhtin's terminology, provided him with a methodology to positively and thoroughly
reassess the myths and history of his native village in the valley.
Watanabe's thoughts on humanism, which he arrived at from his study of the French
Renaissance, helped shape Oe's fundamental view of society and the human condition.
An avid reader of contemporary French and American literature, Oe viewed the
social condition of the metropolis in light of the works he read. Yet, he also
endeavored to reorganize, under the light of Rabelais and humanism, his thoughts on what the women of the village
had handed down to him, those stories that constituted his background. In this
sense, he was again living another duality.
Oe started writing in 1957, while still a French literature student at the university.
His works from 1957 through 1958 - from the short story, "The Catch,"
which won him theAkutagawa Award, to his first novel, Bud-Nipping, Lamb Shooting* (1958)
- depict the tragedy of war tearing asunder the idyllic life of a rural youth.
In "Lavish are the Dead" (1957), a short story, and in The Youth
Who Came Late* (1961), a novel, Oe portrayed student life in Tokyo, a city
where the dark shadows of the U.S. occupation still remained. Apparent in these
works are strong influences of Jean-Paul Sartre and other modern French writers.
Crisis struck Oe's life and literature with the birth of his first son, Hikari.
Hikari was born with a cranial deformity resulting in his becoming a mentally-
handicapped person. Traumatic as the experience was for Oe, the crisis granted
him a new lease on both his life and his literature. Overcoming the agony and
determined to coexist with the child, Oe wrote A Personal Matter (1964),
his penning of his pain in accepting the brain-damaged child into his life,
and of how he arrived at his resolve to live with him. Through the catalyctic
medium of humanism, he conjoined his own fate of having to accept a handicapped
child into the family with that of the stance one ought to take in contemporary
society, and wrote Hiroshima Notes (1965), a long essay which describes
the realities and thoughts of the A-bomb victims.
Following this, Oe deepened his interest in Okinawa, the southernmost group
of islands in Japan. Before the Meiji Restoration, Okinawa was an independent
country with its own culture. During World War II, the islands became the site of the only battle
Japan fought on its own soil. After the war, the people of Okinawa were left
to suffer a long U.S. military occupation. Oe's interest in Okinawa was oriented, politically, toward the lives
of the Okinawans living on what became a U.S. military base, and, culturally,
to what Okinawa meant to him in terms of its traditions. The latter opened out
to a broadened interest in the culture of South Koreans, enabling him to further
appreciate the importance of Japan's peripheral cultures, which differed from
Tokyo-centered culture. This pursuit provided realistic substance to his study
of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory regarding a people's culture which led him to write
The Silent Cry (1967), a work that ties in the myths and history of the
forest village with the contemporary age.
After The Silent Cry, two streams of thought, which at times flow as
one, are apparent and consistent in Oe's literary world. Starting with A
Personal Matter is one group of works that depicts his life of coexistence with his mentally-handicapped son, Hikari. Teach
Us to Outgrow our Madness (1969), a two-volume work, painfully portrays
both the agony-laden trials and errors he experiences in his life with his yet unspeaking infant
child, and his pursuit of his father he lost during the war. My Deluged Soul*
(1973) depicts a father who relates to his infant child who, through the medium
of the songs of the wild birds, has started to communicate with the family,
and who empathizes with youths that belong to a
belligerent and radical political party. Rouse Up, O, Young Men of the New
Age!* (1983), a work in which Oe draws upon images from William Blake's
Prophecies, depicts his son Hikari's development from a child to a young man, and thus crowns the works
he wrote about his handicapped child.
The second group are stories in which Oe relates characters who he establishes
in the theater of the myths and history of his native forest village, but who
interact closely with life in today's cities. This world of Oe's fiction, starting with Bud- Nipping, Lamb-Shooting
and followed by The Silent Cry, came to shape the core of his entire
literature. Making full use of new ideas of cultural anthropology, these works represent the totality of
Oe's world of fiction, as evidenced in Letters to My Sweet Bygone Years
(1987), a work about a young man who, banking on his cosmology and world-view
of Dante, strives but fails to establish a politico- cultural base in the forest.
Contemporary Games is a story that alternates between myth and history, which Oe supports with the matriarch and trickster
principles he draws from cultural anthropology. He rewrote this work in narrative
form as M/T and the Wonders of the Forest* (1986). With the aid of W.B. Yeat's poetic
metaphors, Oe embarked on writing The Flaming Green Tree*, a trilogy
comprised of Until the 'Savior' Gets Socked* (1993), Vacillating* (1994), and On The
Great Day* (1995). Oe has announced that with the completion of this trilogy,
he will enter into his life's final stage of study, in which he will attempt a new form of literature. The implication
of this project is that Oe deems his effort at presenting his cosmology, history
and folk legend as having
been brought to full circle, and that he has succeeded in creating, through
his portrayal of that place in the valley and its people, a model for this contemporary
age. It also implies
Oe's winning the Nobel Prize for 1994 has thus encouraged him to embark on his
pursuit of a new form of literature and a new life for himself.
***************************
In 1995, Oe published in English the text of his Nobel acceptance speech, "Japan the Ambiguous and Myself," along with three other essays in a volume bearing the title of his Nobel speech. In one essay, from 1990, "On Modern and Contemporary Japanese Literature," Oe voiced his concerns about the recent direction taken in Japanese literature as evidenced by the enormous popularity of writers like Murakami Haruki and Yoshinoto Banana. Oe is struck by the difference between serious "intellectual" writers like Natsume Soseki from the late Meiji period, and the postwar generation typified by Ooka Shohei (Fires on the Plain). Soseki's concern was the fall of Japanese people "to a desire for material gains. At the same time, moral urgencies declined." (45)
Oe goes on to write about how postwar prosperity brought about a loss of appeal of serious, intellectually challenging literature to the reading public. The readership of intellectual magazines and journals declined also, further evidence for his point. He writes:
The strange new phenomenon is largely an economic one reflected in the fact that the novels of certain young writers like Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshitmoto each sells several hundred thousand copies. It is possible that the recent sales of the books produced by these two authors alone are greater than those of all living novelists combined. Here we see Japan's economic boom making itself felt in the literary market. In contrast to much postwar wrting which fictionalized the actual experience of writers and readers who, as twenty- and thirty-year-olds, had known war, Murakami and Yoshimoto convey the experience of a youth poltiically uninvolved or disaffected, content to exist within a late adolescent or post-adolescent subculture. And their work evokes a response bordering on adulation in their young readers. But it is too early to predict where this trend will lead as they grow older....
In fairness to Yoshimoto's recent work, it should be said that it does faithfully reflect the habits and attitudes of the young in Japan, a youth culture which on the surface resembles its counterparts in New York or Paris. Her fiction is at least an unselfconscious expression of her own generation. But in the case of Murakami, a writer in his forties and in that sense a generation older than Yoshimoto, we have an exceedingly self-conscious representation of contemporary cultural habits. (49-50)
I guess we might infer from Oe's remarks that he does not find Murakami's reproduction of cultural habits in his texts to be sufficient to qualify his work as werious work in which the human conditions and the struggles and trials of modern life are engaged. For him, 1945-1970 was an era in which writers were still engaged with serious political issues like the nuclear arms race, the emperor system, and how we live our lives. He does not find nearly as much of this kind of serious, questioning literature being produced in the 1970-1990 period.
*****************
*Tentative English Titles
From Les Prix Nobel 1994.
Works in Japanese
A selection of novels, short stories and essays:
Shisha no ogoni, Tokyo: Bungei shunju, 1958.
Memushiri kouchi, Tokyo: Kodansha, 1958.
Mira mae ni tobe, Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1958.
Nichijo seikatsu no boken Tokyo, 1963.
Kojinteki na taiken, Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1964.
Hiroshima noto, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1965.
Man'en gannen no futtoboru, Tokyo: Kodansha, 1967.
Warera no kyoki o iki nobiru michi o oshieyo, 1969.
Okinawa noto, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1970.
Shosetsu no hoho, Tokyo: Iwanami Gendai Senso, 1978.
Natsukashii toshi e no tegami, Tokyo: Kodansha, 1986.
M/T to mori no fushigi no monogatari, Tokyo: Iwanami,
Shoten, 1986.
Chiryo no to. Tokyo, 1990.
Works In English
A selection of novels, short stories and essays:
The Catch, Japan Quarterly, 6-1, 1959.
Lavish are the Dead, Japan Quarterly, 12-2,1965.
A Personal Matter, New York: Grove Press, 1968; London:
W&N, 1969.
The Silent Cry, Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1974;
London: Serpernt's Tail, 1988.
Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, New York: Grove Press, 1977.
Hiroshima Notes, YMCA Press, 1982.
Japans Dual Identity: A Writers's Dilemma, WLT 1988.
Literature
Michiko N.Wilson, "Oe's Obsessive Metaphor, Mori, the Idiot
Son: Toward the Imagination of Satire, Regeneration, and
Grotesque Realism," The Journal of Japanese Studies 1981 H. 1.
Michiko N.Wilson, The Marginal World of Oe Kenzaburo: A Study in Themes and
Techniques, New York, London:
Armonk, Sharpe, 1986.
Sanroku Yoshida, An interview with Kenzaburo Oe, WLT, summer 1988.
Susan J. Napier, Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the
Fiction of Michima Yukio and Oe
Kenzaburo, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ., 1991.
Alain Bouquet, Kenzaburo Oe: un samourai de la vie
int?rieure. Figaro litt?raire, mars 1993.
Helie Lassaigne, Kenzaburo O? et ses d?mons, Quinzaine
litt?raire, 16-31 mars 1993.
List of works taken from the Swedish Academy's Press
Release, 13 October 1994.
1993 1995
The Nobel Prize in
Literature 1994
Press Release
Kenzaburo Oe
Biography
Nobel Lecture
Last modified April 26, 2001
Copyright© 2001 The Nobel Foundation
The Official Web Site of The Nobel Foundation