The following is an excerpt from an essay appearing in the volume noted below. Of course, it would be best to read the entire article, but I have singled out a few of the opening paragraphs that I thought students might find interesting.

Excerpts from

"Oe Kenzaburo and the Search for the Sublime at the End of the Twentieth Century"

by

Susan J. Napier

University of Texas at Austin

from Oe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan, Edited by Stephen Snyder and Philip Gabriel (University of Hawai'i Press, 1999), pp. 11-35.

When Oe Kenzaburo won the Nobel Prize for literature in October of 1994 he became only the second Japanese writer to win the prize. The first winner was Kawabata Yasunari, who received the award in 1968. Twenty-six years may not seem such a long time in Nobel history (many countries still have not been honored), but they demarcate a clear change in Japan's literary generations. Oe's complex, resolutlely intertextual, and frequently grotesque works radically contrast with Kawabata's exquisite elegies to a lost Japanese past. Critics in both Japan and the West see Oe as representing a new "international" Japan, a Japan with a new identity on the world stage. . .

In his Nobel acceptance speech, Oe strives to differentiate himself from Kawabata's Zen-inspired traditionalism, putting himself instead at the "end of the line" of the postwar generation of writers whom he describes as "deeply wounded by the war yet full of hope for rebirth." He firmly distinguishes his generation from that of the younger writers who grew up after the war and who write novels that Oe calls "mere reflections of the vast consumer culture of Tokyo."

In fact, Oe is notably pessimistic on the subject of recent literary trends. He calls 1970 "the year in which the curtain fell for postwar literature," citing the bizarre suicide of his fellow writer Mishima Yukio in 1970 as the turning point. Oe considers Mishima's attempted coup d'etat and subsequent suicide to have been simply a performance and refers to Mishima as a "baleful ghost" whose posturing shadow he sees affecting the new generation of shallow, consumer-oriented writers. But Oe also blames "today's grotequely bloated consumer society" of modern Japan. As he explains it: "Lack of activity in the realm of junbungaku (pure literature) can be substantiated objectively when we compare the volume of its publication with that of the other literature such as popular historical novels, science fiction, mysteries and various nonfiction categories." To Oe, pure literature is being elbowed out by contemporary Japan's increasingly prominent popular culture.

Is Oe correct? Is he simply a representative voice of a dying literary tradition, a tradition which was unique to the set of circumstances that produced the society of immediate postwar Japan? And what does Oe offer as a solution for this crisis? This essay attempts to answer these questions. Yes, Oe is indeed representative--if not in style then certainly in thematic obsessions of postwar literature. Oe shares with these writers, but perhaps feels more instensely, a need for some form of transcendental spiritual experience, an experience which Oe himself terms the "sublime" and which he offers as a possible solution for some of the ills afflicting modern Japan. I would suggest, however, that this desire for the sublime is not restricted only to authors of Oe's gneration. A search for transcendental experience characterizes not only some of the best recent Japanese literature but can also be found in some of the most prominent products of popular culture, notably comic books (manga) and animation. . .

Confining ourselves to fiction, we can identify three major paradigms in which Oe seems to be locating the sublime. The first is a vision of violence, often of an apocalyptic type, sometimes linked with the Japanese emperor of with the Japanese past: a vision of wholesale destruction that both terrorizes and liberates his characters runs through a number of Oe's novels. The second is Oe's notion of a human collectivity tied to a natural setting. Often this sublime is a rural village located in a liminal space that may or may not be Oe's own homeland of Shikoku and composed of marginals and outsiders such as Oe's own mentally handicapped son, Hikari. These outsiders are engaged in a frequently carnivalesque confrontation with established authority. Although they often lose the fight, the process of violent confrontation itself seems to liberate them, thereby connecting this paradigm with that of the apocalytpic sublime. The third site of the sublime is the body, usually in its sexual aspect, but also in relation to violent action. Many of Oe's characters engage in grotesque and sometimes violent sexual activity. As with the previous two paradigms, however, the very extremity of the process often coveys a form of freedom to the participants. (14-16)

...Oe has explored "deviant" sexuality as a means to self-renewal in many other works. These include most notably the sodomization of Himiko in A Personal Matter. . .(29)

Key Works by Oe

1. A Personal Matter

2. The Silent Cry

3. Japan the Ambiguous and Myself (Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech)

4. The Floodwaters Have come unto My Soul (Kozui wa wagatamashii ni oyobi)

5. Teach Us to Outgrow our Madness, 4 short novels including:

"The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away"

"Prize Stock"

"Agwhee the Sky Monster"

"Teach Us to Outgrow our Madness"

6. The Pinch Runner Memorandum

7. Women who Listen to the Raintree

8. Tower of Healing and Tower of the Healing Planet

9. The Burning Tree