Death by Water by Kenzaburo Oe (2009, translated by Deborah Bolivar Boehm, forthcoming 2015)

Japanese Literature Challenge 9

This will be my 6th year as a participant in the Japanese Literature Challenge  hosted by Dolce Bellezza.  Since first participating I have discovered several Japanese writers whose works I treasure.  At the top of this list is Kenzaburo Oe.  There are lots of reading suggestions on the Japanese Literature Challenge 9 webpage and the generated reviews are very illuminating.  

My Prior Posts on Kenzaburo Oe

"The image of Daio in the forest reminded me of the twokanji—淼淼 and森森—that suggest infinite expanses of water and forest, respectively, and thinking about those pictographs made the dream feel even more luminous and prophetic. In my dreamy vision, the relentless torrents of rain had saturated the leaves of the trees with such a vast amount of water that the entire forest seemed as deep and as wet as an ocean."

Death by Water is the nineteenth work by Kenzaburo Oe (1935, Nobel Prize 1994-there is background data on him in my prior posts) which I have read. I believe I have read all his translated into English fiction but there is still a good bit left to be translated. Obviously I hold him in great esteem.  I see the cultural consequences of Japan's defeat in WWII and the destruction of the belief structure this brought about as one of the core themes of the  modern Japanese novel and for sure a basic focus of Oe.     In a novel by Huruki Murakami, I forget which one, a book store owner said his store only stocks books ordinary people read, "Not Tolstoy or Oe".  

I strongly urge  serious literary autodidacts to read all his works in publication order.  The "great Japanese novel" has yet to be written but as a body the post WWII Japanese novel is a world class cultural treasure with Kenzaburo Oe and Yokio Mishima as the left and right pillars in The Golden Temple of Japanese modern literature.  

Death by Water is a masterwork, but in order to understand it you really need to have read a good bit of Oe's prior work, especially his  early novella, When He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears (1972).  I cannot give nearly as good a description of the book as is found on the Website of the publisher, Grove Press:

"Kenzaburo Oe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for creating “an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.” In Death by Water, his recurring protagonist and literary alter-ego returns to his hometown village in search of a red suitcase rumored to hold documents revealing the details of his father’s death during World War II, details that will serve as the foundation for his new, and final, novel.

Since his youth, renowned novelist Kogito Choko planned to fictionalize his father’s fatal drowning in order to fully process the loss. Stricken with guilt and regret over his failure to rescue his father, Choko has long been driven to discover why his father was boating on the river in a torrential storm. Though he remembers overhearing his father and a group of soldiers discussing an insurgent scheme to stage a suicide attack on Emperor Mikado, Choko cannot separate his memories from imagination and his family is hesitant to reveal the entire story. When the contents of the trunk turn out to offer little clarity, Choko abandons the novel in creative despair. Floundering as an artist, he’s haunted by fear that he may never write his tour de force. But when he collaborates with an avant-garde theater troupe dramatizing his early novels, Choko is revitalized by revisiting his formative work and he finds the will to continue investigating his father’s demise. 

Diving into the turbulent depths of legacy and mortality, Death by Water is an exquisite examination of resurfacing national and personal trauma, and the ways that storytelling can mend political, social, and familial rifts."  From Grove Press Website 

Death by Water, i was kindly given a review copy, is an amazing book, deep and wise.  The prose in translation reads wonderfully.   Those who know the work of Oe will desperately want to read this book without urging from anyone.  Those new to his work need to follow my advice to really understand the power and beauty of Death by Water.

Mel u