Kenzaburo Őe - January 31, 1935 to March 3, 2023

 Kenzaburő Őe - January 31,1935 to March 3, 2023

Kenzaburo Oe has departed from us. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994

I first began reading his work in April of 2009. I have posted upon 19 of his works.

His life and body of work is celebrated throughout the world.

"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."!From Death by Water 

I first encountered the work of Kenzaburo Oe in 2009 during JL2. I knew right away I wanted to read everything by him I could. Here were my thoughts from long ago on his stunningly powerful story “The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears”:

“I cannot really begin to convey the strange and wonderful qualities of this work. Imagine if Rabelais (Oe was a student of French literature and philosophy at the University of Tokyo), Jean Paul Sarte and William Burroughs collaborated on a work right after eating some very bad blow fish and you have an idea of how

 The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears feels like as you read it.   

This work is about a lot of things and it is about itself. It is about loss of faith, feelings of profound loss,

survivor's guilt, and the destruction of old values. We feel the effects of the war everywhere.

The Japanese culture provided no role models or cultural archetypes to help them cope with what could not happen, total defeat.   

There is a long established literary tradition of using the insane to say what cannot be accepted by those in fully sunlit worlds. The narrator of The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears has very deep roots in western culture. His ancestors were in the plays of Euripides, his great grandfather was Dostoevsky's underground man, he speaks through Crazy Jane. Oe has stated that he has come to understand the meaning of his own works through reading the poetry of William Butler Yeats.   

I do not mean to convey that The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears is a closed work that cannot be enjoyed or even followed without great effort. It can be enjoyed just as a narrative of a crazy person. As such we will pick up a lot about the aftereffects of the war on Japan. We will see how the Japanese people felt when they heard the Emperor speak on the radio, and we will learn something about the home front in rural Japan. The book is also funny-imagine the very straight laced executor of the narrator's estate being threatened with the loss of his work as administrator of the narrator's estate (who appears to have nothing to pass along anyway and probably is not going to die soon either) by a man in an underwater mask. Oe is as deep as the Russians and as careful as Proust and Flaubert and knows as much about people as Dickens.” 

"Simple. They were basically scared. They can't approach a man as terrifying as Big Papa without costumes, without painted faces...Able official turned to Dog Face and they both burst out laughing...But once they get going so that the merriment

can start percolating, they'll crack the audience up, so they will join in the laughter themselves...";From The Pinch Runner Memorandum 

My thoughts on An Echo of Heaven

An Echo of Heaven is one of the most overtly "philosophical" of Oe's works. It is the story of a woman whose two handicapped sons committed suicide. It focuses on her attempt to make sense of and cope with the impact of this event on her life. It is not what I can call an "open or easy read" compared to some of his other books. If you are into Oe you will for sure love this book.  

An Echo of Heaven is a strange book. It is partially told in long letters from the woman whose sons killed themselves, Marie Kuraki, to the narrator of the story who has agreed to write a book about her to be released in conjunction with a movie a friend of the narrator is making about her. Much of the novel is set among Japanese living in rural Mexico, some went to escape living in post WWII Japan. Marie lives there and has become a saint like figure to the Mexican agricultural workers. She has also joined a religious cult whose leader is called "big daddy" and she is described as looking like "Betty Boop", an American cartoon character. She writes very long letters(10 + pages) about her involvement with the religious cult. I think this is part of Oe's account of the nature and origin of religion. Marie seems at times to throw to her self into a lot of sexual activity, a lot of drinking and meaningless activities in an effort to cope with the death of her sons. One of them was in a wheel chair, both were mentally handicapped (as is one of Oe's children). They agreed to kill themselves. One boy pushed his brother out into the ocean in his wheel chair and then drowned himself. The reasons for this are not made super clear and there is no indication Marie is at fault.  

The more I think about it, the more I feel this is among the very deepest most amazing of Oe's work. It is near R rated in parts (I would have to say the sex scenes in Oe are often more about power than pleasure, more about using sex to drive thought out of your mind.). There is a big symbolic import to having the novel set among Japanese living in Mexico (and the USA) and the narrator and Marie both characterize Mexican men as aggressive macho types and the women as used to a harsh life. Marie went to Mexico to help rural Mexicans. Oe also taps into the religious beliefs of the pre-Colombian residents of Mexico and the effect of Catholicism on the lives of the Mexicans.

The narrator of this story is very into the work of Flannery O'Connor and I was very glad I have recently begun to read her work. In one really enjoyable scene the narrator goes into a Mexico City bookstore and buys up all of their works by O'Connor. He asks the clerk if they sell a lot of her work. She says no not really but every once and a while someone will come in and buy all her work. (Probably there have been dissertations written on the Oe/O'Connor connection.)

The narrator is also into Yeats, Blake, Balzac and a few other western Canon status writers but it is O'Connor that is most important here. I think one reason I am drawn to Oe is that he does talk deeply about authors I love in his work. To me it speaks to the depth of Oe that it is not simply that he shines a light on Yeats, Blake and O'Connor but they do so on him as well.  

Some readers of Oe who want to shy away from seeing him as an atheist try to see him as thinking along the same lines as the Romanian philosopher Marcea Eliade. I think this is a false almost wishful thinking reading of Oe and represents a shallow understanding of his work. I always think back to his Hiroshima interview with an elderly woman whose whole family were killed in the atomic bomb attack and who was suffering from radiation burns.   

 Iv see him as creating wisdom much as I see Samuel Johnson as doing. The wisdom of Oe is that of a world turned inside out on itself, that of Johnson is of a world sure of itself. The best of Oe feels not so much written as discovered.  

A Personal Matter is the most popular of the novels of Oe. The central character Bird is very hard to like, in part because it is hard not to see yourself in him. His estranged wife has given birth to a son who seems to have a severe birth defect resulting in terrible brain damage. Bird secretly wants his son to die but he must go along with the doctors who say they can possibly operate on him once he gets stronger and save him. Bird is not gratified by this as the odds are very high that the child will be severely handicapped mentally. Much of the few days in the life of Bird we see him trying to escape from thoughts pressing in on him that he knows are a violation of acceptable morality. He wants very much to go on a trip to Africa and he spends a lot of time thinking about this. He indulges in a great deal of sexual activity with an ex-girl friend that he care little about, he drinks too much, he gets fired from a job he does not like, and shows little real interest in anything. He does love the poetry of William Blake.   

A Personal Matter is saturated with animal references and metaphors. I did an informal count as I was reading the novel and there are about 150 such references.

The meagerness of her fingers recalled chameleon legs..the toad like rubber man rolling the tire down the road....Bird stared for an instant in the numerous ant holes in the ebonite receiver...the glass chatter at the bottle like an angry rat...like a titmouse pecking at millet seeds..like an orangutan sampling a flavor..Bird and Himiko exchanged magnanimous smiles and drank their whiskey purposefully, like beetles sucking sap..whiskey-heated eyes dart a weasel glance...

There are numerous references to sea urchins, grasshoppers and shrimp. Some of the animal references are amazing in their cleverness and all of them made me see more deeply into the world projected by Oe. (Oe has a brain damaged son.)  

A Personal Matter is a very intense work. Once you realize the central character Bird wants his son to die it is hard to like him and also hard to admit we do not understand why he feels that way. The novel is very explicit sexually. Attitudes toward suicide are considered briefly. A Personal Matter kept me in suspense throughout. I wanted to learn what would happen to the child and how things would turn out among Bird, his wife, and his girlfriend. Oe is not afraid to look a monster in the face. His work can help us do the same and if it turns out one of those monsters is buried within ourselves and our mythic past then at least we know it. (in Hiroshima Notes-a work of nonfiction) that he never admired the courage of anyone more than when he saw she was facing this horror without religion."

Hiroshima Notes by Kenzaburo Oe (trans. from Japanese by David Swain and Toshi Yenezawa, 1965 and translation 1981, 192 pages) is a collection of essays Oe published after making several visits to Hiroshima in 1965 to attend observations for the 20th anniversary of the dropping of the Atomic Bomb August 6, 1945. It also includes a useful introduction by David Swain and two prefaces by Oe.

Hiroshima Notes is a deeply wise book by a man who has thought long and hard on topics most would prefer to move on from. It is far from a bitter work. I want to relay few of the things in the book that stood out for me.

The survivors of the atomic bomb blasts were the very first of the Japanese people to say that the bomb blasts were the fault of the Japanese military government. Oe feels that the dropping of the bomb was a war crime also. My first reaction to this was to say that it saved, among other, the lives of millions of Japanese. (I recall a few years ago I watched a movie from 1944-it was just a very minor movie and I do not recall the name. Some English school children were looking at a future globe of the world. They asked the teacher what the big empty space in the Pacific Ocean was. The teacher laughed and said that was where Japan used to be.) Oe, agree or not, is suggesting in doing this a force was turned lose on the world that could one day bring an end to human life. Never before could war do this. It might have been that the Japanese would have surrendered facing a joint American and Russian Invasion (the Japanese knew the Russians would without hesitation send millions of their troops to be killed and that they wanted very much revenge for their defeat in the Russian Japanese Naval War). Both the Japanese and the Germans were working on Nuclear weapons and clearly would have carpet bombed Australia and England with them and the USA if they could reach it with the planes of the day. It is also true that the Japanese would have been defeated by nonnuclear warfare. (I personally feel Truman did what he had to do) In Hiroshima in 1965 there were 1000s of women who were children when the bomb went exploded. They survived but were so badly scarred that they began essentially life long hermits ashamed to go out in public. No one would marry them as they were thought to be unable to give birth to a healthy child. There were also in 1965 thousands of older women living alone who were the only survivors of their families. Some of the young girls who survived did pray daily that no one else ever experience what they did. Some wanted all the world to go up in a nuclear war. The Japanese government, aided by American occupation forces, did provide medical care to survivors but they did not provide living expenses so many of the injured had to keep working to support their families so could not take treatment.

The doctors who lived in Hiroshima when the bomb exploded soon became the first authorities on the medical effects of the bomb. They also suffered the effects. Rates of leukemia went way up as did other forms of cancer. Suicides went way up throughout the lives of the survivors. Oe tells us a very moving story. A twenty six year old man, age six when the bomb exploded, is advised he has two years to live as a result of leukemia. He can live out his remaining time in a charity hospital ward. He chooses to work at hard labor (he has no skills) so he can live on his own and be with his 19 year old fiance, not yet born when bomb exploded. When he died she took an overdose of sleeping pills stating that her death was also a result of the bomb blast. There are other equally moving stories. We see the wisdom and power of the doctors. We feel a little ashamed when we see different groups fight over who should run the 20 year anniversary memorial but we are also moved by seeing good people from all over the world come together.    

Oe says the greatest gift of the bombing is the wisdom of the survivors. Oe is clearly humbled by his task of bringing their stories to life.  

The youngest survivors of the bomb are now in their middle sixties. There are ninety year old survivors that still bear the scars.

I know I do not have the ability to convey the power of this book. I know most people do not want to dwell on these matters. I am pretty sure my daughters and children throughout the world can graduate from college and never be told of them by a teacher. As I read the book, I hope this remark bothers no one, I thought that Oe was the kind of man who could have written the wisdom books of the Old Testament. At one point he has a long conversation with an elderly woman. He says her wisdom is so strong that she is able to live a life scarred since her middle years by the blast without a belief in any authoritarian creed. Oe does not say that wars are started by those who follow authoritative codes, much of his wisdom is in what he knows he cannot say.

Hiroshima Notes deeply effected me. I felt an almost Oceanic Feeling come over me as I thought about the book and what I could attempt to say about it.

To those new to Kenzaburo Őe I would suggest you read through his works in publication order.

Mel Ulm

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

A Quiet Life by Kenzaburo Oe

A Quiet Life by Kenzaburo Oe (1997, trans. by William Wetherall)

My Prior Posts on Kenzaburo Oe

A Quiet Life is the 18th work by Kenzaburo Oe (1935, Japan, awarded Nobel Prize 1994) I have read and now posted on.  Obviously I greatly like and admire his work.    I see him as one of the greatest of all contemporary novelists.  I think, based on my quick research, that I have now read of all his translated fiction.  He does have a large body of work still untranslated and I hope one day to read more of his work.

This is a very personal book.  It is told as the fictional memoir of the twenty year old daughter of a famous Japanese novelist who also has a severely mentally challenged twenty six year old son.    The son possesses, just as the real son of Oe, even though he is terribly handicapped a wonderful ability in musical composition.   There is also a younger brother.  The family life centers very much on the handicapped son.   The daughter does feel resentful, as anyone would.

The father is subject mental "pinches" (I am assuming this is something like a long term depression or "funk"). He has been invited to go to California to be writer in residence at one of the state universities for six months.   He has gone out of the country before to work at universities but this time his wife plans to go also.  The daughter thinks the "pinch" of the father has had bad consequences for her parents marriage and she thinks maybe the mother feels if they are alone for six months they can rebuild their marriage.  Her father, who does take charge of the care of the son, puts her in charge of him.

The father at times seems insensitive almost cold to his family, other than the one son.  A Quiet One, told in the form of a diary, is the daughter's account of what happens when the parents leave and she tries to cope with her brother and go to college.  Part of the theme of the novel, it seems to me this is one of the bigger themes of Oe and the post WWII Japanese novel, is how to deal with life in a world without faith, with no outside support for values.

The diary tells us about her challenges getting the brother, named Eeyore, to his workshops, enrolling him in swimming lessons and dealing with his epileptic seizures and other fits.   The daughter begins to wonder why her father and mother abandoned her like this.

There is a section in the novel where the characters go to see a movie by Tarkovsky about a stalker which mirrors a stalker who is after either Eeyore or the daughter.  There is also an interesting discussion of a novel about the crucifiction of Jesus.   K, as the father is called, is very into the work of William Blake, especially the prophetic books (this is also true of Oe).   It is almost as if he sees his son as a person from these books.

What A Quiet One really seems to me to be is a meditation of the author on his failures as a father and his own spiritual years in a faithless world.  If there is no religious text which can give foundation to a life, then one seeks it in obscure open to many meaning texts.  Oe also, this is not shown here, treats the work of Flannery O'Connor almost as holy works.

There are some exciting things that happen in the story.  The daughter almost gets raped, she helps capture a molester and we meet some of the father's famous friends.   There is a murder plot and intrigue at a private swim club.

A Quiet Life seems a work in which Oe is very hard on himself.   The emotions in the book are very subdued but run deep.   We can sense there is something wrong with the family, perhaps caused by emotional issues of the father brought on by the birth of his handicapped son.   There is  great pain at the center of this story.

The father in the story seems on the surface, and maybe deeper, to be selfish, and arrogant, using his knowledge of his own real brilliance to avoid his responsibilities.  On the other hand, he is in fact a creative genius and he clearly sacrifices greatly for his son.  He also neglects and does not seem to show a lot of interest in his daughter and his other son, eighteen.

I am very glad I read A Quiet Life and I am sad that I have now read, as far as I know, all of his translated into English fiction.  It is impossible for anyone into the work of Oe, to not see this as largely autobiographical, to his attempts to confess his inadequacies as a father and a husband.

There are many layers of meaning in this book, a Oe novel can take you as deep as you can go.  I found it near compulsive reading.  The book for sure made me think of my own failures as a father, my own emotional remoteness.  I think most fathers will be drawn to reflect on their own issues.

I will note that there are a lot of typos in the Kindle edition of this book, things any competent proof reading would have found.  It seems kind of a sloppy job of editing.  

I am reading this in participation in two great events devoted to Japanese Literature

January in Japan

Japanese Literature 5

There are lot of good reading ideas on these webpages as well a links to great reviews by participants.

There is still time to participate in these events, all you have to do is read and post on one Japanese novel.

Kenzaburo Oe and William Butler Yeats

"When He Himself Will Wipe Away My Tears" by Kenzaburo Oe (1972)

Irish Short Story Week Year Two

March 11 to July 1

Nobel Prize Winners Only Week

April 6 to April 13

Posts by Participants

Resources and Ideas for Irish Short Story Week

My Prior Posts for ISSW Year Two

My Prior Posts on Kenzaburo Oe

Please consider joining us for Irish Short Story Week Year Two.   All you are asked to do is to post on one or more Irish short stories (or a work of non-fiction that related well to this topic) and let me know about it.

I decided to include Kenzaburo Oe in Nobel Prize winners only Week on Irish Short Story Week  Year Two because he is one of my core authors, he is a genius, and he is so influenced by William Butler Yeats that he mentioned him eight times in his 1994 Nobel Lecture.  As far as I know I have posted on all of Kenzaburo's translated works of fiction.  Here is what Oe says in his Nobel Speech (and if a writer ever wants to tell the world something, a Nobel Prize Speech would be the place to do it!)

To tell you the truth, rather than with Kawabata my compatriot who stood here twenty-six years ago, I feel more spiritual affinity with the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature seventy one years ago when he was at about the same age as me. Of course I would not presume to rank myself with the poetic genius Yeats. I am merely a humble follower living in a country far removed from his. As William Blake, whose work Yeats revalued and restored to the high place it holds in this century, once wrote: 'Across Europe & Asia to China & Japan like lightnings'.
During the last few years I have been engaged in writing a trilogy which I wish to be the culmination of my literary activities. So far the first two parts have been published and I have recently finished writing the third and final part. It is entitled in Japanese A Flaming Green Tree.I am indebted for this title to a stanza from Yeats's poem Vacillation:
Is half all glittering flame and half all green
Abounding foliage moistened with the dew ...
('Vacillation', 11-13)
In fact my trilogy is so soaked in the overflowing influence of Yeats's poems as a whole. On the occasion of Yeat's winning the Nobel Prize the Irish Senate proposed a motion to congratulate him, which contained the following sentences:
... a race that hitherto had not been accepted into the comity of nations.
... Our civilization will be assesed on the name of Senator Yeats.
... there will always be the danger that there may be a stampeding of people who are sufficiently removed from insanity in enthusiasm for destruction.
(The Nobel Prize: Congratulations to Senator Yeats)
Yeats is the writer in whose wake I would like to follow. I would like to do so for the sake of another nation that has now been 'accepted into the comity of nations' but rather on account of the technology in electrical engineering and its manufacture of automobiles. Also I would like to do so as a citizen of such a nation which was stamped into 'insanity in enthusiasm of destruction' both on its own soil and on that of the neighbouring nations.

His wonderful novel, Rouse Up Oh Young Man is almost a gloss on the poetry of  Blake which Oe discovered through reading Yeats.

In deciding what to post on Oe, I selected one of my first posts on Oe and rewrote it a bit.  I When He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears goes to the heart of Oe and I enjoyed it tremendously.

The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears  by Kenzaburo Oe was first published in Japan in 1972 and translated into English by John Nathan in 1977.  .

The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears is an exceedingly bizarre narrative by a 35 year old man lying in a hospital bed wearing underwater goggles covered in cellophane.    This man, whose name we never learn,   may or may not have cancer but he believes and seriously hopes he does.   This work is more than passing strange.     The narrator is unreliable, to put it mildly.    His perception and memory of past events are at best confused.   The novel is set in hospital in post war Tokyo.    Maybe the narrator saw too much at too young an age and it drove him mad.   Something for sure did!   At more than one point in the

work I felt like yelling out to him "What are you crazy or something?"    I simply have to quote a bit of the opening few lines of the book

"Deep one night he was trimming his nose that would never walk again into sunlight atop living legs, busily

feeling each hair with a Rotex rotary nostril clipper as if to make the nostrils as bare as a monkey's, when suddenly a man, perhaps escaped from the mental ward..or perhaps a lunatic who happened to be passing with a body abnormally small and meagre for a man save only for a face as round as a Dharma's and covered in hair, set down on the edge of his bed and shouted, foaming,  What in God's name are you?  WHAT?...I'm cancer, cancer LIVER CANCER it is me".

In the world of this book, passing lunatics screaming the truth at us, or is  it,  perfectly ordinary.   When one is possibly dying of cancer, of course,  your top priority might be to trim your nose hairs.

The vast majority of the work consists of an interior monologue spoken out loud..   For brief periods the person who the narrator has designated as the administrator of his will comment on the monologue  and once and a while even his mother has a comment or two to make.   He flashes back in time from the times of the Japanese Invasion of Manchuria (where someone very important to him may have been killed-maybe his brother or stepbrother), to the period right after the Emperor of Japan in August of 1945 came on the radio and advised the Japanese people he was not a god .   As conveyed indirectly in The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears   this affects the narrator and the Japan as a culture much as if the Pope were to say he had been advised by God to inform the people of the world that Christianity was a fraud.    Perhaps the impact was worse as the Emperor of Japan was seen as divine himself.   He himself was seen as God, not God's messenger.     The more one believes in old ways the harder is becomes to accept new ones.

Through out the narrative we hear about "a certain person" who may be the narrator's brother or step- brother.   He may have died a hero's death in Manchuria or he may be a deserter hiding away while plotting to kill the Emperor.   Just to muddy the waters a bit more, the Emperor may also be confused at times with the narrator' s father.   He seems never to have known his father.   Here is how the narrator sees his cancer, real or not

"When he began to feel cancer growing in his body cavity with the vigor of fermenting malt...his cancer appeared to him as a flourishing bed of yellow hyacinths or possibly chrysanthemums bathed in a faint, purple light."

Everything matters in this narrative.   It seems as carefully crafted as  a work of Flaubert.    Hyacinths grow with extreme rapidity and chrysanthemums are sacred  to the Emperor.      

Here are some words from the administrator  about another chrysanthemum

"blind to all things  in reality but the colossal chrysanthemum topped with a purple aurora illuminates the 

darkness behind his closed lids more radiantly than any light he has ever seen". 

Maybe we know now why he wears underwater goggles with cellophane on them.

Part of the story is about the narrator's hatred of his mother which seems to stem either from her preference for his brother or issues with the narrator's never seen by him father.   We learn enough about the narrator to partially reconstruct his interior world.

"My mother was isolated...from the days those ashes returned...she began to ignore every man, woman and child in the valley even when they were right under her nose.   Which left me, a kid to run around the valley..collecting our rations ...and making sure a certain party, who was gradually becoming obsessive over his food, had enough to eat."     

I cannot really begin to convey the strange and wonderful qualities of this work.   Imagine if Rabelais (Oe was a student of French literature and philosophy at the University of Tokyo), Jean Paul Sarte and William Burroughs collaborated on a work right after eating some very bad blow fish and you have an idea of what 

 The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears   feels like as you read it.   

This book is about a lot of things and it is about itself.   It is about loss of faith, feelings of profound loss,

survivor's guilt,   and the destruction of old values.   We feel the effects of the war everywhere.

The Japanese culture provided  no role models or cultural archetypes to help them cope with what could not happen, total defeat.   

There is a long established literary tradition of using the insane to say what cannot be accepted by those in fully sunlit worlds.    The narrator of  The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears has very deep roots in western culture.    His ancestors were in the plays of Euripides, his great grandfather was Dostoevsky's  underground man,   he speaks through Crazy Jane.   Oe has stated that he has come to understand the meaning of his own works through reading the poetry of William Butler Yeats.   

I do not mean to convey  that The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears is a closed work that cannot be enjoyed or even followed without great effort.   It can be enjoyed just as a narrative of a crazy person.  As such we will pick up a lot about the aftereffects of the war on Japan.    We will see how the Japanese people felt when they heard the Emperor speak on the radio, and we will learn something about the home front in rural Japan.   The book is also funny-imagine the very straight laced executor of the narrator's estate being threatened with the loss of his work as administrator of the narrator's estate (who appears to have nothing to pass along anyway and probably is not going to die soon either) by a man in underwater goggles.    

My  judgment is that Oe is as deep as the Russians and as careful as Proust and Flaubert and knows as much about people as Dickens.  

Added note-since I first wrote this post, I read lots more work by Oe and I think he belongs among the great writers of the world.   I think it took a lot of courage and honesty on his part to acknowledge Yeats as one of his masters rather than refer to Japanese antecedents.   Given that Yeats was heavily influenced by the great Indian writer  Rabindranath Tagore who I will post on next for this event we can see a circle from Asian to Western Nobel Prize Winners.   Given the powerful influence of Oe on Japanese literature we can see how the writers of Irish stories are shaping even now the worlds of people who have never even heard of them.  

I thank who ever reads as far down as here. 

Mel u

The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe

The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe  (2010, 479 pages,  2826 KB, translated by Deborah Boehm)

My Prior Posts on Kenzaburo Oe

The Changeling is Kenzaburo Oe's most recent work.     Oe (1935, Japan) won the Nobel Prize in 1994.   This is the 16th work my Oe I have read and posted on since I began my blog in July, 2009.   I feel a bit sad as I think I have now read all of his translated works.     Obviously I hold Oe's work in the highest esteem and greatly enjoy it.   In Norwegian Wood there is a scene where the central male character is talking about a book store a family member owns.   He says it is just a place to buy simple books that ordinary people can read, not Tolstoy or Kenzaburo Oe.    Oe has said that The Changeling is his last book.   (It is my understanding there are several untranslated as of yet works of fiction which may come out in English one day.)

As I started to read The Changeling  I hoped so much I would find it to me a great work worthy to perhaps be the final work of a great writer.  I thought what will I do if instead it is a major disappointment like 1Q84 was?    I do not think I could bring myself to saying anything negative about a writer I love as much as Oe and I am glad to say that The Changeling is a great masterwork.   It deals with many of the same themes as his other works and like many of them is based on his own life experiences.    

Oe's brother-in-law was a very successful film director.  In 1997 he committed suicide through jumping out of a window.   The book is about the narrator's attempt to come to terms with the death of a close friend of his, a very well known movie, director, by suicide.  The friend has left behind a series of audio tapes for the narrator, called Kogito.   Kogito is a world famous author with a son with a birth defect limiting his mental capacities who nevertheless become a composer, just like Oe.   Kogito becomes obsessed with trying to understand why his brother-in-law, the proverbial man with everything, decided to end his own life.  The book is essentially a series of reactions to the tapes.   Oe is as deep a writer as one will find and the book reflects this in the thoughts of the narrator.  

As I read this work there was something that did make me wonder a bit about why it was in the book.   Just as some people were put off a bit by 1Q84's inclusion of extensive descriptions of the body of a 17 year old female and descriptions of sex with her by a much older man there is a section of very graphic  very erotic explicit descriptions of the movie director, in his late 50s, having a limited sexual encounter with a 17 year old girl.   Some things are subject to cultural relativism and the age of consent in Japan is lower than in the USA or the Philippines so perhaps this is socially acceptable behavior but to me it made the movie director seem, foolish, predatory, perverted, and a bit evil.   No reflections like this are made by the narrator who, if he reflects Oe's age, is in his 70s.   Are beautiful young girls just another perk of being a movie director, am I overreacting because I have three teenage daughters or is there another meaning to all this?   Or does sex simply sell  books?   I will say it is better done than the sex in 1Q84.

I do not recommend this as a first Oe.  For those into his work, I for sure endorse it.   I actually would suggest that all of his work be read in order written.    To me there is no bad Oe!

Mel u

The Pinch Runner Memorandum by Kenzaburo Oe

The Pinch Runner Memorandum by Kenzaburo Oe ( 1976, 251 pages)
"Sometimes the Heart of a Turtle"  (1964, 8 pages-short story)
"The Atomic Bomb, Nuclear Energy, and Japan" (2011, two pages-essay)

Oe in French Surrealistic Mode

A Post Jarry Look at Oe

The Reading Life Kenzaburo Oe Project

Japanese Literature on The Reading Life

The Pinch Runner Memorandum by Kenzaburo Oe (translated by Michiko and Michael Wilson) is perhaps the most experimental of Oe's Novel(1935-Japan-Nobel prize 1994-there is background information on Oe in my prior posts on his works).  Recently I read for the first time Ubo Roi by Alfred Jarry, a founder of French Surrealism.    As I read The Pinch Runner Memorandrum (my 15th by Oe) I was struck by how much of it seems almost made possible by the artistic liberation brought about by Alfred Jarry and other French writers.   A lot of the book is about a character called "The Patron" who seems straight out of Ubo Roi.  Oe is perhaps the most "French" of contemporary Japanese writer.    There are two political peeks in Japanese literature, on the right is Mount Mishima and the left is Mount Oe.    I see much more than I did two years ago when I first began to read Japanese literature that these two writers react to each other in their works.   Much of Oe is a mocking of the cultural dictates of Mishima and his devotion to the Bushido code.   I think Oe can be perfectly well appreciated without knowing this but my realization of this has taken me, I think, deeper into both writers.   

The Pinch Runner Memorandum deals directly with the two central issues in Oe's work and his personal concerns.   Oe's personal life has been dominated by the birth of his learning impaired brain damaged son.   His political thinking was shaped by his reaction to the atomic bombs dropped on Japan during WWII.    In a chaotic blend of styles and techniques Oe blends these two themes into an absurd plot centering on a cult that plans to use nuclear terrorism to enforce their values on Tokyo.   Let us hope Oe is not a prophet.   

Here are some very French absurdest lines-(all from just one page-225)

"Simple.   They were basically scared.    They can't approach a man as terrifying as Big Papa without costumes, without painted faces...Able official turned to Dog Face and they both burst out laughing...But once they get going so that the merriment

can start percolating, they'll crack the audience up, so they will join in the laughter themselves..."

Like Jarry, Oe is letting us see the absurdity behind government.   Big Papa is Napoleon, he is The Emperor, General Hirohito or MacArthur, or Alexander.    Oe, I think, also is explicating the origins of religion.   

I really enjoyed The Pinch Runner Memorandum.   I do not see this as a good "starter" Oe.   Once you have read a few of his better known works then I think you will be in a better position to appreciate this novel.   

"Sometime the Heart of a Turtle" is a simple short story sort of on the plot lines of the Karate Kid movies.    If you are an Oe fan, you might as well read it online HERE.

"Atomic Power, Nuclear Energy, and Japan" (from The New Yorker) is the bare bones of Oe's opposition to Nuclear power and his reaction to the implications of the recent earth quake and Tsunami as it touches on these issues.    Many, maybe most people, will  not fully agree with his views but they are worth pondering.  

I have two Oe novels to go in my plans to read all of his translated works.   I think I will wait until 2012 to start them.   Somehow I do not look forward to completing this project.   

Do you see Jarry in Oe?    There is a reference in The Pinch Runner Memorandum to Jean Paul Sartre being a script writer for the movies of Luis Bunuel, which I take as a kind of tip off to us.   It does make me a bit nervous how obvious Oe is making all of this for us.   Probably there are deeper layers in Oe still to be reached.   

Mel u

An Echo of Heaven by Kenzaburo Oe

An Echo of Heaven by Kenzaburo Oe (1989 in Japanese, in English 1996, 204 pages, translated by Margaret Mitsutani)


The Reading Life Japanese Literature Project


My Posts on Kenzaburo Oe


The Japanese Literature 5 Reading Challenge


The Reading Life Guide to Japanese Historical Novels


An Echo of Heaven is my 14th work by Kenzaburo Oe (1935-Japan-Nobel Prize 1994-there is background information on Oe in my prior posts).    It is my goal to read all of the translated fiction of Oe (there is a lot of untranslated work).   By my count I have three novels to go.  

Obviously I like and admire Oe a great deal.   I have posted quite a bit on him on prior occasions so I will just talk very briefly on An Echo of Heaven.    


An Echo of Heaven is one of the most overtly "philosophical" of Oe's works.   It is the story of a woman whose two handicapped sons committed suicide.   It focuses on her attempt to make senses of and cope with the impact of this event on her life.  It is not what I can call an "open or easy read" compared to some of his other books.    If you are into Oe you will for sure love this book.  

An Echo of Heaven is a strange book.    It is partially told in long letters from the woman whose sons killed themselves, Marie Kuraki, to the narrator of the story who has agreed to write a book about her to be released in conjunction with a movie a friend of the narrator is making about her.    Much of the novel is set among Japanese living in rural Mexico, some went to escape living in post WWII Japan.   Marie lives there and has become a saint like figure to the Mexican agricultural workers.    She has also joined a religious cult whose leader is called "big daddy" and she is described as looking like "Betty Boop", an American cartoon character.  She writes very long  letters(10 + pages) about her involvement with the religious cult.   I think this is part of Oe's account of the nature and origin of religion.    Marie seems at times to throw to her self into a lot of sexual activity, a lot of drinking and meaningless activities in an effort to cope with the death of her sons.   One of them was in a wheel chair, both were mentally handicapped (as is one of Oe's children). They agreed to kill themselves.   One boy pushed his brother out into the ocean in his wheel chair and then drowned himself.   The reasons for this are not made super clear and there is no indication Marie is at fault.  

The more I think about it, the more I feel this is among the very deepest most amazing of Oe's work.    It is near R rated in parts (I would have to say the sex scenes in Oe are often more about power than pleasure, more about using sex to drive thought out of your mind.).    There is a big symbolic import to having the novel set among Japanese living in Mexico (and the USA) and the narrator and Marie both characterize Mexican men as aggressive macho types and the women as  used to a harsh life.      Marie went to Mexico to help rural Mexicans.    Oe also taps into the religious beliefs of the pre-Colombian residents of Mexico and the effect of Catholicism on the lives of the Mexicans.

The narrator of this story is very into the work of Flannery O'Connor and I was very glad I have recently begun to read her work.    In one really enjoyable scene the narrator goes into a Mexico City bookstore and buys up all of their works by O'Connor.   He asks the clerk if  they sell a lot of her work.    She says no not really but every once and a while someone will come in and buy all her work.    (Probably there have been dissertations written on the Oe/O'Connor connection.)
The narrator is also into Yeats, Blake, Balzac and a few other western Canon status writers but it is O'Connor that is most important here.    I think one reason I am drawn to Oe is that he does talk deeply about authors I love in his work.   To me it speaks to the depth of Oe that it is not simply that he shines a light on Yeats, Blake and O'Connor but they do so on him as well.  

Some readers of Oe who want to shy away from seeing him as an atheist try to see him as thinking along the same lines as the Romanian philosopher  Marcea Eliade.   I think this is a false almost wishful thinking reading of Oe and represents a shallow understanding of his work.   I always think back to his Hiroshima  interview with an elderly woman whose whole family were killed in the atomic bomb attack and who was suffering from radiation burns.    He said he (in Hiroshima Notes-a work of nonfiction) that he never admired the courage of anyone more than when he saw she was facing this horror without religion.  

An Echo of Heaven is a very interesting novel that displays almost the full range of Oe's themes.     This novel is out of print but I bought a copy for just a few dollars on Amazon.   The next Oe work I read will be The Pinch Runner Memorandum.

Mel u

17 by Kenzaburo O 大江 健三郎

17  by Kenzaburo Oe (1963, 73 pages, translated 1996 by Luk Van Haute)




Kenzaburo Oe

Japanese Literature 

Kenzaburo Oe (1935, Uchiko, Japan-1994 Nobel Prize for literature) is on my read everything they have written (or is translated) list.    By my count, he has 14 works of fiction translated into English.   I have read 12 of them so far.   Obviously I greatly admire and enjoy his work.    (There is background information on him in my prior posts for those interested.)

Yukio Mishima occupies the  right peak of Japanese  WWII literature, Oe the left.   17 is in many ways a condemnation of the typical hero of a Mishima novel.    The prototypical Mishima hero (such as found in The Torrents of Spring and A Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea) is a young man who has just found out the adults in his world do not live up to the ethical standards he learned in school.   He is outraged and feels a call to action even to murder the adults who he feels have betrayed him.   At the same time he seeks desperately a new standard bearer to give him hope.   If this sounds to you  like the political scenario that lead to Fascism you are on target to understanding why Oe is so diametrically opposed to the Mishima model of  Japanese history.  (Mishima is also on my read everything list.)

17 is a very left wing (I use these terms to refer to Japanese who oppose the rearming of Japan, the glorification of  the Emperor, the acceptance of nuclear protection  from the USA,  the use of nuclear power, the Samurai way (a slave's code-sorry just how I see it) and any attempt to cover up Japan's role in WWII.   Oe has been sued several times by right wing organizations.   Most recently for saying that Japanese leaders on Okinawa attempted to propagandize local citizens into suicide once they saw the Americans would take the island.

The central male character in 17  has just turned 17 and he knows about the American magazine of that name.  To him it represents all that is bad with Japan in 1960.   He sees a country selling itself for consumer goods.    As an late adolescent, he conflates  his sex drive with his desire to return Japan to old ways.   In part this may be the result of him simply feeling left out because he lacks the means to buy the items he repudiates.  

In one very brilliant scene, our lead character visits a massage parlor.    The woman who will take care of him as an ear missing and her face has been severely damaged.    She is a few years older than he is and clearly hates being a sex worker.    One of  the dominant themes that fueled the ideological fires of the post WWII Japanese right wing was the wide spread of prostitution which they felt degraded Japanese women (or in reality when the customers were American service men they felt it was a direct affort to their manhood).    The young man is very repelled by her appearance and feels guilty as he knows she has suffered war injuries.   No Japanese will marry her now.     He also understands he is violating his own code driven by his animal needs.    He concludes he should commit suicide in an attack on what his right heroes speak against.    Of course there is an excellent chance they are the owners of the massage parlor or at least frequent customers.

On one level  17 is a political novel, on another it is a coming of age story about a confused young man growing up in a country whose belief structure (really there religion) was destroyed when when they were defeated in WWII and their Emperor said he was just a man.    As I am starting to see it, this theme is a near dominant one in post WWII Japanese literature:  what do you do when your value system is totally destroyed and is revealed to you as a vicious joke at your expense.

17 should for sure be on the reading list of those who admire Oe.     It is out of print but can be bought for under $5.00 online.

So far I have not read or posted on many Japanese short stories because I did not have print media or links to works in this Genre.   I now have solved this problem and once the Japanese Literature 5 Challenge begins I will be frequently posting on Japanese short stories.  


Mel u

J by Kenzaburo Oe-大江 健三郎

J by Kenzaburo Oe  -大江 健三郎 (1963, 127 pages,  translated by Luk Van Haute)

Link to all my Kenzaburo Oe Posts

Link to all my Posts on Japanese Literature

It has been eight months since I read and posted on Kenzaburo  Oe and that is way too long for me.   Oe (1935-Japan-Nobel Prize 1994) is on my "Read Everything I can List".    J is the 13th of his works I have read so far.   I think this leaves me five or six works still to go (it is my understanding that less than half  of his fiction has so far been translated)   There is background information on Oe in my prior posts for those interested.

J  is one of Oe's first novellas.     Oe is one of the very greatest of living writers in all the world.   Numerous other writers sell many more books than Oe but no Japanese author is as respected.     His image among those who do not really know his work is of an ultra-serious author whose work should be approached only when in a properly reverent state of mind.    His work is a world class treasure and in the right frame of mind it can be a lot of fun.    Oe is shunned in some quarters of Japan for his complete opposition to the militaristic activities and the state of mind that lead the Japanese into WWII.    

J  is a very funny near x-rated book that centers on three men, one sixty, one thirty or so and one eighteen that ride the very crowded Tokyo commuter trains at rush hour wearing nothing but a trench coat and shoes.    They bring themselves to orgasm by rubbing up against women train riders.    J goes into graphic details as to how they do this.    It details the reaction of their victims (not everyone realizes what is going on) and the reaction of others on the train when they become aware of what is going on.   (I guess  this is a world wide issue-there are female only cars on the commuter trains here in Manila)

We get to know the central character J pretty well before he decides to cruise the trains and subways.    There are very openly described sex scenes and descriptions of the nude bodies of young women in J.    It is kind of a boy's fantasy book in that the women in the novel are all beautiful and all eager to have sex with anyone.   J's wife is a film maker.   There is a lot of unconventional sex acts in J, besides the ones on the train.    I think some readers will be put off a little by the ages of the women in the book and the way they are depicted.    Any mention of a woman is sure to be followed by a description of her breasts and her sexual availability.   A lot of the time the women in J sit around naked just because they feel like it.

OK maybe you think J might be fun but what is so profound about a bunch of subway perverts?      Is this how you get the Nobel prize?    Under the weird behavior and sex antics this book is a deep study of aloneness,  transcendence, crowds,  the collapse of values of an old world culture, and it is deeply about how we feel most alive while fixed on that which can destroy us.  

J  might not be liked by a lot of readers for its seeming treatment of women.    It is harsh and portrays some very ugly attitudes.   One woman, who sees what is happening to her on the subway, is described as being so ugly she should be honored to have any kind of male attention.    She has a growth on her head which is so disfiguring that J says the woman should thank him for bothering with her instead of carrying on and screaming like she has been in physically hurt.  J and his two cohorts tell themselves that none of the women are actually hurt, and in their perceptions, some of the women seem to find it quite thrilling.

There are some unanswered questions in the novel.   The biggest one concerns the eighteen year old subway pervert (he sees himself as doing this to seek inspiration for a great poem he will one day write).   I was left wondering whether or not he tossed a very young girl in the path of a train or whether or not he rescued her.   In a very interesting introduction to the book (it comes with another of Oe's early short novels, 17),  Masao Miyoshi  suggests Oe is having fun with the youthful suicidal  heroes in the works of Mishima-I can see this also.)

I have three more Oe books on hand to read and review.   When I complete these I will have read sixteen of his works.    I may do a Reading Life Getting Started with Kenzaburo Oe Guide then.  

J  is out of print but can be found on Amazon.com, sometimes for less than $5.00.  17 is in the same book so it is a fair value.   The print is large and the production value is high.

If you love Oe and do not mind (or if you like it, go for it) r/x rated descriptions of sex then you will for sure like this book.   If you just pick it up  at random to read while on the subway (OK I could not help it) to work, you might at first honestly and fairly ask "what  is so profound about subway perverts?".    I think when you can begin to answer that question, you are on the way to "getting" Oe.  

The next Oe I post on will be 17.    I will also soon begin posting on many short stories by Japanese authors.  I will wait until the Japanese Literature V Challenge begins July 1, 2011 to  begin.      Japanese literature is one of my reading passions and it will be a permanent feature of my blog.    Like my other interests, sometimes it will seem to dominate my blog, sometimes it may seem I have totally moved on.   I have found over the years that new interests deepen my understanding of old ones, they do not end them.



Mel u

"The Silent Cry" by Kenzaburo Oe

The Silent Cry by Kenzaburo Oe  (1967-trans 1974 by John Bester-274 pages)

A  year ago I am sad to say I had never heard of Kenzaburo Oe.   Now, after having read and posted on four of his novellas, five novels, a work of non-Fiction on Hiroshima survivors, and a collection of short works by atom bomb survivors selected and edited by Oe I consider him one of the great literary artists of the post WWII period.   I see him as creating   original wisdom, something I would say of very few writers or thinkers.  Samuel Johnson comes to mind here.    The wisdom of Oe is that of a world turned inside out on itself, that of Johnson is of a world sure of itself.   The best of Oe feels not so much written as discovered.    Oe (1935) won the Nobel Prize for literature in  1994.     He is a towering figure in contemporary Japanese literature.   In a revealing scene in Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami the lead character says his family owns a simple neighborhood book store that sells popular books, not "Tolstoy or Oe". 


The Silent Cry centers on two brothers who return after WWII to their ancestral home town  in a village in rural Japan.    The village is now dominated by a Korean businessman ironically called "The Emperor".     One of the brothers has a mentally handicapped son (this is a frequent theme in the work of Oe and is a large factor in his own life) and The Silent Cry shows how he deals with this.   This is the first of the works of Oe I have read in which we see the effects  the birth of a mentally handicapped child has on the wife who is depicted as now very promiscuous and a lover of whiskey.


One of the brothers tries to come to understand why a long time friend had killed himself.    The other brother tries to lead the local youths in a rebellion against the domination of the Korean.    There is a lot of violence in this work and graphic sexual scenes.   I recommend this book to anyone who has read some of the better known works of Oe and enjoyed them.    
To me the work of Oe is a great world class cultural treasure.


Mel u

"Somersault" by Kenzaburo Oe

Somersault by Kenzaburo Oe (570 pages, 1999, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel)

Somersault is the 11th work of Kenzaburo Oe (1935-) on which I have posted since I first discovered him last year.   Oe won the Nobel Prize in 1994.    He is a towering figure in contemporary Japanese literature.   In a revealing scene in Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami (which I am currently reading) the lead character says his family owns a simple neighborhood book store that sells popular books, not "Tolstoy or Oe".

Somersault is Oe's longest book by far, being twice as long as most of his prior novels.  (The Japanese novel as a rule seems shorter than typical American or English works.)    I think it is not nearly as widely read as some of his earlier books.   The reviews of it on Goodreads.com are more mixed than those for nearly all his other works.    As far as I could find there are no prior book blog posts on it.    Unlike many of his other works, there is little of an autobiographical nature in this book.   

Somersault is a strange kind of book.   I think most of those who do not like or "get" it are trying to hard to see it as a novel purely in the European tradition and this causes a failure of understanding.   I have talked about a similar matter in my post on The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea by Yukio Mishima.  

To get the flavor of this work, imagine Samuel Beckett writing a Kabuki play about the origin of religion with characters with names like "Patron", "Guide" and "Dancer" intended for an audience as cultured in the Japanese tradition as James Joyce and Ford Madox Ford are in the western.   Then your throw in some sex scenes (hetro and otherwise) worthy of Henry Miller just for fun.   Add in a terrorist plot and you get a bit of the idea.  

The book centers on a religious cult led and begun by Guide and Patron.   Ten years ago they did what is referred to as a somersault in which it was announced that the fundamental provisions of the religion which they then advocated and created were a deliberate fraud and that their religion was created for purely self seeking reasons, among them to have sex with adoring believers.   Now it is decided to revamp the religion (many of its thousands of followers-the figure is given as about 30,000) never accepted the literal truth of the somersault and saw it as a kind of revelation.    The religion of Guide and Patron is not an offshot of Christianity but they make use of Christian imagery in describing their beliefs.   Some try to see Guide and Patron as Antichrists-the response (one wonders if the play on words is as close in Japanese) is that they are antechrists.   They are making the way for the true God or his earthly representative.   The suggestion is there must be many antechrists and the true Christ will come only after there are many anti and ante Christs.   The leaders of the religion feel they will do best (some of the leaders are at least partially venal in their motives, others are true believers) if they can create a state of terror and chaos in society through terrorists acts.   They plan a spectacular act of terrorism that reminds us of the subway attacks in Tokyo.   A lot of Somersault is about the nature of religion and how religions get started.   Meaning to offend no one, it can almost be seen as a a fun house mirror account of the origins of several of the worlds major religions.  We have Guide who receives what some see as hallucinations and others see as divine revelations.   He is surrounded by followers of varying degrees of devotion and he dies a kind of martyr's death.   His word is then spread by Patron, sort of the Peter of his religion.   I think Oe choose to model his religion on that of Christianity as the way in which Christianity originated is central to the reasons to believe it.   Somersault can be see as a mockery of religion in general.    I recall in Oe's non-fiction work Hiroshima Notes his tremendous admiration for an elderly female bomb survivor who was badly injured and who lost many family members in the blast.  Oe saluted her for her ability to face what happens strongly without the crutch of a faith to prop her up.   

I recommend Somersault to those who have read at least 5 of his other works first and really liked them.   I would not advise anyone to make it their first Oe.    I understand why some do not like it, mainly for the fact that none of the characters are really developed much (this again comes from it being seen wrongly  as a purely European Novel).   Some will see it as a general attack on religion  and are probably right in thinking this.    I see Somersault as a very serious powerful  work and one of the major books of the post WWII Japanese novel.    

"A Personal Matter" by Kenzaburo Oe

A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe (1964, translated by John Nathan , 157 pages)

Six months ago I am sad to say I had never heard of Kenzaburo Oe.   Now, after having read and posted on four of his novellas, two novels, a work of non-Fiction on Hiroshima survivors, and a collection of short works by atom bomb survivors selected and edited by Oe I consider him one of the great literary artists of the 20 the century.   I see him as creating  wisdom much as I see Samuel Johnson as doing.     The wisdom of Oe is that of a world turned inside out on itself, that of Johnson is of a world sure of itself.   The best of Oe feels not so much written as discovered.  

A Personal Matter is the most popular of the novels of Oe.    The central character Bird is very hard to like, in part because it is hard not to see yourself in him.    His estranged wife has given birth to a son who seems to have a severe birth defect resulting in terrible brain damage.    Bird secretly wants his son to die but he must go along with the doctors who say they can possibly operate on him once he gets stronger and save him.    Bird is not gratified by this as the odds are very high that the child will be severely handicapped mentally.    Much of the few days in the life of Bird we see him trying to escape from thoughts pressing in on him that he knows are a violation of acceptable morality.   He wants very much to go on a trip to Africa and he spends a lot of time thinking about this.   He indulges in a great deal of sexual activity with an ex-girl friend that he care little about, he drinks too much, he gets fired from a job he does not like,  and shows little real interest in anything.   He does love the poetry of William Blake.   

A Personal Matter is saturated with animal references and metaphors.   I did an informal count as I was reading the novel and there are about 150 such references.

The meagerness of her fingers recalled chameleon legs..the toad like rubber man rolling the tire down the road....Bird stared for an instant in the numerous ant holes in the ebonite receiver...the glass chatter at the bottle like an angry rat...like a titmouse pecking at millet seeds..like an orangutan sampling a flavor..Bird and Himiko exchanged magnanimous smiles and drank their whiskey purposefully, like beetles sucking sap..whiskey-heated eyes dart a weasel glance...

There are numerous references to sea urchins, grasshoppers and shrimp.   Some of the animal references are amazing in their cleverness and all of them made me see more deeply into the world projected by Oe.   (Oe  has a brain damaged son.)  

A Personal Matter is a very intense work.   Once you realize the central character Bird wants his son to die it is hard to like him and also hard to admit we do not understand why he feels that way.    The novel is very explicit sexually.    Attitudes toward suicide are considered briefly.    A Personal Matter kept me in suspense throughout.   I wanted to learn what would happen to the child and how things would turn out among Bird, his wife, and his girlfriend.    Oe is not afraid to look a monster in the face.   His work can help us do the same and if it turns out one of those monsters is buried within ourselves and our mythic past then at least we know it.  

The next work of Oe that  I will read will probably be Somersault (1999).   This is Oe's longest work and departs from his autobiographical mode.   It centers on a religious cult.   Oe has just had his latest novel, The Changeling published in English by Grove press.   Oe has said he will write no more novels and with the publication of this work he sees himself as ready for death.   

Here is a link to all of my Japanese literature posts.

Mel u