Kenzaburō Ōe

• Born: January 31, 1935
• Birthplace: Ōse, Shikoku, Japan
• Died: March 3, 2023
• Place of death: Japan

Biography

Kenzaburō Ōe (oh-ay) was born in 1935 in the village of Ōse on the island of Shikoku, Japan, the smallest and most isolated of the four main islands. The third son of seven children, he was six when Japan entered fully into World War II. On August 6, 1945, when Ōe was ten years old, the United States Army dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. On August 15, Emperor Hirohito for the first time spoke on the radio in a “human voice,” announcing the unconditional surrender of Japan. This event was a defining moment in Ōe’s life. Up until then, he had been taught, like all Japanese schoolchildren, to fear the emperor as a god and to promise to die for him if he were asked. Every day his turn came to be called to the front of the classroom and be asked: “What would you do if the emperor commanded you to die?” Trembling, Ōe would reply, “I would die, Sir. I would cut open my belly and die.” So the truth of the emperor’s divinity, as Ōe had been taught it, was declared a lie. He felt betrayed, and his anger became his motivation as a writer as he witnessed the suffering of many Japanese people who were affected by the war.

In 1954, Ōe entered Tokyo University, where he majored in French literature. While there, he published his first story in the student newspaper and received the May Festival Prize for it. Ōe’s first commercially published story, “Shisha no ogori” (1957; “Lavish the Dead,” 1965), missed the coveted Akutagawa Prize by one vote, but he did win that prize the following year for his acclaimed story “Shiiku” (1958; “The Catch,” 1966). Ōe was a brilliant student of language and philosophy, but he kept to himself. Withdrawn by nature and ashamed of his provincial accent and his stutter, he remained a loner. He lived in a rooming house near the campus, where at night he set about pursuing his writing career in earnest.

Ōe’s first novel, Memushiri kouchi (1958; Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, 1995), reflects his provincial background and was favorably compared with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954). His next novel, Warera no jidai (1959; our age), brought the wrath of the critics down on Ōe’s head. Critics deplored the bitter pessimism and honesty of the book, which was published at a time that was being heralded as a bright, new beginning for Japan’s reemergence from the devastation of World War II.

In February, 1960, Ōe married, and later that year he traveled to Beijing, China, as a representative of young Japanese writers. In 1961, he traveled to the Soviet Union and Western Europe. His fascination with European culture has been lifelong. In June, 1963, his first son, Hikari, was born with serious brain damage. Devastated, Ōe put everything else aside and wrote Kojinteki na taiken (1964; A Personal Matter, 1968), for which he won the Shinchosha Literary Prize. The baby boy, whom he called “Pooh,” drastically altered his world. He describes his anguished relationship with the child in Warera no kyōki o ikinobiru michi o oshieyo (1969, 1975; Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness: Four Short Novels, 1977).

While Hikari was growing up, a strong, intensely private bond developed between father and son. In a strange and painful way, Ōe and this fragile, deformed child became each other’s best friend, embracing each other as if each carried the key to the other’s destiny. Shortly after Hikari was born, Ōe ordered two gravestones to be placed side by side in the cemetery in his native village, for he was convinced that when Hikari died, he too would die.

In the summer of 1965, Ōe traveled to the United States for the first time to participate in the Kissinger International Seminar at Harvard University and to deliver a speech about the survivors of Hiroshima. He also visited Hannibal, Missouri, home of Mark Twain, whose Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) was a major influence on Ōe’s work. In 1967, Ōe published Man’en gan’nen no futtoboru (The Silent Cry, 1974) for which he won the Tanizaki Prize. In 1967, he also traveled to Australia, in 1968 to the United States, and in 1970 to Southeast Asia.

In 1973, Ōe published a two-volume novel, Kōzui wa waga tamashii ni oyobi (the waters have come in unto my soul), which won the Noma Literary Prize. In 1976, he taught at the Colegio de Mexico as a visiting professor. That same year he published Pinchi ran’nā chōsho (The Pinch Runner Memorandum, 1994). Ōe published a collection of short stories in 1980 and two others in 1982.

In 1989, the Belgium-based Europelia Arts Festival hosted Japan and named Ōe the recipient of the Europelia Award. Ōe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994. In the announcement of his prize, Ōe was described as an author “who with poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.” After receiving the award he published a trilogy that includes the novels The Changeling (Chienjiringu) translated from the Japanese by Deborah Boliver Boehm in 2010, Ureigao no dōji (2002; The infant with the melancholy face), and Sayonara watashi no hon yo (2005; Farewell to my books!). His novel Death by Water(originally published as Suishi) was translated by Deborah Boliver Boehm and published in 2015 by Grove Press. His writing style evolved toward the more experimental though it remains influenced by philosophy and political and social issues.

Ōe wasinvolved in antinuclear activities including publishing about the topic of nuclear disarmament. This activity increased after the 2011 tsunami in Japan that affected the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Analysis

American readers can best approach Ōe’s works through his fascination with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ōe first read the book when he was fifteen, and he was keenly affected by Huck’s pilgrimage down the Mississippi River. It was Huck’s moral courage that captured Ōe’s imagination. With the fearless determination to turn his back on the constraints of a rule-bound and racist society, Huckleberry Finn became the model for Ōe’s own heroes, who bravely assume responsibility for carving out their own destinies. As he read more American fiction, Ōe found kindred spirits in such other Americans writers as James Baldwin, J. D. Salinger, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer, all of whom were rebellious in their own ways. These writers’ young heroes possessed the independence and resolution that Ōe’s heroes realize they must acquire if they are to survive in a world caught between the collapse of the old order and the creation of the new.

Ōe’s early heroes find themselves banished from the security of childhood and thrust into a world that bears no relation to their past. The values that regulated life when they were growing up vanish in the aftermath of the atomic bomb. The postwar world they now face is a gaping hole, a blank, a terrifying nothingness. They know the penalty of surrendering to despair but are all too aware of the difficulty of solving the riddle of survival. They feel they need to cling to their anger and to employ their hostility as a weapon against bewilderment and apathy. Terrorism is a temptation. Ōe’s protagonists fantasize about throwing hand grenades into the emperor’s limousine or joining the Foreign Legion, but they cannot bring themselves to act on their fantasies. Instead, they dabble in perversions that temporarily relieve the ache but never really fill the void that causes it.

Ōe’s writing style has been the subject of much controversy in Japan. On one hand, it is refreshingly experimental, honestly brutal, and challenging; on the other hand, it can be merely undisciplined, trivial, and annoying. Ōe tries hard to avoid the tendency toward vagueness, which is said to be inherent in the Japanese language. He deliberately ignores its natural rhythms and pushes the meanings of words beyond commonly acceptable limits. To many it seems clear that he is in the process of evolving a language and vocabulary all his own, a language that can express the vitality of his imagination. There are critics in Japan who are offended by his breaking with literary tradition. They say that Ōe’s prose “reeks of butter,” meaning that he has corrupted the purity of Japanese with borrowings from European languages. To them, he offends traditional notions of what constitutes the spirit of Japanese language. This is hardly surprising, however, considering that it has always been Ōe’s intention to attack traditional values. Like Huck Finn, his heroes are searching for their identity in a perilous wilderness. It is only fitting, then, that their language is graphic and untamed.

In addition to objecting to his style, critics have expressed disenchantment with Ōe’s subject matter. While his early works were received enthusiastically, critics expressed disappointment with what followed. His stories between 1958 and 1964 are generally about the life of a college student in Tokyo, unable to fit in, aimless, politically ambiguous, morally unrestrained, and with very little hope. Critics and readers alike objected to the sordid world he portrayed, as well as to his use of explicit language. It was clear that he was far ahead of his times.

Depressed by this response but unrepentant, Ōe chose not to tone down his language but to continue to write graphically about troubled young men who wander aimlessly in dangerous territory, rootless and dispossessed, no longer innocent boys but not quite adults. The student unrest of the 1960’s had a tremendous influence on Ōe’s narratives. Suspicion of the adult world became a major theme in his works.

When A Personal Matter appeared in 1968, American reviewers responded enthusiastically to this English translation of Kojinteki na taiken. It marked the debut, in English, of a major Japanese writer whose treatment of postwar youth was rendered with uncompromising realism. In 1977, when Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness was published in the United States, Ōe was described as a brilliantly obsessive writer.

Although Ōe is not a joiner, he has deep political convictions. That he feels strongly about his role as a writer in society is apparent both in his essays and his speeches. In his speeches, he has discussed many of the sociopolitical issues, such as nuclear disarmament and Japan’s need to take a leading role on the world stage, that many people would rather politely avoid. Critics have objected to the lack of romantic love in his fiction and to the relegating of female characters to secondary roles. Defenders argue that all Ōe’s characters are more symbolic than real, and that the men stand for characteristics common to all people. While it is true that he may view the world from a masculine perspective, he does not excuse the often insensitive treatment of female characters by male ones. He uses such behavior to illustrate human failings in the larger sense.

Ultimately, Ōe’s works read like diaries of the modern soul, rudderless and adrift, stumbling about in a darkening world.

A Personal Matter

First published:Kojinteki na taiken, 1964 (English translation, 1968)

Type of work: Novel

The father of a deformed child is at first devastated but ultimately redeemed as he becomes devoted to his brain-damaged son.

A Personal Matter was the first of a series of novels whose main character is the young father of a brain-damaged child. Called Bird because of his birdlike appearance, the young father is a frustrated intellectual and unhappy husband who dreams of flying off to Africa. When Bird’s wife gives birth to a baby with a hideously misshapen head, Bird sees the baby as a threat to his dream. Convinced that the baby will not live long, Bird arranges with one of the doctors to dilute the baby’s milk, but miraculously the baby thrives on this potentially lethal diet. Overwhelmed by the infant’s instinctive power to survive, Bird resolves to devote his life to his son regardless of the cost.

The baby is not only the cause of the father’s personal anguish but also the symbol of the anguish of humanity faced with calamity. The connection between personal and universal tragedy is made at the moment when Bird, as he is about to murder the baby, hears a news broadcast announcing the Soviet resumption of nuclear testing. In a flash Bird sees the world’s destiny mirrored in his own. Whether it is one life or a million lives, the act of murder is equally evil.

The moment he perceives the connection between the baby’s fate and the fate of humanity, Bird decides he must take care of the baby. He knows the odds are against him, that he will be creating misery for himself while sustaining a life that means absolutely nothing to the world. Accepting these odds, he says to himself: “It’s for my own good. It’s so I can stop being a man who’s always running away. . . . All I want is to stop being a man who continually runs away from responsibility.” Bird does not ask what is wrong with himself or what he had done to deserve this tragedy. Instead he assumes that his fate has a purpose and that he will come to understand that purpose. With his commitment to the baby, the father embarks on a new life. His happiness will come from nurturing the life, not causing the death, of his son. Near the end of A Personal Matter, Bird gradually begins to identify with his son. At this point, he seems to be emerging from something like a trance, during which he has gained the strength to face a world intolerant of any deviation from the norm. His devotion to the baby has already begun to liberate Bird from the self-indulgence he was prey to when he saw a deformed child as merely an obstacle to his own happiness.

Bird is the first of Ōe’s heroes to reject the central fantasy of life—“pleasure with responsibility”—because he knows that morally he has no choice. In the end he learns to substitute forbearance for hope.

“The Catch”

First published: “Shiiku,” 1958 (collected in The Catch, and Other War Stories, 1981)

Type of work: Short story

A black American prisoner of war becomes a hero to the children of a remote Japanese village, only to die a tragic death.

“The Catch,” a story in the collection The Catch, and Other War Stories (1981), begins with the capture of a black American soldier whose plane has been shot down in a remote part of Japan near the end of World War II. The narrator, the older of two brothers, is given the job of keeping the black soldier (the catch) alive. Gradually the black soldier becomes an accepted part of village life as the narrator, his brother, and their best friend, Harelip, learn to communicate with him without the means of spoken language. When word arrives that the prisoner must be handed over to the army, the narrator tries to warn the black soldier who, in desperation, holds the boy hostage. In the end the black soldier is killed by the boy’s angry father, who also seriously wounds his son.

“The Catch” is Ōe’s way of expressing the shock he felt when, at the end of the war, he heard the emperor’s surrender speech on the radio and knew the emperor was not a god but an ordinary man. It is a story of the passing of the innocent world of the village in the valley and of how the war finally intrudes into the lives of two devoted brothers. In the center of this world is the catch, a powerful, black giant of a man who is worshiped by the village children. The story reaches its richest and most moving point when the narrator describes how the black soldier joins the children for a swim in the village pond. It is a celebration of summer and high spirits. Totally unrestrained, and yet totally unspoiled, the swimmers abandon themselves to the ancient ritual of cleansing and rebirth.

To the young narrator, the black soldier becomes a symbol of an uncorrupted world in which people and animals live happily together. The black soldier is even described as “a rare and wonderful domestic animal, an animal of genius.” The young narrator instinctively understands the natural rhythms of pastoral life. For a moment there is peace and harmony and joy and passion of the purest intensity. The narrator thinks that it will never end. It does end, and it is the memory of this mystical moment that makes the end all the more devastating.

“The Catch” also explores the bond between the two brothers and the way it helps the older brother survive his ordeal as a hostage. Later, it is his younger brother who is the only person who can comfort him during his convalescence. The younger brother’s innocence and caring resolve help heal the narrator, who cannot remain in despair in their presence. When the narrator comes to realize, however, how dependent he has become on his brother, he knows he must put his childhood behind him and enter the adult world.

Aghwee the Sky Monster

First published:Sora no kaibutsu aguwee, 1964 (English translation, 1977)

Type of work: Novella

A young father kills his newborn son, who returns as a phantom baby the size of a kangaroo, wearing a white cotton nightgown.

The main character of Aghwee the Sky Monster is a young composer and father who kills his newborn baby by giving him only sugar water. When the autopsy reveals that the baby had only a benign tumor, the father goes into seclusion and gradually becomes obsessed with the idea that his baby flies down from the sky and visits him. This phantom baby, described as being the size of a kangaroo and dressed in a white cotton nightgown, descends from the sky at odd times and always out of doors.

The narrator of Aghwee the Sky Monster, a young man the same age as the composer, is hired as a companion by the composer’s father, a banker who is concerned that his son is demented and will do something embarrassing or dangerous. The composer, known only as D, is the only one who can see the phantom. It soon becomes clear that the baby is D’s conscience and that it appears from the sky to torment the father with a reminder of his crime. This illusion also suggests that the father wants desperately to communicate with the child who, during its brief life, uttered only one word: “Aghwee!” In the end, the father wants to go beyond communication and actually join the baby. To the narrator, who is starting to believe in the apparition, it seems as if the baby is able to fulfill the father’s wishes. As the two men are out walking one day, the baby suddenly appears, and the father runs out into a busy intersection to pursue what to him is a beckoning figure. This is the first time the father has actually followed the baby. The father is struck by a car and killed. At this point the narrator begins to wonder if the baby is an angel of mercy or of vengeance.

The focus in this story, as in many of Ōe’s stories, is on the narrator, who begins as a skeptic and ends as a would-be believer. At the point when D runs into traffic in pursuit of Aghwee, the narrator is just about to make the leap of faith. He pulls back, however, fearing he has been misled, and at that moment he is hit in the head by a rock and suffers a serious eye injury. As D is being carried away in the ambulance, the narrator tries to get a straight answer from him, but all he gets is an ambiguous smile. Even so, he is haunted by what D has said about sacrificing his own livelihood for the sake of the child whose life he cut short. It is another example of Ōe’s concern about accepting responsibility, especially for those to whom one has given life.

Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age!

First published:Atarashii hito yo mezameyo, 1983 (English translation, 2002)

Type of work: Novel

Inspired by the poetry of William Blake, the famous novelist K attempts to redefine himself and to pass his wisdom on to his mentally retarded son Eeyore.

In Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age!, the novelist-narrator reflects on many difficult challenges facing him in life. The narrator’s career path bears many similarities with that of Ōe, who published other autobiographical novels about distressed fathers of disabled children. This novel recounts the harrowing circumstances of Eeyore’s birth (also described in A Personal Matter), when the baby was born with two brains, one protruding outside his skull that was surgically removed. The protagonist’s single-letter name alludes to Kokoro (1914), a novel by Natsume Sōseki, in which the character K impedes the path of the protagonist toward ideal love. In the same way, K’s son Eeyore provides a constant stream of funny, disheartening, and shocking statements that cause the narrator to stumble. As K attempts to understand Eeyore’s peculiar behavior, he is propelled toward new definitions of life, death, love, and human compassion.

On one of his frequent trips out of Japan, K happens to buy an edition of the Complete Works of William Blake, the eighteenth century British poet, visionary, composer, and engraver. K recalls that many years ago he had attempted his own translation of a William Blake poem in the midst of a writing project. As the father of a severely handicapped son, K feels his imagination being drawn toward the world of Blake as a means of explaining suffering and life’s ironies. Blake’s poems become a powerful subtext and running commentary on K’s life as an author and parent. Unable to sleep in his Frankfurt hotel room, K reads his volume of Blake poems, seeking comfort from the mind-numbing stress and chaos of being the parent of a mentally challenged son. Eeyore is almost twenty years old and has reached a physically intimidating size. He is a mental infant inhabiting the body of a powerful man. K fears the increasing unpredictability of his son, whose hulking presence preempts the needs of his other two children.

Looking back over his career as a writer, K recalls a promise that he would transcribe all the dominant themes of life in a manner so simple that even his retarded son could understand. Blake felt compelled to redefine the major themes of Christianity and European history. As a dutiful parent, K is obligated to leave instructions and wisdom behind him after his death. K soon realizes that this goal is impossible. Instead, K chronicles the changing directions of his imagination under the powerful influence of Blake. Each chapter of Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age! takes the title of a Blake poem such as “Let the Inchained Soul Rise and Look Out” (chapter 6).

K closely monitors Eeyore’s schooling, his attempts to work at jobs, and various disastrous accidents, such as the time a student kidnaps Eeyore and abandons him at a train station in protest of K’s liberal politics. Ultimately, Eeyore finds his true calling when he begins to write and perform classical music. The book’s culmination takes place when Eeyore rejects his nickname and refuses to join the family at dinner until they call him by his real name, Hikari, which means “light.”

Summary

By giving events in his own life universal significance, Kenzaburō Ōe broadened the scope of the autobiographical novel. In so doing, he defied Japanese literary tradition, which insisted that personal narratives be straightforward and factual. The main reason this approach works for Ōe is that his heroes are self-aware and never self-pitying. They can even be unreliable narrators at times, a device Ōe admires in Western writers. Ōe has two themes: the loss of innocence and the acceptance of responsibility. Ōe’s heroes are very modern; they begin by deceiving themselves and trying to make bargains with fate. Eventually they discover that avoiding truth is a kind of madness. Learning how to outgrow this madness becomes, ultimately, their purpose in life and their salvation.

Bibliography

Cargas, Harry James. “Fiction of Shame.” The Christian Century 112 (April 12, 1995): 382-383. Brief biographical sketch, commenting on Ōe’s theme of guilt over Japanese attraction to Western customs and rejection of their own traditions and guilt over the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, which violates the samurai code of honor.

Claremont, Yasuko. The Novels of Ōe Kenzaburo. Routledge, 2011.

Napier, Susan J. Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the Fiction of Mishima Yukio and Ōe Kenzaburō. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. An excellent, in-depth comparative analysis of key texts by both writers. The book provides great insight into the literary imagination of these two important, yet very different, writers.

Napier, Susan J. “Marginal Arcadias: Ōe Kenzaburō’s Pastoral and Antipastoral.” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 5 (December, 1993): 48-58. An intelligent critical study of the treatment of nature in Ōe’s works. Relates Ōe’s often fantastic and grotesque description of rural life to the author’s childhood at the remote margins of Japanese society. Successfully analyzes Ōe’s connection to the traditions of Western pastoralism.

Ōe, Kenzaburō. "Opinion: Hiroshima and the Art of Outrage." The New York Times, 5 Aug. 2010. www.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/opinion/06oe.html. Accessed 1 Dec. 2017.

Ōe, Kenzaburō. “Kenzaburō Ōe: After the Nobel, a New Direction.” Interview by Sam Staggs. Publishers Weekly 242 (August 7, 1995): 438-439. Ōe talks about his decision to discontinue writing fiction; discusses his lifestyle and his relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre.

Remnick, David. “Reading Japan.” The New Yorker 70 (February 6, 1995): 38-44. Recounts a meeting with Ōe, in which the writer talks about his life and art. Discusses Ōe’s obsession with his mentally disabled son in several of his stories and his place in modern Japanese culture and literature.

Swain, David L. “Something Akin to Grace: The Journey of Kenzaburō Ōe.” The Christian Century 114 (December 24-31, 1997): 1226-1229. Brief profile, discussing Ōe’s sense of native place, his sense of marginalization, and his literary cosmopolitanism; briefly discusses An Echo of Heaven and A Healing Family.

Wilson, Michiko Niikuni. “Kenzaburō Ōe: An Imaginative Anarchist with a Heart.” The Georgia Review 49, no. 1 (Spring, 1995): 334-350. Combines a good overview of Ōe’s life with a sophisticated interpretation of his literary output. Argues convincingly that the outstanding features of Ōe’s fiction are a complete rejection of evil, a tenderness for all humans, and a biting irony.

Wilson, Michiko Niikuni. The Marginal World of Ōe Kenzaburō: A Study in Themes and Techniques. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1986. An attempt at dealing with the weird, grotesque, and perverse imagination of Ōe by showing—or attempting to show—how two short stories and three novels present the relationship of a corpulent father and his mentally disabled son by establishing a unity of theme, a chronological development, and an ironic turn of events.

World Literature Today 76 (Winter, 2002). Four essays form a special section dedicated to analyzing Ōe’s recent work.

Yamanouchi, Hisaaki. “In Search of Identity: Abe Kōbō and Ōe Kenzaburō.” In The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Draws parallels between Abe and Ōe respecting their treatment of themes and mutual concern in the search for identity. The ideas of identity, authenticity, and alienation that Ōe attempts to use are Western themes stemming from the existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. Ōe seeks to graft these themes onto a Japanese culture that, although it has been rapidly modernized, still manages to maintain some strong traditions. Yet Ōe insists on using antisocial characters, whether juvenile delinquents, sexual perverts, or vicious criminals, whom he treats as “fallen angels,” while he himself dreams of a “pastoral community.”

Yamaguchi, Mari. "Nobel-winner Ōe Slams Abe, Urges Nation to Follow Germany and Quit Nuclear Power." The Japan Times, 11 Mar. 2015, www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/03/11/national/nobel-winner-oe-slams-abe-urges-nation-to-follow-germany-and-quit-nuclear-power/#.WiFz-1WnFEY. Accessed 1 Dec. 2017.

Yoshida, Sanroku. “Kenzaburō Ōe: A New World of Imagination.” Comparative Literature Studies 22 (Spring, 1985): 80-96. Ōe is presented as the leading Japanese literary reformer, who, rejecting literary elitism and high art, holds that literature should be democratic and should appeal to the masses in didactic terms. Ōe sees literature under the obligation to protest against social evils, which, in his view, have only political solutions. Hence he believes that political ideology has a legitimate place in literature.

Yoshida, Sanroku. “Kenzaburō Ōe’s Recent Modernist Experiments.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 26 (Spring, 1985): 155-164. A general view of Ōe’s innovative narrative techniques, including his characterizations, his recurrent themes, and his stylistic practices. Stylistically he is said to have attempted to wed the structure of the Japanese language to Indo-European structure. He also indulges widely in grotesque and animal imagery. His narrative techniques include scrambled chronologies and spatial narrative structure. His characterizations feature a voiceless narrator, switched identities, and a character who turns out to be the author’s Doppelgänger.