The Novels of Oe Kenzaburo

Yasuko Claremont

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134118335
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Ôe Kenzaburô was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994. This critical study examines Ôe's entire career from 1957 – 2006 and includes chapters on Ôe's later novels not published in English. Through close readings at different points in Ôe's career Yasuko Claremont establishes the spiritual path that he has taken in its three major phrases of nihilism, atonement, and salvation, all highlighted against a background of violence and suicidal despair that saturate his pages. Ôe uses myth in two distinct ways: to link mankind to the archetypal past, and as a critique of contemporary society. Equally, he depicts the great themes of redemption and salvation on two levels: that of the individual atoning for a particular act, and on a universal level of self-abnegation, dying for others. In the end it is Ôe's ethical concerns that win out, as he turns to the children, the inheritors of the future, 'new men in a new age' who will have the power and desire to redress the ills besetting the world today. Essentially, Ôe is a moralist, a novelist of ideas whose fiction is densely packed with references from Western thought and poetry.

This book is an important read for scholars of Ôe Kenzaburô's work and those studying Japanese Literature and culture more generally.

1 No way out

I wrote these stories in the latter half of 1957. The task I had assigned myself was to concentrate on the theme of confinement within closed walls as a major characteristic of life. Before then, I had concerned myself with studying French, but the theme of walls began to confine me.¹

In this passage, Ōe Kenzaburō is referring to stories such as Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, ‘Prize Stock’, ‘Kimyō na shigoto’ (‘An Odd Job’, 1957), ‘Shisha no ogori’ (‘Lavish Are the Dead’, 1958), ‘Sheep’ and ‘Fui no oshi’ (‘Unexpected Muteness’, 1958).²

A major feature of these very early stories is that they have as their background Ōe’s own childhood in the forests of Shikoku and his later experiences as a youth in the bleakness of post-war Tokyo. Forest and city counterpoint each other as settings. The stories contain deep references to Ōe’s inner life. Embedded in them are themes that continue to echo for decades in his writing: savagery and persecution, allegiance and betrayal and the struggle that can take place in human motivation between spontaneous instinct and social imperatives, between what is felt to be right and the demands of an ideology. These early novels and stories are so bleak that a turning towards spiritual renewal, in whatever form it might take, becomes a necessity. Death, violence, suicide, alienation, humiliation, coercion, political extremism—Ōe’s themes are consistently depressing. The feeling of being trapped and abandoned is unremitting. For the children and young men in these stories there is no way out; only the childhood forests of Shikoku offer temporary refuge. Yet, even in Nip the Buds, the forest is threatening in its vastness and indifference.

‘Prize Stock’

Awarded the Akutagawa Prize for Literature in 1958, when Ōe was only twenty-three years old, ‘Prize Stock’ remains one of his most compelling stories. All the incidents are seen through the eyes of a boy/narrator, who is never named. Murder, terror and betrayal bring a dramatic end to the innocence of childhood. A black American soldier, captured by villagers after his plane has crashed in a forest, is brought back into the village like an animal, shackled in a boar trap. He is imprisoned in a cellar, still shackled and chained to a post. The boy befriends him, bringing him food and, with the help of the other children, releases him once the village has been ordered by the prefectural office to keep him under surveillance. Gradually the black soldier becomes a marginal figure accepted in village life. They find him to be ‘as gentle as a domestic animal’ and ‘like a person’. The soldier repairs a broken spring in the trap and makes a present of his pipe to a one-legged official named Clerk in response to Clerk’s offer of a cigarette made of knotweed leaves. Normal life begins again. The village men return to their work, stepping around the soldier when they meet him as if he were a domestic animal; the women cease to be afraid of him; and the children surround him everywhere, shouting in amazement. To the children, the soldier is nothing less than a mythical figure, with his strangeness and huge size. Ōe describes their swimming together in language reminiscent of a fable:

When we were as naked as birds and had stripped the black soldier’s clothes we plunged into the spring all together, splashing one another and shouting. We were enraptured with our new idea. The naked black soldier was so large that the water barely reached his hips even when he went to the deepest part of the spring; when we splashed him he would raise a scream like a chicken whose neck was being wrung and plunge his head underwater and remain submerged until he shot up shouting and spouting water from his mouth. Wet and reflecting the strong sunlight, his nakedness shone like the body of a black horse… Suddenly we discovered that the black soldier possessed a magnificent, heroic, unbelievably beautiful penis. We crowded round him bumping naked hips, pointing and teasing, and the black soldier gripped his penis and planted his feet apart fiercely like a goat about to copulate and bellowed. We laughed until we cried and splashed the black soldier’s penis… To us the black soldier was a rare and wonderful domestic animal, an animal of genius. How can I describe how much we loved him?³

The next day, Clerk returns to take the prisoner away, with the village men as guards. The boy urgently warns his friend, shouting and gesticulating. Terror-stricken, the soldier barricades himself in the cellar, taking the boy as hostage and threatening to strangle him if the villagers break in. They storm the cellar, bludgeoning the soldier to death. In the mélée, the boy’s hand is smashed by a hatchet wielded by his father. Ordered not to cremate the soldier’s corpse, the villagers carry it to an abandoned mine, but soon the overpowering smell of death blankets the village, as if it were ‘an inaudible scream from the corpse encircling us and expanding limitlessly overhead as in a nightmare’.⁴ As he gradually comes to terms with his ordeal and begins to recover from his injury, the unnamed narrator realizes that his childhood is over. The experience has isolated him. Adulthood is far away but so, too, are his early life and all the pleasures of growing up in the forest. ‘I was no longer a child—the thought filled me like a revelation’.⁵

Artistically, ‘Prize Stock’ is a triumph. Ōe succeeds in his assigned task of ‘concentrating on the theme of confinement within closed walls’.⁶ To begin with, the village itself, enclosed within the forest, is a symbol of isolation and confinement. During floods, it is completely cut off. Monotony and repetition are the stuff of daily life here. The villagers are aware of the long war involving Japan but never directly experience it until the crash of an enemy plane forces the men to act. The soldier has been effectively closed in by his military duty as surely as any forest could have done. Chained by the leg to a post in a cellar, his incarceration is complete, both physically and psychologically. And his sudden descent from the sky heralded not only his own death but, for the narrator, a brutal closure to childhood. In different ways all the characters are trapped by circumstance.

‘Prize Stock’ is a classic instance of what Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as ‘one of the most universal motifs in literature’—the motif of ‘encounter connected with the breaking point of life, the moment of crisis, the decision that changes a life’.⁷ The story is constructed in a succession of rhythms counterpointing one another and building to a double crisis: the confrontation in the cellar, and the boy’s sudden exposure to an adult world of savagery and treachery. Already present in it are two major reference points that recur repeatedly over decades in Ōe’s work: the village as a microcosm of life on earth, and the confined space as a symbol of incarceration or retreat.

Commenting on the pastoral setting so evident in ‘Prize Stock’, Yamanouchi Hisaaki came to the conclusion that ‘Ōe seems to be seeking the prelapsarian world of innocence. However, such a world is unobtainable except as a transitory vision’.⁸ Susan Napier takes a somewhat similar view, arguing that ‘the overall effect left by the narrative is that of romantic pastoralism’, in which ‘romantic and mythic modes […] serve to highlight the horrors of the real world’.⁹ And certainly a case can be made to support these interpretations. The most powerful image—powerful because of its sustained paganism—is the swimming scene, quoted by all critics and scholars. The entire incident is imbued with myth. In all of Ōe’s work it is one of the few expressions of absolute joy. In their innocent delight, the children, described by Ōe as ‘little Pans’, urge the black soldier to copulate with a goat. To them, he is a fantastic mythical creature come from the heavens. And with their fear abated for the time being, the villagers regard him as an animal. ‘We will rear him’, says the boy’s father. The story is full of exact observations of forest life, often, however, with a hint of menace (e.g. ‘adders watchfully coiled among the stubborn roots’).¹⁰ In the following passage, descriptions of nature, beauty and sudden alarm combine:

All around us wild birds were singing. The upper branches of the high pines were humming in the wind. Crushed beneath my father’s boot, a field mouse leapt from the piled leaves like a spurting gray fountain, frightening me for an instant, and ran in a frenzy into the brilliant underbrush alongside the road.¹¹

Although but an insignificant detail, the predicament of the field mouse nevertheless foreshadows the calamity to come.

For all that, pastoralism remains as a background. The central theme is clear: the loss of childhood innocence brought about by violence. The opening scene is striking in its image combining primal innocence and death. The boy and his brother are scratching about in the ashes of a makeshift crematorium at the edge of the village, looking for ‘nicely shaped bones we could wear as medals on our chests’.¹² In the closing pages, after the butchery in the cellar and the stench of the soldier’s corpse enveloping the village, the boy realizes that his childhood has come to an abrupt end. Despite Ōe’s lyricism, violence and fear control the action. For the soldier, there is no escape from the uncertainty overwhelming him. He might be seen resting under a tree or walking along the cobblestone road, even swimming joyously, but the nightmare of his situation threatens to explode at any time, as it finally does in the cellar, where, howling and screaming, he covers his skull with the little boy’s hand in a last effort to save his life. So, the imprint of death is everywhere in ‘Prize Stock’. In the opening scene at the crematorium, the boy remembers seeing ‘the corpse of a village woman lying on her back with her naked belly swollen like a small hill, her expression full of sadness in the light of the flames’.¹³ And at the end of the story, he finds Clerk’s grinning corpse on a mountain slope, the result of an accident. ‘I had rapidly become familiar with sudden death and the expressions of the dead’, is his reaction.¹⁴

Ōe is able to achieve his effects through a remarkable amalgamation of realism and personal mythology. Apart from the swimming scene, there are many incidents allied to mythology. The solemn procession of adults bringing the soldier in chains out of the forest has about it the elements of ritual, and when he is taken down into the cellar it is ‘as if a ceremony were beginning’.¹⁵ The climax of his harrowing death combines realism with myth. It is as if Ōe were writing on two levels simultaneously. Of great interest also is that in describing psychological states he often uses images from nature, particularly images of cruelty. Trapped in the cellar with the soldier, and in shock at the realization of his betrayal, the boy describes his feelings: ‘I was a baby field rabbit who weakens and dies as it stares in disbelief at the metal claws biting into its foot’.¹⁶ As the soldier chokes him, he makes a feeble sound ‘like the scream of a small animal’.¹⁷ And midway through the story the entire tone of the horror to come is captured in Ōe’s description of the killing and skinning of a weasel:

A last instant of revenge in its final throes, and as the weasel’s neck was wrung it farted a horrible, terrific smell, and when the skin was laid back with a soft tearing noise at the dully gleaming tip of my father’s knife there remained only muscle with a pearly luster encasing a small body so exposed it was lewd.¹⁸

Detailed descriptions of animals trapped and slaughtered abound in Ōe’s stories. The critic, Watanabe Hiroshi, has pointed out that Ōe’s symbolic use of animals as victims is similar to Pierre Gascar’s. Watanabe Hiroshi comments: ‘Gascar found in the blind instinct of animals a means to express the uncertain existence of modern man, in other words an existence directly related to fear and blood. The role that animals play in Ōe’s stories is similar’.¹⁹

From the first, Ōe has used his fiction as a means of voicing strongly held moral positions. ‘Prize Stock’ is notable for showing the dominance which state power can exert over the sympathy that people commonly feel for one another. From the beginning, both the soldier and the villagers are seen to be complying with the laws of their respective states and the general principles of morality underpinning them. Once the soldier donned a uniform, his individuality is submerged, and his identity changed to both protector and enemy. His uniform defines him. Equally, the villagers passively comply. The imperatives of the state remain uppermost, compelling them into action and to begin hunting for the enemy. The soldier is captured and chained. Captors and captive confront each other as agents of opposed ideologies. When, however, the adults are directed to keep the soldier in the village, he is released and joins village life. Tacitly, his individuality is acknowledged, even at the most primitive level of being regarded as a strange creature to be reared. Then, when he is to be taken under guard away from the village, state power has once again intervened, reducing the group to howling murderous savages governed by blind instinct. Only one of the boys named Harelip has reacted to the situation with the clear vision of childhood. On first seeing the prisoner, Harelip shouted out: ‘He’s a black man, he’s no enemy!’²⁰ This shout from a boy, unnoticed by anyone, is the only sign of opposition to the aggressive roles adopted by the adults.

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

In Ōe’s next story, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, childhood innocence has vanished long ago, and the forest, once idyllic, is now full of menace. Nip the Buds is a pitiable story of a group of reformatory boys, outcasts already brutalized by the harshness of their lives. During wartime they are taken for their safety to a remote village where a plague breaks out. The villagers leave at night, ensuring that the boys cannot follow them by blocking the trolley exit spanning a gorge and guarding it from the other side with an armed sentinel. All but two of the boys survive. They bury dead human beings and animals alike. Despite being abandoned, and with the threat of plague ever present, the boys begin to take charge of their lives, revelling in their new-found freedom. The village is theirs. They break into houses, pillaging whatever food they can find. They catch a large pheasant and hold a festive celebration in the snow. The narrator experiences for the first time feelings of love for an adolescent girl, left behind with her dead mother, who subsequently dies from the plague. A young deserter from the Japanese Army joins them. When the villagers return, he is captured and killed. The village men then turn on the boys, intimidating them, forcing them to agree to say nothing to the authorities about their disgraceful abandonment. Only the narrator refuses to succumb. The novel ends with his escape, plunging exhausted into the darkness of the trees and undergrowth as the brutal villagers close in. Little doubt is left as to his fate.

On reading Nip the Buds, what is noticeable immediately is its structural resemblance to ‘Prize Stock’. Once again, we are taken into the life of a marginal community, where myth is interwoven with realism. Again, a soldier is hunted down in the forest, brought as a captive to the village, and killed. Violence transcends all other themes. Adults and children function as the centres of emotional engagement. The adults are without pity; the children are deceived and betrayed. And all is observed through the eyes of a child, this time an adolescent already hardened by the indifference and hostility of the adult world. At its deepest level, Nip the Buds is an attack on the powers of the State, making people subservient to its imperatives, provoking hatred and violence as weapons of self-protection. It is in this sense that the characters are ‘confined within closed walls’.²¹ The adults will continue to be oppressed, their horizons constricted. The immediate future for the reformatory boys holds only loneliness and struggle, summed up by the narrator as he is forced out of the village: ‘I was about to be banished from the cul-de-sac I had been shut up in. But outside I would also be shut up. I would never be able to escape’.²²

One of the villagers is a blacksmith. In successive sequences involving him, Ōe shows how feelings of humanity that we all share can at the same time coexist with a propensity for evil. In the beginning, the blacksmith’s behaviour towards the boy is friendly, unexceptionable. He helps the narrator’s small brother down from a truck. ‘His strong arms effortlessly lifted him down, as he laughed bashfully, tickled’.²³ In the c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Author’s note
• Introduction
• 1 No way out
• 2 Breaking free
• 3 Father and son
• 4 The silent cry
• 5 Myth
• 6 Redemption and salvation I
• 7 Redemption and salvation II
• 8 Truth and illusion I
• 9 Truth and illusion II
• 10 Friendship and brotherhood
• Notes
• Bibliography