[In the following essay, Richter examines the role of shame in the short story "Sheep. "]

On the surface it is paradoxical that Ōe Kenzaburō (b. 1935), a spokesman for the Japanese New Left, admirer of Mao, and student of Sartrean Existentialism, should give thematic treatment to anything quite so traditional as the notion of "shame," a complex emotional response to a variety of situations in Japanese society. Although very much the modern writer and liberated from many of the complexes that burdened older literary figures such as Tanizaki Jun'ichirō and Mishima Yukio, Ōe, in the short story "Sheep," directly confronts the experience of shame with power, subtlety, and insight. Whereas other major Japanese writers generally deal with shame as incidental to their primary thematic concerns, only as part of the psychological makeup of their characters, Ōe pushes his creations headlong into shameful situations where reader and characters are afforded a deeper insight into the na ture of shame, and at times a full-fledged revelation oc curs in which the self is strengthened and achieves a new identity through the ordeal. The originality of Ōe's achievement in his young career lies in the fusion of shame in its traditional setting, calling for a traditional interpretation, with an understanding of shame informed and shaped by Sartrean Existentialism, with its implications for the self in the world.

In The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Ruth Benedict's very useful but at times overly abstract analysis of Japanese behavioral patterns, shame is clearly given primacy over guilt. Japanese culture is one in which shame is the major sanction for social behavior. Shame, external in nature, is opposed to the internalized conviction of sin. Shame requires an audience, either an actual audience or one that is fantasized. Furthermore, a major difference between guilt and shame is that the latter cannot be relieved by confession or expiation. Shame in Japanese culture, Benedict argues, occurs when there is a failure to balance obligations or to foresee contingencies. Benedict's analysis is applicable in large part to Japanese culture, but it dŌes not cover all the ramifications and complexities of shame which also may be present in the context of Japanese life.

Helen Merrell Lynd's study of shame [On Shame and the Search for Identity, 1958] delves into the experience more extensively. Of the many characteristics she lists for shame and guilt a good number are relevant and are applicable to Japanese culture. First of all, shame and guilt are not opposites; although linked at times, they are distinguishable. Shame is quite often visual exposure, usually physical and sexual in nature. Shame, moreover, involves the whole self, caught up in a diffused anxiety and the sense that one is put upon by life. Guilt, on the other hand, is more related to specific acts, where a transgression is involved. Nor would external and internal differentiae seem to be the crucial criteria. Although an external observer is always presumed to be present, this is not always the case in the ordinary sense of the word, for the "Other" may simply be oneself, especially where there is a failure to reach an ideal, with a resulting sense of inadequacy. This last is particularly applicable to Ōe's longer work, A Personal Matter.

In "Sheep" the structure of shame as embodied in the narrative reveals in part aspects of the above discussion, but also our knowledge of shame is further extended by the very act of communication to us through the medium of art. The story tells of a young man returning home on a bus one dark, foggy night. On the bus is a group of foreign soldiers accompanied by a Japanese prostitute. The young man suddenly becomes the object of the prostitute's attentions and as a result one of the soldiers becomes angry and forces the young man to bend over with his bare buttocks exposed. This greatly amuses the soldiers and soon other male passengers are forced to join the lineup of helpless victims. The soldiers tire of their game and finally leave the bus. One of those watching this disgraceful exhibition, a school teacher, seeks to expose the young man's shame to the public and seeks justice for the soldiers' crude conduct. The young man refuses to cooperate with the police, however, and he attempts to escape to his home and gain relief from the entire ordeal, but the teacher follows him and vows never to relent until he has learned the young man's name and has made his shame public, while bringing the soldiers to justice.

Here shame can be seen as operating on three levels, or circles, inasmuch as the experience of shame is one that envelops, surrounds the entire self and one either wishes to disappear or to break through the circle and escape from the shameful situation. The circles of shame in "Sheep" are distinct but reveal a partial overlap. One of the necessary constituents of a shameful experience is an observer with his own particular values and social status, or at least an awareness and implicit understanding of such is lodged in the consciousness of the observed, the second element in the shameful situation. The observed at least automatically assumes that the observer possesses similar values. The observed is self-conscious, inclusive of the observer, the observer existing in either fact or fantasy. The third constituent is that of the context in which the observed and the observer interact. Given the same observer and observed, but a different context, the experience of shame may be entirely absent. In "Sheep" two circles that are present at the beginning overlap almost completely. The young man is the observed in the eyes of the foreign soldiers (I will touch on the allegorical implications of this later), and he feels anger and helplessness at being exposed by them. Secondly there is the circle of observers constituted by his fellow Japanese passengers on the bus. Their perception of the situation is of course colored by their values and cultural outlook that they share with the young man; again this is within the mind of the observed, but it is also an objective fact. This is the primary experience of shame that lies at the center of the two circles. It is important to emphasize that the significance of the shameful situation bears a difference for each group. The young man is ridiculed in public, thereby not differing from a shameful situation that could be termed a traditional setting, although universal in range. The foreign soldiers, however, as perpetrators of the incident, and the existence of the school teacher, who wishes to be more than a passive observer, change the situation from what might have been left as a terrifying and incongruous experience of shameful physical exposure to another circle on a different level. But what is the qualitative difference between the two circles involving the fellow passengers and the soldiers and the third circle involving the school teacher?

The dualistic structure involving the three circles bears an imperfect analogy to the Sartrean view of consciousness, as well as implying a connection to Sartre's interpretation of shame and his somewhat less than sanguine conception of human relations [Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, 1956]. One legitimate view of Sartre's theory of consciousness is that it is dualistic: consciousness, while it is always consciousness of something, is self-consciousness. This is contrasted to reflective consciousness where the self and even shame may become the object of consciousness, but shame in its primary structure is not reflective. Sartre speaks instead of the "irruption" of the self, and the self that "haunts" the unreflective consciousness. It is shame in this primary state that the young man experiences with the observers on the bus, the passive Japanese and the active soldiers who humiliate him and the other passengers.

It dŌes not require a Sartrean interpretation of shame to tell us that this is a most disagreeable experience the young man undergŌes. But Sartrean shame suggests even more negatives. Shame is dependent on the Other, and this Other robs the self undergoing the experience of its transcendence, "enslaves" it, bringing about a state of an "original fall." One feels uneasy, always in danger. The self becomes an unknown object of unknowable appraisals, that is, of value judgments. The most terrifying part is being an object, the body symbolizing that defenseless state. We are no longer the center of our world, for the Other has robbed us of our being and placed it outside of ourselves, at the mercy of the Other in the act of recognizing ourselves as degraded, fixed, and dependent. Thus what is most surely a psychological shock to the common sense viewpoint is also an ontological trauma, if one can speak in these terms. Danger is part of our being-for-others in that we are an instrument of possibilities which are not our possibilities and we are constituted as a means to an end of which we are ignorant. This is the bridge to the second level of experience for the young man. To continue the imperfect analogy for purposes of discussion of structure, one sees that this second level corresponds to shame on the level of reflection. Different aspects afford a distance between the primary experience before the passengers and the soldiers and the young man in the hands of the school teacher at the reflective level. A major element in the primary experience of this shame is its "innocence" in the eyes of the witnesses, the victims and the victimizers.

The passengers in the front of the bus reveal a mixture of feelings, one of which is a kind of uneasy bemusement, and finally an expression of anger as they surround the "sheep" after the soldiers have left. It is perhaps their refusal to interfere that characterizes the situation as peculiarly "Japanese" and thereby traditional. They do not attack the soldiers for humiliating their countrymen, for they would not wish to form a spontaneous relationship that would ensnare them in a web of burdensome obligations. Because one of the soldiers has a knife there is the possibility of physical danger to anyone who tries to help, but their failure to act as rescuers stems from a cultural reluctance to become involved with any individual who is outside their own group. It must be recognized, of course, that the passengers in the front of the bus are not indifferent to what is occurring, although they are still passive. The victims, too, seem passive before the soldiers; their reaction at this point not differing from the onlookers in that they do not act. The school teacher, however, imbued with Western ideas of social justice and a member of an occupational group in Japan that is traditionally to the political left, demands that some action be taken. He wishes to become involved and to thrust the incident beyond the boundaries of spontaneity and to use it for calculated ends.

The soldiers, too, use the young man and his fellow victims as a means to an end: that of venting their anger and as an object of amusement. This is a constituent in the structure of shame, to become an instrument of possibilities that are not our possibilities. But what is crucial in the case of the soldiers is that the incident begins and ends spontaneously. While the humiliated victims existed as objects for them, the passengers' buttocks symbolizing their object-ness, using Sartrean terminology, the motivation for their behavior dŌes not extend beyond the simple emotions of amusement and anger, the latter, ironically, stemming from a chivalric impulse to assist a "lady" who has apparently been abused.

The school teacher perceives the victims as a means to a loftier end, a moral aim. The "innocent" spontaneity of the incident disappears as an effort is made to communicate the shame to the world at large. The teacher's desire to seek vengeance for the shame is in part a mode of communication, but the shame itself has been transformed and is now the motivation for a qualitatively different act. The teacher, however, as a part of his desire to seek justice and punishment for the soldiers, wishes to reveal to the world shame in its totality and in its unchanged state. The desire on the part of the victim to hide what has been revealed, to hide what one is at the moment, conforms to our own experience and has been pointed out by Benedict and Lynd as peculiar to the nature of shame. Any threat to this desire to remain hidden is normally an occasion for unpleasantness. Thus the teacher has done violence to the nature of shame, as one insensitive to its implications, and has oddly turned out to be the "villain" of the piece, although some readers may have divided sympathies. The desire of the school teacher to expose the young man's shame in a broader context is likewise linked to what Sartre calls l'esprit de serieux in that values are considered as "transcendent givens independent of human subjectivity." The teacher ignores human subjectivity and seeks to manipulate the young man in order to assign a value to the incident that ultimately derives from an abstraction external to the concreteness of the situation: that of social justice. We have only to recall Roquentin arguing with the autodidact that such abstractions as Youth, Maturity, Old Age, and Death do not exist [in Sartre's Nausea, trans. by Lloyd Alexander, 1959]. Although the abstraction itself is not used in the text, the bourgeois sense of Justice is most surely what the teacher represents.

The narrative texture—that is, the choice and repetition of images, and the foreshadowing function of certain imagery occurring at the beginning of the story—complements the structure outlined above. The choice of imagery, in particular, contributes to the theme of the victimized, the irrevocably insulted and injured, powerless before cruel and malicious forces. In general, the significant imagery is sub-human, creating both an atmosphere of grotesqueness when associated with character and situation and a sense of powerlessness, that events are overwhelming the passive victims on the bus. The first person protagonist refers to himself as a "beetle." The soldiers have the "moist eyes of cows." The prostitute reminds the hero of a "wet plucked chicken." The hero has his overcoat stripped off "as though they were skinning the fur off an animal." The "sheep," placed in quotation marks in the Japanese original, first occurs when the male passengers are lined up on the bus. The implication of "sheep" is clear enough for the Western reader—not only does it clearly indicate passivity, but the passengers who are humiliated become a group with a common identity. They are opposed to the others on the bus; and thus we see clearly two camps. Also, in carrying the "sheep" analogy further, the protagonist refers to his unwillingness to become the sacrificial lamb.

The author has spoken of his liking for the tightly constructed short story and "Sheep" fulfills his requirements admirably. The imagery in the second paragraph serves to adumbrate the constituents of the forthcoming incident. For example, the acne sore on the girl conductor's neck, likened to a rabbit's sex organ, suggests the erotic undercurrent that emanates from the role of the prostitute in the incident. The protagonist then trips over the teacher's coat and bumps against the buttocks of one of the soldiers, providing a glimpse of his soon-to-be tormentors and of course it will be a question, quite shortly, of the young man's buttocks that are touched and not the soldier's.

Imagery, therefore, not only creates atmosphere, but also functions structurally, as a dynamic element clustering around and anticipating attitudes and actions within the narrative. The abstract framework of the story, however, is dualistic; and this is seen in its composition, where the story naturally falls into two parts: events involving the soldiers and then when the teacher begins his attempt to impose his will on the young man. The brief stasis when the soldiers have left forms a natural hiatus before the second half of the story begins. Also, as has been suggested, the Sartrean dualistic view of consciousness may be inferred as a basis of analogy for the dualistic structure. The interplay of opposites is also seen in the Japanese vs. the foreign soldiers, victims vs. observers, passivity vs. activity, and also quite importantly in the divided sympathies of the reader. The teacher appears in a negative light, and although to a certain degree we share his moral outrage, our emotional sympathies are with the young man and the second ordeal he is forced to undergo at the hands of the teacher. The last and most pregnant pairing of opposites involves Japan vs. the outside world. The story as an allegory pointing to Japan victimized and humiliated during the Allied Occupation cannot be overlooked. But what is represented is more the psychological climate of the times rather than a political call-to-arms.