SOURCE: "Abe Kōbō and Ōe Kenzaburö: The Search for Identity in Contemporary Japanese Literature," in Modern Japan: Aspects of History, Literature and Society, edited by W. G. Beasley, University of California Press, 1975, pp. 166-84.

[Yamanouchi is a Japanese educator and author. Here, the critic details various literary methods employed in the works of Abe Köbö and Ōe and explores thematic parallels between the two authors, including alienation, isolation, and the search for identity.]

The literary scene in Japan during the last five years or so has been eventful. The award to Kawabata Yasunari (1898-1972) of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968 brought Japanese literature into the international arena for the first time. Tanizaki Junichiro (1886-1965), who had been reputed to be a candidate for the Prize for many years, did not survive to witness the event. Kawabata himself ended his life by a rather anti-climactic suicide in 1972. This had been preceded eighteen months earlier by Mishima Yukio's (1925-70) more dramatic and ostentatious ritual suicide (seppuku). With the death of Shiga Naoya (1883-1972) we have scarcely any writer of importance left who began his career in the Taish period (1912-26). Of the writers who started working before the Second World War, Ibuse Masuji (1897-) and Ishikawa Jun (1899-) deserve special mention, but the major roles in the contemporary literary scene are played by post-war writers. Among these, we choose for discussion here two men whose choice of themes and innovation in literary methods make them particularly relevant to an understanding of modern Japan: Abe Köbö (1924-) and Ōe Kenzaburö (1935-). They are writers who have already produced important works and are likely to produce more in the years to come.

Despite the gap in their ages (Ōe being eleven years the younger), there are interesting similarities as well as differences between the two. Both are concerned with the solitude of men and women alienated from contemporary society and suffering from a loss of identity. Besides the thematic parallels in their works, Abe and Ōe agree in their deliberate deviation from the dominant trend of the pre-war Japanese novels. They are completely free from the sentimentality or self-commiseration characteristic of the 'I-novels'. Their prose style is also a mark of their deviation from the Japanese tradition. Abe's style is objective, logical and lucid. Ōe, on the other hand, deliberately distorts the traditional syntax, but is incomparable in his use of vivid imagery. Comparisons are often odious, but Abe's literary world has a closer kinship with that of Kafka and some contemporary European writers than that of his countrymen. It is also evident that Ōe is greatly indebted to and has absorbed much of Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer. . . .

The link between Abe Kōbō and Ōe Kenzaburö is evident from the latter's remark in his introduction to the selected works of Abe [in the Warera no bungaku Series, No.7, 1966]:

When I first started writing novels, there was nothing for me but to imitate Abe Kōbō. I tried my best to imitate his way of thinking, but naturally I never attained the clarity characteristic of the world he created. I soon gave up imitating him and wrote a short story. Its publication in the newspaper of the University of Tokyo marked the beginning of my literary career. Soon after that I was asked for the first time to contribute a review of The Beasts Go Homeward to that newspaper.

Abe Köbö was thus very important for me to start my career as a writer. This is still true even now when I can talk face to face with him.

Between the two writers there are parallels in more ways than one. Abe's earliest work came to be published through a recommendation by Haniya Yutaka (1910-) who was then a member of the magazine Kindai Bungaku (Modern Literature). Practically the earliest of Ōe's short stories, "A Queer Job" ("Kimyō na shigoto," 1957), was chosen for the University of Tokyo Newspaper Prize by Ara Masahito (1913-), who was also a founding member of Kindai Bungaku. Abe and Ōe thus share the qualities that must have appealed to the literary taste of their elders, who constituted one of the main forces of the post-war Japanese literature. But these circumstances are in a way incidental. The link between the two must be defined in more fundamental terms. In Ōe's earliest short stories such as "A Queer Job" and "The Extravagance of the Dead" ("Shisha no ogori," 1957), the main characters are university students who are engaged in humiliating hack work for their livelihood. Unable to resort to political activities as their fellow students do, they find no way out from their present impasse. In this respect their condition may most appropriately be described as one of confinement, alienation and deprivation of freedom, which are all unmistakably Abe's major themes.

"The Catch" ("Shiiku"), for which Ōe was awarded the Akutagawa Prize for the first half of 1958, has many merits and, despite its limitation as a short story, embodies in many ways the best of his literary talent. Instead of the baffled youths suffering from mental inertia and alienation in the metropolis, as in "A Queer Job" and "The Extravagance of the Dead," the major characters are country boys. The story in fact owes its vigour to the vivid picture of the Japanese countryside. This is something genuinely inherent in ŌE himself, who is deeply rooted in his native province of Shikoku. In this respect he differs from Abe who, born in Tokyo but brought up in Manchuria, is essentially a déraciné. While the fact of deracination and solitude in the Manchurian wilderness is the framework of Abe's The Beasts Go Homeward, ŌE's story is built around the boys' sense of oneness with the natural surroundings of the Japanese countryside. It is also possible that Ōe might have obtained from Abe the idea of using the boy as the point of view. Furthermore, The Beasts Go Homeward and "The Catch" reflect the impact of wartime experience on the authors, one in his adolescence and the other in his boyhood.

The setting of the story is intriguing. From the commonsense point of view the captured Negro American pilot represents the enemy country. From another point of view, though this is not explicitly brought into the context of the story, the Negro belongs to a minority group alienated within American society and cannot be entirely identified with the enemy country. From yet another point of view, Ōe may anticipate a recently fashionable idea that black is beautiful. The first point of view is represented by the adults, while it is on the tacit understanding of the second and the third that the boys' actions are based. For them the captured Negro is the object of their admiration, for he embodies the life force of organic Nature which they also find in the natural surroundings of their native village.

What Ōe creates through the eyes of the boys is an almost paradisiacal state of innocence in which man and Nature are organically united. Harmony seems to pervade the whole community, so that there no longer exists a barrier even between the adults and their captive. However, the harmonious state of the community proves vulnerable to the code of the external world: the Negro must be handed over to the local authorities. Ironically enough, when the protagonist discloses the news to the captive, he finds himself held as a hostage. The story ends tragically: the Negro is killed, and the boy's hand wounded by his father's axe, and thus the dream of innocence is completely shattered.

Ō's first novel, Plucking Buds and Shooting Lambs (Memushiri ko-uchi, 1958), is an extended version of "The Catch." In "The Catch" the antithesis between innocence and experience, juvenile spontaneity and social restraint, is only gradually realised in the course of the story, but in this novel the antithesis is presented from the outset in that the protagonist and his companions are stigmatised as juvenile delinquents. They are outsiders, unlike the boys in "The Catch," who are natives of a local community. But in the course of the story it becomes evident that they are in fact variations of the boys of "The Catch," and that in spite of their social stigma, paradoxically enough, they represent potential innocence, while the villagers embody malignity, hypocrisy and injustice.

Ōe succeeds to the fullest extent in bringing home the theme of confinement and alienation from the outside world, which he shares in common with Abe and with which he was concerned in his earliest short stories. The hero and his companions find themselves not only deserted by the villagers, who run away for fear of an epidemic, but also locked up in a shed from outside. One can also recognise here a caricature of wartime Japanese society: the juvenile delinquents share their lot with a Korean boy, the daughter of an evacuee and an army deserter. Their initial animosity against one another changes to a sense of fellowship derived from their common lot.

The author's sympathy lies with the juvenile delinquents, but do they embody any positive value? They are certainly akin to the boys of "The Catch," but the fact of their deracination and alienation makes their rapport with the external world weaker than in the case of their prototypes. The utmost they can achieve is reduced to a kind of primitivism: for instance, their curious affinity with animals. Another aspect of the potential good that they could embody is their uninhibited life force. But again there is an ambivalence about it: their uninhibited spontaneity can manifest itself, for instance, in sexual perversion as practised by one of the boys. Perhaps the only positive moment of communion is achieved between the hero and the deserted girl. Only this act embodies genuine human solidarity and therefore a positive value.

Both "The Catch" and Plucking Buds and Shooting Lambs reveal Ōe's wish-fulfilment for envisaging a universe pervaded with pantheistic harmony. Two approaches are therefore discernible in ŌE's work so far: those which directly treat confinement, alienation and lack of freedom against the background of urban society, and those which envisage an aspiration to the potential pastoral. These are in fact two sides of the same coin. Since the latter is not easy to achieve, as illustrated by Plucking Buds and Shooting Lambs, it was natural for Ōe to concentrate on the former in his subsequent writings, producing such works as Leap before You Look (Miru mae ni tobe, 1958), Our Age (Warera no jidai, 1959), and The Youth Who Came Late (Okurete kita seinen, 1962). All these are concerned with the theme of how to get out of a state of humiliation and restraint.

The sense of confinement in Ōe's earlier short stories and novels is an expression not only of an existential anxiety but also of an intuitive apprehension about the post-war political situation at large. When the Pacific War ended, Ōe was in the fifth form of a primary school. He listened to the Emperor's speech on the acceptance of the unconditional surrender, but he did not understand a word of it, nor the reaction of his elders. Unlike Mishima, for whom the end of the war was almost the end of the world, Ōe belonged to the generation that accepted the post-war 'democratisation' initiated by the American occupation. For him as well as Oda Makoto (1932-) the post-war 'democratisation' and the New Constitution which proclaimed the renunciation of war form the bases of their political views and activities. They are thus in a sense the best pupils of the post-war American policy; and yet the irony of the situation is that they came to feel at odds with many products of the American presence in the Far East. It is against this background that Ōe wrote the works which express his sense of helplessness and humiliation such as The Human Sheep (Ningen no hitsuji, 1958), Today the Struggle (Tatakai no konnichi, 1958) and Our Age.

Already in his earliest works Ōe's concern with sex is evident. In the early 1960s he wrote three novels in which sex occupies an important place: "Seventeen" ("Sevuntiin," January 1961), Outcries (SakebigŌe, November 1962) and The Sexual Man (Seiteki ningen, May 1963). In his treatment of sex two features stand out clearly. The first is his complete freedom from any kind of inhibition. This reflects partly the change of attitude to sex in Japanese society at large. This freedom is also shared by Ishihara Shintarō (1932-), who was awarded the Akutagawa Prize for his The Season of the Sun (Taiy no kisetsu) in the first half of 1956. But the parallel does not go very far. Ishihara treats sex as an end in itself and goes no further than the sensationalism of the Japanese naturalistic tradition. The detailed description of sexual scenes in Ōe's novels, however, is characterised by the author's callousness. Sex almost becomes an abstract object as is, to some extent, common in Abe's novels. In spite of full details, sexual description in Ōe's novels arouses no pornographic interest.

This is due to another feature of Ōe's treatment of sex: namely the sexual impulse in his novels matters not in its own right but as an equivalent of an unfulfilled, repressed social ego. In "Seventeen," for instance, the protagonist's habitual masturbation is a compensation for his discontent with the external world. In criticising the political and social situation of Japan the protagonist appears to be a potential left-wing radical. Curiously enough, however, he becomes indoctrinated by the right wing instead of the left. The sequel to this novel, "The Death of a Political Boy" ("Seiji shōnen shisu"), which echŌes the assassination of the chairman of the Japan Socialist Party by a right-wing youth, provoked threats to Ōe and his publisher by the right. Ōe's position in these novels is extremely complex. The process by which the protagonist's sexual impulse is sublimated into a political passion is an extension of the reaction of the juvenile delinquents to the hypocritical adults in Plucking Buds and Shooting Lambs. In drawing a parallel between the sexual impulse and rightwing fanaticism, "Seventeen" and its sequel resemble Mishima's story Patriotism (Yūkoku, 1959). And yet Ōe himself is no ally of the right wing. Ōe's works in ques tion parallel Mishima's story only superficially and are at best a parody. Ōe wrote them with his tongue in his cheek and their effect is one of irony. He commits himself nei ther to the left nor to the right, but is concerned with the curious fact that the sexual impulse as an equivalent of a repressed social ego can reveal itself either as left-wing radicalism or as right-wing patriotism and that the two are interchangeable.

The theme of "Seventeen" is taken over with a slight variation in Outcries. The four central characters, including the narrator, are all social misfits in one way or another but united by their common intention to build a yacht and run away from their present state of maladjustment. Their social inadaptability is presented in the form of lost identity due to their racial background. A half-caste, born of a black American and a Japanese-American, nick-names himself 'Tiger' as the colours black and yellow are mixed in his skin. As a misfit in Japanese society, his dream is to go to Africa in search of his lost identity. Another character, Takao, is born of a Korean father and a Japanese mother. An interesting feature of the characterisation of Tiger and Takao is the curious interlocking of the fact of their alienation with their sexual life. For instance, Takao, like the protagonist of "Seventeen," finds selfsufficiency in the habit of masturbation. That he can be neither Japanese nor Korean is shown by the fact that he finds himself a stranger in a Korean ghetto. He writes down in his diary the French words 'l'homme authentique', by which he means man secure within society, the exact antithesis of himself. After Tiger's death his previously self-sufficient masturbation proves inadequate and he fails to achieve a sense of mastery over the external world. As an alternative, he kills a female high school student, whom he sees as an example of 'l'homme authentique', under the guise of raping her. Ōe models this on the actual murder of a female high school student by a Korean boy, which is known as 'the Komatsugawa Incident'. He transforms, as Mishima did in his The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji), a criminal into a coherent character. Takao is an extension of the hero in "Seventeen" and represents a socially repressed and alienated ego whose release consists in either sexual activity or else an act of destroying a symbol of the established social order.

Preceded by "Seventeen" and Outcries, The Sexual Man looks like the final part of a trilogy dealing with the human condition in terms of sex. At the end of the novel the protagonist, who has had only a sterile relationship with his wife, tries to achieve a sense of presiding over society by means of his sexual misconduct in public. Here again we see the author's use of the sexual act as a means of revenge on the society from which one is alienated. This novel has little to add to "Seventeen" and Outcries, but one notable feature is the author's sense of the primitive, which is not unfamiliar in his earlier works such as "The Catch" and Plucking Buds and Shooting Lambs and which was to play a more important role in The Football in the First Year of the Man 'en Era (Man 'en gannen no futtobō ru, 1967). In a fishing village where the protagonist and his company are staying to make a film entitled Inferno, the villagers happen to be suffering from poor catches, which they attribute to some supernatural cause. The village is thus a miniature of the waste land. In the meantime the protagonist and his company feel the presence of 'a pair of eyes' in the villa where they are staying. They turn out to be the eyes of a village boy who has been hiding in the villa and witnesses the protagonist's sterile intercourse with his wife. The boy runs away, passing through a window and crying in a local dialect, 'I've seen ogres'. There is an ironical effect that the protagonist and his company themselves have been playing both the real and fictitious roles of infernal characters. The villagers' attempt to regain fertility and the sterile sexual life of the city dwellers who are uprooted from the sources of life are starkly contrasted. This is another instance which suggests that except for the momentary synthesis of the primitive and life force in "The Catch" the sexual power in Ōe's novels is embodied only by the characters who are alienated from the root of life.

In the whole corpus of Ōe's works The Football in the First Year of the Man 'en Era is monumental in that it synthesises all the elements in his earlier works in a new and wider perspective. The major character suffers from the sense of being cut off from reality and the story opens with his sitting at the bottom of a hole, which is a symptom of his anxiety about existence itself. This has been partly caused by the birth of an abnormal and defective child, and the subsequent impotence of himself and frigidity of his wife. He is also haunted by the memory of his activist friend, who, after the failure of the 1960 campaign against the Security Treaty, went mad and committed suicide in a grotesque fashion. The author once again resorts to the elder-and-younger brother pattern: while Mitsusaburō is a brooding, impractical intellectual, his younger brother Takashi is an active man. Ōe also places the setting of the novel in the familiar countryside of Shikoku. That these characters are in search of their identity is evident from the visit they pay to their native village, as well as their family name Nedokoro, which means 'where the root is'. Ōe's description of the village where the protagonists' ancestors used to be the local headmen is as masterly as in "The Catch." In addition to his superb sense of place the author employs his historical imagination: the political situation in which Takashi becomes involved is overlapped with that of the first year of the Man'en era or 1860. In that year a revolt by the peasants against the great grandfather of the Nedokoro family was led by his younger brother. The revolt was a failure and the younger brother is said to have escaped to Edo and later made his career under the Meiji government. It is with the younger brother of the great grandfather that Takashi identifies himself. In 1960 the Nedokoros are no longer powerful in the province. The village economy is under the control of an upstart Korean who owns a large supermarket. Conflict arises between him and the native villagers whose lives he makes unbearable. As might be expected, Takashi becomes the leader of the villagers' strife with the upstart millionaire or 'the emperor of the supermarket' as he is called. But Takashi becomes isolated and deserted by the villagers as a result of his raping a girl. He commits suicide and the villagers' battle fails. Takashi's death is preceded by his confession that he had incestuous relations with his idiot sister many years ago. It is followed by a further recognition that the younger brother of the great grandfather actually did not escape from the village but was kept imprisoned till his death in a dungeon on the Nedokoro estate.

What emerges from this gloomy family chronicle in which the past and present are overlapped? Are Ōe's characters able to re-discover their lost identity in it? The answer is no. As shown in 1860 the family of Nedokoro contained within itself two antithetical elements: the great grandfather, as the retainer of the family tradition and the patriarchal authority; and his younger brother, who rebelled against him in collaboration with the peasants and was eventually defeated. In 1960 the relationship between Mitsusaburō and Takashi corresponds to that of the great grandfather and his younger brother. Mitsusaburō as an urban intellectual, however, has already lost identity with his ancestors, while the object of Takashi's rebellion is the commercialism that destroys the village community. But Takashi himself cannot embody an absolutely positive value, for he is responsible for the death of a village girl and his own idiot sister. He functions only as a mediator for discovering the identity which is universal and unchanging throughout history. It seems that Ōe wants to say that such an identity is embodied in the nature of the countryside, belief in the spirit of the forest, and rituals such as the nenbutsu (invocation) dance, all shared by the people of the village community. Such is the identity that Mitsusaburō and Takashi should be searching for. It could have existed in an ideal community where there was harmony between man and man and between man and Nature. Unfortunately, however, for neither Mitsusaburō nor Takashi, living in the industrial society of 1960, is it possible to attain this state without some sacrifice: in Takashi's case, his own death; and in Mitsusaburō's case, patience to come to terms with reality, reconciling himself with his adulterous wife and bringing up Takashi's body. It is far from heroic, but that is the only alternative for Mitsusaburō.

While producing a number of novels year after year, Ōe has also for some time been actively engaged in voicing his political opinions in public. In 1960 Ōe, Ishihara Shintarō and Etō Jun (1933-) all collaborated to organise the Wakai Nihon no Kai (the Young Japan Group), which criticised the way in which the government handled the revision of the Security Treaty and expressed deep concern over the subsequent political chaos. In the same year Ōe visited the Chinese mainland and vigorously praised the communist regime until the first Chinese nuclear tests, which he criticised. In 1963 he paid a visit to Hiroshima, the record of which was published as Hiroshima Notebook (Hiroshima nōto, 1965). His concern for Hiroshima is not based on any specific ideological standpoint but derives from his genuinely humane sympathy with the survivors who have suffered from the same kind of humiliation and existential anxiety as represented in his novels. For these people neither the government's aid nor the ideologically biased anti-nuclear campaign would do. The Hiroshima Notebook, however, dŌes not end with entire pessimism about the situation but with admiration and hope for the attempt on the part of the survivors to recover from the persistent after-effects of radiation and the effort of half a dozen conscientious local intellectuals to help them.

The Hiroshima Notebook was followed by Okinawa Notebook (Okinawa nōto), which was in a way a logical development of the previous book. Here again the author looks at the situation from his unique position. At that time, while the Japanese government was doing its best to get Okinawa back from America, the opposition parties and various left-wing groups were protesting against the presence of the American bases. But they all overlooked the fact that whŌever governed Okinawa, whether the Japanese government (1868-1945) or the post-war American administration, there always existed the indigenous populace who were sacrificed for some external aim. It was with these people that Ōe sympathised. His sympathy is at one with his aspiration to the communal identity shared by the local people in The Football in the First Year of the Man'en Era.

We are entering the sphere where literature and politics meet. Ōe's aspiration to the communal identity shared by the indigenous people involves a difficult question: how could it transcend its own specificity and attain universality? A tentative answer to this question may be found in Ōe's account of his trip to South-East Asia in the autumn of 1970 [published in Asahi Shinbon (11 January 1971); evening edition]:

After staying a few weeks in India, I became aware that I was beginning to take my Japanese identity as something of only relative importance. This awareness of mine appeared in the forefront of my consciousness in the holy land of Benares in the valley of the Ganges when I heard on the B.B.C. radio news about how a Japanese writer committed seppuku after crying "Long Live the Emperor". For the last few years I have been preoccupied with Okinawa and obsessed with an overwhelming and shameful question: "what is it to be a Japanese? how can I transform myself into a Japanese different from what he is now?" . . .

When from India I look back upon Japan, it becomes crystal clear that the view of the Emperor given by that writer who committed suicide was nothing but a fiction, a personal mysticism.

Also I cannot but realise how we are bound by a false Japanese identity. Yes! it is not so much that we are dissatisfied with our false identity as that we are proud of it. Are we ever ashamed of ourselves as "economic animals"? Have we sufficiently disapproved of having ourselves defined as "an economic power"?

In India Ōe came across a gregarious, poverty-stricken people. Instead of recognising them as Indians, he sees in them humanity at large driven to extreme deprivation. He goes on to say:

In the climate of India and surrounded by the people there I became more and more aware of the falsity of the assumption that Japan is an economic power and will predominate in the twenty-first century.

. . . Japan is wrapped in "ethnocentricism", which, however, looks so illusory as to fade away in the eyes of the "human beings" in the streets of Calcutta.

According to Ōe, the Emperor System, Japan as an economic giant, and Mishima's suicide are all based on a false standard of values. Perhaps he is over-simplifying the matter. That Mishima's idealism was not compatible with the recent material prosperity of Japan is well known. But Ōe's sin of over-simplification is venial. It is more important to note the different ways in which Mishima and Ōe seek Japan's identity. Mishima's search moves upward towards the idealised concept of the Emperor, while Ōe's moves downward towards the populace; Mishima's imagination binds itself within the framework of the national polity, while Ōe's releases itself beyond and transcends the boundary of the state. The indigenous populace embodies a medium through which Ōe can search for his identity, yet he is capable of transcending geographical particularities and attaining identity in a universal perspective:

Through my Indian experience the voice of "humanity" free from the illusion of "ethnocentricism" indicates where a new hope exists, yet curiously intermingled with deeper despair. I find myself on the threshold of a new vista at the end of my trip to India, Asia and Okinawa. . . .

Abe Kōbō and Ōe Kenzaburō are both concerned with the search for identity, each in his own way. Abe's unique position may become clear by comparison with his predecessors. The Japanese I-novelists, for instance, believed or at least tried to believe that there was the ego or the core of individual personality to be searched for through their attempts to write novels, although their purpose was never really fulfilled. Even Mishima, who was an opponent of the tradition of the I-novels, treated the growth of his own ego under the guise of a mask. Abe, on the contrary, seems to suggest that, whether disguised under a mask or not, there is no personal identity other than that which is inevitably bound to the material world. In this Abe represents the truly existentialist standpoint that existence precedes essence.

The search for identity presupposes a community in which the ego is to be realised as a social self. For Abe, however, a community is an illusory idea which he rejects outright. His works provide a picture of life in which man is utterly lonely, deprived of communication with his fellow men and determined by physical reality. And yet what Abe intends to prescribe in his works is not despair but tough reasonableness with which to accept the inescapable reality of life; only by doing so can man justify his own existence. In contrast to Abe, Ōe seems to aspire to a community in which the personal identity is to be realised. The difference between the two in this respect is probably due to the fact that as a child one spent the life of an expatriate while the other was deeply rooted in his native rural community. However, it is extremely difficult for Ōe, now living in the midst of industrial society, to celebrate the pastoral. As a result he portrays characters overwhelmed by the strain of urban society, or else he is 'of the Devil's party': in depicting a tension between the social restraint and spontaneous impulse, he represents the latter by anti-social characters, such as juvenile delinquents, sexual perverts and criminals, who are apparently intended to be fallen angels. Unfortunately, Ōe's aspiration to a community is thus expressed by showing the difficulty of its realisation.

The history of modern Japanese literature, as in other aspects of culture, has been streaked with the cross-currents of the native tradition and Western influence. There were writers, such as Tanizaki and Kawabata, who embodied the traditional sensibility almost spontaneously. Mishima's artificially acquired Western taste, on the other hand, was deliberately counterbalanced by his fortified Japanese consciousness. Abe differs from any of these predecessors. He was brought up as an expatriate in a place somewhat like a barren wilderness, where neither the culture of his homeland nor that of the West was available in tangible form. In such a circumstance there was nothing for him but to conceive of culture, of whichever hemisphere, in the abstract. This could have been a disadvantage, but, in Abe's case, it enabled him to create a literary universe which transcends the author's nationality. He is probably the first Japanese writer whose works, having no distinctly Japanese qualities, matter to the Western audience because of their universal relevance.

With Ōe it is a different matter. On the one hand he looks Westernised in his attempts to assimilate various features of contemporary European and American authors. On the other, however, he presents his themes in a specifically Japanese context. I have tried in this [essay] to underline his concern with the communal identity to be sought in indigenous culture. This is likely to derive from his anxiety about his own and his countrymen's precarious footing in contemporary Japanese society, where the native tradition is jeopardised by the ever-accelerating modernisation which was started under Western influence in Meiji and has perhaps got out of hand. A description of the situation in these terms might sound fictitious to Abe for whom there exists no distinction between the native and foreign cultures, while it is an overwhelming reality to Ōe. From this difference in their attitudes to the cultural milieu of present-day Japan emerge the two types of literature: one has so nearly effaced Japanese elements as to attain universality in both its themes and its techniques; the other, despite its Westernised façade, houses sentiments that epitomise the dilemma of the nation at the present time. In this sense, Ōe's is a search for the identity of the race as well as an individual.