SOURCE: "The Device of Repetition: In Quest of Dialogic Narrative," in The Marginal World of Ōe Kenzaburo: A Study in Themes and Techniques, M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1986, pp. 61-82.

[In the excerpt below, Wilson studies the narrative structure—especially the function of repetition—in "Father, Where Are You Going?," "Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, " and "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away. "]

"Father, Where Are You Going?" ("Chichi yo, anata wa doko e ikuno ka?," 1968, hereafter "Father"), "Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness" ("Warera no kyōki o ikinobiru michi o oshieyo," 1969, hereafter "Teach Us"), and "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away" ("Mizu kara waga namida o nuguitamō hi," 1971, hereafter "My Tears") show an obsessive repetition of characters, events, images, and dialogues, sometimes repeated word for word, paragraph for paragraph. It is as though Ōe had rewritten the same draft again and again, and had found in all the versions independently satisfying stories. Repetition becomes the fabric of the stories, shapes their structure, and provides an impetus to their narrative movement.

"Father, Where Are You Going?" a line taken from Blake's pŌem "The Little Boy Lost," opens with the confession of the narrator (whose name we are not told): "I write, [[. . . while my father spent his days in self-confinement,]] and have again realized that I have to abort the manuscript." This short story is a narrative of reminiscences: vague memories of the narrator's father who died suddenly in self-confinement perpetuate the narrator's desire to "recreate a whole image of his father." The narrator was stimulated to undertake the "reproduction project" because, on the one hand, he was too young to remember the details of his father's self-confinement and death and, on the other, his mother, the only capable informant, has adamantly refused to tell her son anything. She maintains total silence. This pattern becomes "the figure in the carpet" for Ōe, the overall plan that also governs the two subsequent stories, "Teach Us" and "My Tears." As the Jamesian narrative based on the "quest for an absolute and absent cause" is set in motion by the absence of knowledge, Ōe's tales are also provoked by something that is not present. The narrator/biographer talks to 1) his father, who does not see/hear/speak (=self-confinement); 2) his mother, who does not recognize her own son; 3) his wife, who does not believe her husband (=distrust); 4) his son, who does not know language (=idiocy). "Father" tells of the father who wants to have "dialogic" contact with his own father, who ignored him in the dark storehouse, and with his own son, who is retarded, has rickets, and has never uttered a word nor run nor jumped. No dialogue is open to the narrator/biographer, who plays a double role. He [X] is at the same time a son and a father caught in between: the father of X: X: the retarded son of X. In short, "Father" is a tale of the quest for dialogic narrative, and this quest continues in "Teach Us" and "My Tears."

Without accurate, concrete data about his father, the biography is doomed to fail. It will never be completed. Paradoxically, this limitation also makes it possible for the biographer to start the project over and over again. There is no beginning or ending, the task generates a perpetual repetition. The biographer likens himself to an archaeologist trying to recreate the entire bone structure of a dinosaur based on a fossil of a lower jaw bone. As the narration struggles to reproduce an image of the dead father, the reader must organize in his mind the sequence of incidents surrounding the self-confinement of the father, because the narrator dŌes not give these incidents in sequential order: something triggers the mind of the biographer, who jots down whatever he feels is relevant to the project. His fragmentary notes constitute the narrative. "Sometimes when I got stuck with my project daydreaming about my father, I either wrote notes or made tape recordings, in various styles, about my reproduction plan."

The repeated act of writing the biography creates the very structure of narrative discourse in "Father": "I hope my reader can bear with me; the only thing I can do is to explain step by step the entire process of this undertaking." The act of repetition, however, dŌes not end with the task of the biographer, but extends to several other elements within the story. First there is a humorous episode of recording and replaying in the dead of night a tape of an imaginary dialogue between the biographer and his wife, who is already deeply asleep in the adjoining bedroom. The biographer's recorded voice narrates one of Blake's poems, "The Little Boy Lost," which he calls paragraph "A":

A
Father, father! Where Are You Going?
O do not walk so fast.
Speak, father, speak to your little boy,
Or else I shall be lost.

Through the stimulus of this pŌem, the biographer attempts to reproduce his childhood in search of a dialogue with his own father, who constantly ignored the presence of the little boy.

In the next paragraph, A', the biographer comes back to the present and plays the role of a husband in search of a dialogue with his own wife. He is suspicious that she might be a voyeur and pretends she is hiding. The resulting imaginary dialogue is recorded on the tape:

A'

Why are you peeping at your husband through the keyhole.... I'm simply trying to understand my father who died twenty-five years ago. You say I'm mad? It's the other way around. I'm trying not to repeat the life of a man who'd gone mad, covered his eyes and ears in self-confinement, moved his mouth only to eat and accumulated enough fat to collapse his heart. I'm investigating how he was cornered into a cul-de-sac.

The husband then changes tactics:

A"

Hey, you should be ashamed of peeping at your husband through the keyhole. You distrust me, don't you, you think that I might be masturbating? I don't make love to you because of the hormone imbalance brought on by obesity. . . .

Now the reader learns that the biographer is fat like his father and wants to approach his image by imitating his mad behavior. The third variation of the imaginary dialogue reveals the repetitive nature of the biographer's life: he does things by rote.

A"'

——Ha, ha, ha, ha, I knew for a long time that you've been peeping at me through the keyhole. Every year around this time, I drink whisky all night, play the tape recorder, sleep during the day, and shut myself up for a week without seeing my wife or my son, an annual event that began five years ago. . . .

As the biographer repeats the task of recreating a whole image of his father, the repetition of recording and replaying his voice on a tape recorder is superimposed on the biographer's remembrance of the act of his father recording, replaying, and erasing his own voice twenty-five years ago. The distinction between the present and the past blurs, and the cŌexistence of THEN and NOW emerges.

The effect of these futile repetitions, as the reader can see, is comic. Another comical use of repetition with a touch of absurdity in "Father" occurs in an episode that I call "an assassin mounting several unsuccessful attacks on the father-in-self-confinement." As often happens in the story, this episode is sparked by the memory of the father's waxcylinder recording machine, which he originally purchased in order to learn Chinese so that he could publish translations of Chinese pŌetry. Ōe later "recycles" this recording machine in "My Tears," where the machine is used by the biographer's mother to describe the "worth" of the mad husband: "Taking radios and phonographs apart and putting them back together was about the one thing a certain party [his father] could do a pretty decent job on—he was at least average when it came to working with his hands—and he had a radio and a phonograph in the storehouse."

In "Father," at the outbreak of the war, the recording machine was confiscated by the secret police, who, in league with the villagers, spread a rumor that the narrator's father was either a lunatic or a spy who sent secret codes to the other side of the Pacific. According to the narrator's grandmother, "he was neither a spy nor a lunatic. He got involved in an incident (which happened either in China or in a big city in Japan)." The assassin who assaulted the father in the dark storehouse possibly had something to do with the incident. The narrator/biographer tells us that he will select the accounts of what his grandmother told him from the manuscript he could not finish:

Finally the assassin, consumed with fury, stood in front of the storehouse holding a drawn sword. . . . He brandished his sword, shouted at the top of his voice, yahhh, yahhh, yahhh, dashed into the storehouse, barely missing the pitiful man in meditation in the barber chair, banged himself against the clay wall, bounced around and out to where he started. As he renewed his spirits, with the drawn sword held high in the sky, he jumped right back into the storehouse yelling, yahhh, yahhh, yahhh, ran past the man in meditation who waited perfectly still for the moment of assassination, banged himself against the wall, and came out again. Some firemen and veterans caught up with the assassin in the courtyard, who had by then expended all his reserves of energy.

The slapstick farce of the assassin's fruitless repetition is a self-parody of the reiteration that provokes the narrative discourse of "Father." In "Teach Us" Ōe repeats the same episode in summary as something the biographer (called the fat man) heard from his grandmother:

His grandmother had said more than once that his father had been attacked by an assassin with a Japanese sword, and that he managed to escape harm by sitting perfectly still in the dark storehouse without offering any resistance. The assassin was probably one of the band which had been associated with his father through the junior officers in the revolt. .. . He [the assassin] tracked down a craven like himself to the place where he [the fat man's father] was living in selfconfinement, and brandished his Japanese sword and threatened emptily, but that was all he had ever intended to do.

The end of "Father" suggests that the narrator's repetition might not be futile, when the receptive act is contrasted with the sequence in which the retarded son runs for the first time. The son of a fat madman who covered his eyes and ears and sat stock-still in a barber chair, the biographer is also the father of a physically handicapped son who has not yet uttered a single word. The father leaves the son on top of a slope and runs down the hill, repeatedly calling the boy's name. He runs back and forth over and over again. The son stands perfectly still. The father repeats the act. "What if I have a heart attack on the spot? How will my son react? In that brain shrouded in the mist of dullness, what sort of reaction will emerge, take shape, and explode? Father, father! Where are you going? / O do not walk so fast / Speak, father speak to me, / or else I shall be lost."

After countless attempts, the father witnesses the successful result: for the first time the boy runs down the hill like "a normal human being" toward his panting father, who is writhing on his back in the grass. The narrative discourse in the story comes to a halt when the repetition produces a desirable effect. In a roundabout manner, then, the father and the son discover how to communicate with each other and make dialogic contact without the means of verbal communication. The self-parody of repetition suddenly takes on a serious tone at the end of the story. Because the son/father sees some kind of significance in his repeated act, he decides not to abandon the "reproduction project" for the moment:

My father . . . ]] I began to write all over again. When I recognize clearly what the purpose is for writing it, the biography of my father will be either completed or abandoned totally. [[My father began his retreat from the world because. . . .

The oxtail stew episode also suggests that repetition can produce successful dialogue. Like the episode in which "an assassin attacks the father-in-self-confinement," Ōe recycles the "oxtail stew" episode only twice. That is to say, the former episode is repeated in "Father" and "Teach Us" but not in "My Tears"; the latter episode in "Father" and "My Tears" but not in "Teach Us." In "Father" the verbal assault the narrator's mother directs against his father's uncontrollable appetite again triggers a memory: "Appetite was my father's weakest point. . . ." The oxtail stew anecdote is already twice removed from the actual incident because the narrator gives an account of what his older brothers have told him. It gŌes like this: one day there was an illegal killing of an ox in the village. One of the narrator's brothers represented the family and went out to get a share of the kill. The villagers discriminated against the little boy, giving him only half a thigh and a tail. All night he was lost and by the time he returned home, there was only a tail in the sack. "My father made one of his rare appearances outside the storehouse to do the cooking of oxtail stew, which he had learned during his stay in China, and stood in the kitchen in the main house to confront a piece of oxtail with black hide, hair and all."

When the narrator himself cooks an oxtail stew his act is a means by which he captures the lost time and becomes one with his dead father. Total identification and assimilation takes place: "diachronic" time is obliterated. In the guise of a gourmet cook, "I wear sunglasses," just as his father did, "with a pretext that they are useful as protection against the spattering from the joints of oxtail heated in lard." The cooking session turns into a ritual for the biographer to reproduce the image of his father. In "My Tears," in the process of recycling the material, Ōe gives an expanded, more detailed version of how the son/narrator helps his fat father cook the stew—the first occasion his father ever addresses the little boy.

But "Father" contains another story which, in the context of the other narratives, contradicts this hopeful message. Structurally, in addition to the two tales, the one dealing with the biographer's father-in-self-confinement and the other with the little boy's success in running, the third tale that dovetails with "Teach Us" concerns the biographer/narrator's "date" with a transvestite. This humorous story within a story plays upon the two-in-one role of the son/father narrator. A French transvestite had taken a fancy to the narrator at a conference held in New York City some years before. During a subsequent visit a few years later, the narrator runs into the transvestite. He insists on referring to the transvestite, whose appearance and behavior exhibit femininity in toto, as "she (he)." But in actuality "she" is a "he": the presence of a female, yet the substance of a male. The identity as a male is exposed accidentally when the narrator grabs her (his) erect penis which he mistakes for the car's emergency brake! They wander into the Museum of Modern Art where she (he) points out the striking resemblance the narrator bears to a sculpture of a plaster-of-Paris man seated on a bus driver's seat turned away from the viewer. The biographer/narrator is immediately infatuated with the piece and buys a postcard of a plaster-of-Paris man about to straddle a bicycle, by the same sculptor. The side-long view of the man reminds him of his own father, who sat on a barber chair in the dark; even in the photograph his face is forever turned away from the viewer.

The picture card becomes part and parcel of the biographer's life, one more clue that might solve the mystery of his father's self-confinement and death. At the end of "Teach Us," however, the fat man, defeated by his mother who blocks his "reconstruction project," burns a sheaf of pages "which contained every word he had written down about his father" and the "picture card which had been thumbed-tacked above his desk since he had brought it back from New York, of a sculpture, a plaster-of-Paris man who resembled his father as he fancied him, about to straddle a plaster-of-Paris bicycle."

"My Tears" is the most complicated text in its repetitions. It takes up a subject introduced by an earlier series of repetitions. Among the incidents that appear in all the works under discussion, "his mother's accusatory silence and the ensuing verbal assault" gives an excellent example of the circularity of Ōe's narrative. We learn in "Father" that the biographer is not on speaking terms with his mother, who lives in the deep forest lands of Shikoku Island. "My mother, who had never criticized or reminisced about my father since his death (that was why I came up with the idea to recreate his image based on the fossils of memory, or a desire to write his biography which I have continued until now), suddenly broke her silence and began to criticize me and my father."

However, she does not reproach her son directly, but only indirectly, through his wife, who becomes the intermediary in the war of nerves between the mother and the son. In a telephone conversation with the wife, the mother remarks on her son's suicide attempt the previous morning:

——That child knows he's not doing anything in earnest, it's a waste of time to worry about him. His father was just like that.

——I'm sure he's not in earnest; he's eating oatmeal with a big grin on his face.

...

——The child's father repeated what he knew was fake. Since he wasn't in earnest, he couldn't experience anything real, or find out what kind of effect it had on him . . . when he realized what he was doing, it was too late. What stupidity!

The narrator's wife relays to him his mother's version of what caused his father to withdraw, which the narrator then "reproduces" for the reader. In other words, I (the narrator) am telling you (the reader) that my wife said that my mother said to tell me:

——Your mother asked me never to take you seriously, my wife said, if you started glorifying your father's behavior during his last years. If you try to justify his behavior by arguing that he sat perfectly still in the storehouse wearing pitch-black sunglasses and ear plugs because he wanted to deny the reality of a world in which Japan was making war on China, she said, it is true that he spent his last years sitting in a storehouse without moving, with his eyes and ears covered, but it was simply madness that made him do what he did, not a protest against the times. He had been as fat as a pig when he died because he had been stuffing himself with everything he could lay hands on without moving anything but his mouth, and your mother asked me to tell you, he had probably hidden himself in that storehouse because he was ashamed of being the only fat man around at a time when food was scarce.

This battle between the mother and the son is carried on in "Teach Us." The son's defense against his mother's accusations, however, deteriorates quickly because she has stolen his manuscript and notes in which he has invested so much time and effort. "This produced a new repetition of collisions with his mother, who had never spoken about his father's self-confinement and death and had combatted him for years for pretending to go mad whenever he questioned her. Not only did she refuse to cooperate; during a stay at his home while he was traveling abroad she had stolen his notes and incomplete manuscript for a biography of his father and retained them to this day." On the telephone the fat man/biographer confronts his mother and repeats her accusations against him by retelling what she has told his wife (which we know from "Father") word for word:

. . . Didn't you ask my wife not to take "sonny boy" seriously if he started glorifying his father's behavior during his last years? . . . didn't you tell my wife not to believe for a minute that he's done that as a protest against the times, because he wanted to deny the reality of a world in which Japan was making war on the China he revered? Didn't you tell her it was simply madness that made him do what he did? Didn't you even say that Father had been as fat as a pig when he died because he'd been stuffing himself with everything he could lay hands on without moving anything but his mouth, and then insinuate that he had hidden himself in that storehouse because he was ashamed of being the only fat man around at a time when food was so scarce? . . . That morning my wife had the illusion I was about to hang myself, you told her my father was never in earnest; that he knew everything he did was fake, because he told himself he was not in earnest whenever he began something, but he didn't notice the effect it was actually having on him however little at a time, wasn't conscious of it, and that it was too late when he did notice. . . .

Now the vituperation has been presented in a full circle with the flow of "communication" fixed rigidly in one direction:

As a result of this renewed battle, the mother discloses another explanation, probably an authentic one, of the cause of his father's self-confinement. She sends a printed notice to his wife: "I am reminded that my late husband, having had an acquaintance with the officers involved in a certain coup d'état, was led upon failure to the dreadful conclusion that no course of action remained but the assassination of his Imperial Majesty. It was the horror of this which moved him to confine himself in a storehouse, where he remained until his death."

This "certain coup d'état" is recycled in all three of the stories. It first appears in "Father" in a dream the biographer often has. The dream takes the form of a play which he either watched as a boy or heard from his older brothers, or possibly from his grandmother. In the dream, the nameless drama, in commemoration of the thirty-fiveyear anniversary of a coup d'état, is played by the aged widows of junior officers of the Imperial Army who were executed for their part in the revolt. There is a "man seated in a huge chair with his back to the widows, now thirty-five years younger, who stalk behind him with drawn daggers." The chair looks like "the barber chair my father sat in during his last years" or "a throne of a king." Is the man "the highest Authority to have abandoned the young junior officers, or a private citizen who sympathized politically, provided funds, and was generally in league with the junior officers until the day of the revolt, finally betrayed them, dropped out of the uprising, and spent what remained of his life hiding in a storehouse in his country village?" In "Teach Us" the drama, the fat man's fondest dream since his youth, mystifies the true identity of his father, who might have been, in the fat man's reveries, "the highest Authority" or "a private citizen" conspiring to assassinate the Imperial Majesty. The dream-turnedinto reality is what constitutes the theme of "My Tears." To ascertain the role his father played in the coup d'état, the validity of the coup, and the role of the divine Emperor, the little boy continues "his appeal for opening a dialogue" with his mother.

A personal quest for a dialogue, which starts in "Father" and continues in "Teach Us," expands into something more public in "My Tears," shifting from the individual issue (of a private citizen) to that of the collective (the highest Authority, i.e., the Emperor). The fat man/biographer in "Teach Us" learns through the intermediary that his mother scornfully refers to his father only as "the man" (ano hito,) whereas the narrator of "My Tears" prefers the designation (it is still ano hito in the original, though "a certain party" is John Nathan's translation), since it is "a way of exalting him into a kind of idol." The deliberate ambivalence Ōe imparts to the term ano hito is significant because "the man," although it originally referred to his father, also means "the Man," the divine Emperor, who was never on public view and was never referred to by name.

"My Tears" repeats events, as the earlier narratives do. The entire text consists of a "repeating narrative," narrating n times what happened once. The same event is told several times, not only with stylistic variations but also with additional information that can be brought together and in the end interpreted by the reader. The same principal of narrative frequency operates in the production of "Father" and "Teach Us," that is, Ōe repeats the same event—which happened once—intertextually as well as internally.

The story (the "what" of narrative) in "My Tears" is of a thirty-five-year-old man, dying of liver cancer, who tells what he thinks happened to his father-in-self-confinement on August 15, 1945. The narrative or discourse (the "way" of narrative) takes, depending on the viewpoint of the reader and the narrator, one or all of the forms of confession, testimony, chronicle (a "history of the age"), allegory, and memoir. Narration is produced by the "dying" man who narrates an event of twenty-five years ago, which is recorded by the scribe, his wife (also treated as the nurse), and contradicted and discredited by his mother.

ŌE also employs the literary technique of "laying bare," which has been analyzed by Russian formalists: "a perceptible device is permissible only when it is made creatively outstanding. When a device is noticed despite the author's attempt to conceal it, it produces a detrimentally comic effect. To prevent this, the author deliberately lays bare the device" [Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans, by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, 1965]. Ōe lays bare the techniques of narration and composition. We are constantly reminded of the presence of the scribe, who objects to the narrator's choice of words, gives uninvited suggestions, asks questions, and in the end is relieved of her position as the "acting executor of the will." We are not supposed to know that a work of verbal art is actually being recorded by someone; we are expected to believe the story to be "completed," not a draft being produced right in front of us. The complexity and the strangeness of the text are further compounded by 1) infidelities to the chronological order of events; 2) repetition, or narrative frequency; 3) a fluidity in the use of personal pronouns; 4) the elimination of direct quotation marks.

As is the case with "Father" and "Teach Us," the opening passage of "My Tears" has no bearing at all on the chronological order of narrated events of the following pages. What the narrator believes happened, what he imagined happened, what he wants to remember, are given in a piecemeal fashion. The first five paragraphs give us extremely limited information: he (we do not know who) is someone with liver cancer in a hospital bed, wears tinted underwater goggles, and encounters at midnight a Dharma-like creature, who resembles a certain party. Not only do we not know who this he is, but we are not sure that the what of the narrative (the story) has any beginning at all, apart from the fact he apparently has something to do with a certain party. (Even halfway through the text we cannot improve on this observation.) The sixth paragraph abruptly solves the mystery of who he is: "[[Must I put down even that kind of silliness? asks the 'acting executor of the will,' who is taking down his verbal account." At this moment we know bare facts: that he is the narrator, and that someone else is recording his words, which are the sum total of the what of the narrative, "My Tears."

The incidents surrounding a certain party illustrate the temporal distortions that violate the chronological order of events. Although he knows a certain party, we do not know the relationship between the two, nor the identity of a certain party until we are sixty pages into the text. Scattered throughout the narrative is the following information (the number before each sentence indicates the sequential order of what we are accustomed to in a realistic presentation of a story like the one told by Marlow in Heart of Darkness):

1. His mother also knows a certain party.

8. A certain party's underwater goggles have been given to him.

7. A certain party had been killed in a street battle.

6. Ten soldiers came and asked a certain party to join them.

5. He used to sleep with a certain party in the storehouse.

4. A certain party had shut himself up in the storehouse.

2. The scribe suggests calling a certain party "father".

3. He is the real son of a certain party.

Five pages before the end of the story, we think he knows that the Dharma-like creature he encountered in the beginning of the story is his mother. However, again we are not sure when exactly she comes into the room and sits at the foot of his bed. Instead of unentangling all the Gordian knots, Ōe either tightens them or creates additional "snares." To use Ōe's metaphor, the way (discourse) of the narrative continues, like cancer, with cell-by-cell proliferation, or, like the overcooked oxtail stew, all the secret ingredients are meshed together and it is the reader's task to burrow his way gingerly through them. While the narrative discourse proliferates, bifurcates at each juncture, layers one incident on top of another, or dovetails one with another, it continuously repeats an event that happened only once.

The tortuosity of Ōe's narrative also originates in the carefree use of personal pronouns. Characters are not designated by one particular personal pronoun. The narrator refers to himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third person. His story is challenged by she, the scribe, and by the ultimate executor, she, his mother. The narrative is a mixture of "reported" and "immediate" speech alternating with "narratized" discourse. In "reported" speech the narrator "pretends literally to give the floor to his character" [Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. by Jane E. Lewin, 1980]. "—A wagon! You call that ridiculous box on top of the two sawed-off logs a wagon, his mother said unsparingly." In "immediate" speech the narrator is "obliterated and the character substitutes for him." In "narratized" discourse, which distinguishes nothing external "between what was word in the original and what was gesture, posture, state of mind," the narrator tells his own story in the third person.

For "immediate" speech, Ōe eliminates quotation marks to enhance fluidity in the use of personal pronouns and to "activate" the function of parole (speech act) in the narrative. The following example, a conversation between the narrator and the scribe, his wife (called the nurse), illustrates the fluidity Ōe can achieve in Japanese:

[[Once August begins, "he" is in a state of constant agitation . . . "he" repeatedly cries out as though in great danger. However, "he" insists to a dubious "acting executor of the will" that "he" continues to have no memory whatsŌever of his dreams. These past few days you've frequently expressed concern over whether your mother will be able to survive the heat of this summer, I wonder if your dreams might have something to do with that? the "acting executor of the will" says. It could be, now when I'm finally in a position to really let my mother have it for the first time in my life . . . "he" replies with objective calm. . . . You and your mother promised one another you wouldn't commit suicide? When I was in high school my mother made certain I would never be able to try suicide by hurting and humiliating me so deeply my basic attitudes toward society around me were bent all out of shape. . . .

The narrative flows, giving the reader a sensation of moving through it backward, forward, and sideways. It has the effect of "a text which takes several levels of its own 'textuality' and presents them all simultaneously" [Alfred MacAdam, Modern Latin American Narratives, 1977]. By employing "repeating narrative," Ōe lets one text speak to the other, the preceding one to the following one, and vice versa. On the level of the story (the what), the narratives show the father/son in desperate struggle to open a dialogue with his parents, wife, and son. On the level of the discourse, one narrative (or one text) attests to "an absorption of and a reply to another text" [Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language, trans. by Thomas Gora, et. al., 1980], one in a constant dialogue with another.

Another kind of repetition in this narrative is the allusion to mythic figures, which functions paradoxically. As Ōe "rewrites" "Father" and "Teach Us," the emphasis shifts from the son (the biographer) trying to relate to his father to the father (the biographer) trying to relate to his idiot son. In "My Tears" Ōe gŌes one step further and layers three polysemic relationships of father/son or master/subject one on top of the other: 1) Don Quixote/Sancho Panza; 2) the Divine Emperor/His children; 3) God/Christ.

"My Tears," sharing the upside-down world of Don Quixote, is a masterpiece of parody, a long-neglected genre in Japan. Inoue Hisashi, one of the few satirists in Japan, draws upon oxymoron to define parody as "an accurately distorted mirror." It debases the value of an object by accurately imitating it but at the same time distorting it. Its main task is to search for a similarity, however weak, between the great and the insignificant and to identify the two. Another definition of parody calls into play the archaic religious conception of "the second aspect" or the "double." For example, servants and jesters imitate and caricature the protagonist in a story and become doubles of the hero himself. "This idea of doubling . . . constitutes the nature of all parody. We encounter it, without exception, 'paired': without chiaroscuro, without something to be contrasted to something else, it dŌes not exist" [O. M. Friedenberg, "The Origin of Parody," Semiotics and Structuralism, ed. by H. Baran, 1974].

"My Tears" is filled with images and situations "paired" and "contrasted": the obese "infant" father is nursed by his skinny "maternal" son; the mother loves her stepson and rejects her real son; while the father has his real son shot, the stepmother wants the deserter stepson to escape; the son dreads his mother's hateful sideways glances while he is ready to settle for even one cursory glance which his father never gives; the ten-year-old boy wears adult clothes and rides on an adult bicycle. The only way the little boy can ride this bicycle is by "side-pedaling," and ŌE stresses the fact that the size of the vehicle is a "number 8." This number, a visual manifestation of two circles "paired," represents the two wheels of the bicycle, the two round black lenses of the underwater goggles that cover the eyes of a certain party and the narrator, and the two dreadful eyes of the narrator's mother.

The ten-year-old son, paired with his fat father dying of bladder cancer, is a watchman, nursemaid, waiter, henchman, soldier—in short, a little factotum. The master/father, embodying everything from quixotic madness to gargantuan excess, has one mission to carry out: ". . . We're going to steal ten fighter planes from the army field and disguise them to look like American planes and bomb the Imperial palace. There's no other way left to make the Japanese people rise up and protect the true essence of our nation!" Deprived of a white horse to mount, the only transportation available to him and his little soldier and drunken subjects is a cart, "a ridiculous wooden fertilizer box with sawed-off legs for wheels," lined with pillows and old diapers.

Ōe's Sancho Panza, born too late to join the Imperial Army and fight for the divine Emperor, finds in the "tub of lard" a substitute for the human Emperor. This substitute addresses the little boy, asking him to support his enormous weight back to the storehouse after the ritual of the oxtail stew cooking session is over. Ōe cheerfully appropriates a Rabelaisian gaiety and farce in a phallic and urinary rhapsody: "Slowly they advanced toward the entrance to the storehouse, but a certain party's feet, ponderously lifting and lowering like the leg of a circus elephant stepping up onto a barrel, simply could not step across the broad, high threshold of the many-layered fire door. And when the boy dropped to his knees on the ground that retained the midday warmth and threw his arms around the calf of the thick pole of a leg a certain party was still laboring patiently to lift and tried to lend him strength, a certain party fell over on his back as unceremoniously as an infant but with a thud that shook the ground. Then his large, pitch-black penis sprang from the long-since buttonless fly of his 'people's' overalls, and he energetically urinated."

The image of the human Emperor, the fat father, becomes increasingly imbued with the authority of God addressing his only son, Christ: ".. . a certain party faced his chosen son and spoke as follows, heedless of the enemy firing into him, Have you seen what must be seen? For the next quarter-century that you will live remember always what you have seen. All has been accomplished, you have seen what must be seen, Survive and remember, that is your role, Do nothing else!" This is his Lord for whom the little boy secretly sheds blood: "Please drink the blood; it is for you!"

The narrative also includes parodies of other literary texts—including Ōe's own. Unable to restrain himself from parodying his own earlier works and one of the holiest haiku by Bashō about a frog and an ancient pond, Ōe lays bare the literary device of a so-called 5-7-5 form and purposely blocks our automatic response to and perception of the traditional form. The narrator's father, as a representative of the "Manchurian Committee to Revere Bashō the Master," composes a doggerel about a frog (kawazu in classi cal Japanese and kaeru in modern Japanese, which also means "to change," "to return," and is often used with other verbs to form compounds). Ōe puns on kaeru:

What is a frog?
It is hatching eggs
It is exchanging for money
It is a pompous ass sitting back
It is being knocked down flat on its back
It is returning to an old garden
It is returning to mud
It is everything quieting down
Many of these belong to human reality.
The old pond—/ A frog leaps in, / And a splash.

At another time, the narrator parodies Ōe's own work, alluding to the two hundred dogs that appear in "A Strange Job," The Youth Who Came in Late, etc.:

Once he was awake he could hear that not only the patient next door but the two hundred dogs kept in the hospital courtyard for use in the laboratory had also been threatened by his sobbing and clearly were howling still; nonetheless, he thought to himself, I am only dreaming; besides, I'm fully conscious of the significance of those howling dogs because I've written about them, this is no time for howling dogs.

On another occasion, a famous classical work is the object of parody. According to the narrator's mother, a certain party's last words, "All has been accomplished, you have seen what must be seen," that echo the Biblical prophecy, are the quotation her real father found in the Tale of the Heike "when he read it in prison and sent it to relatives that were about to be bereaved, yessir! Can you imagine a certain party turning to a pitiful little child and speaking to him in classical Japanese?"

The effect of these parodic repetitions is what Russian formalists called "defamiliarization" of literary techniques. Victor Shklovsky defines "defamiliarization" as the deautomatization of perception and the habitual way of thinking: "And so it is in order to restore the feeling of life, to be aware of things, in order to make the stone stoney, that there exists what is called art. The aim of art is to give the feeling of a thing as something seen, and not as something recognized. The device of art is the device of making things strange, and the device of impeded form, which increases the difficulty and duration of perception since the process of perception in art is an end in itself and must be prolonged" [Literature and Semiotics, trans. by Ann Shukman]. Ōe "defamiliarizes" a familiar historical subject, Japan's surrender and the prewar relationship between Japanese and the divine Emperor, by presenting it through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy superimposed on the eyes of the grown-up man, who still believes in the myth of the Emperor System, his "Happy Days."

Finally, the "one event" narrated n times in "My Tears" and its grave significance are laid bare: "August fifteenth, 1945, the Emperor swiftly descended to earth to announce the surrender in the voice of a mortal man. August sixteenth, his Majesty circling upward in a swift ascent again . . . would revive as the national essence itself, and more certainly than before, more divinely, as a ubiquitous chrysanthemum, would cover Japan and all her people. As a golden chrysanthemum illuminated from behind by a vast purple light and glittering like an aurora, his Majesty would manifest himself." The hallucinatory ecstasy that overwhelms the thirty-five-year-old son is "contrasted" with the "chill objectivity" and "negative evidence" presented by his mother, who discredits her son's memories, those memories he wants to remember. This contrast reminds us that the narrated event may not have happened the way the narrator tells us: ". . . there's no telling whether I've actually experienced what I say, correspondence with reality in itself has never meant anything anyway, 'he' says." The reader has already suspected that this narrative by a man possibly mad, possibly dying of liver cancer, may be unreliable; this passage suggests that the narrator suspects his own reliability. Imagining is a "supreme game" he enjoys; he is often unable to deny his mother's account, which has "a reasonably combative correctness." He sometimes doubts "if I hadn't created a certain party entirely in my imagination." In passages like this, the narrator suggests that to argue what may or may not be true, what may or may not be realistic (nichij teki), is outside the realm of fiction or a work of verbal art. This is the point Ōe is trying to make in "My Tears": this is his own raison d'être as a writer.

If the narrator succumbed to his mother's imputation that he is escaping by the repeated act of remembering only what he wants to remember, to the doctor's words that he is not dying of liver cancer, or to his own misgivings that a certain party might be a phantom, "My Tears" would no longer be a parody. For this reason, the narrator, pitied by his mother, the contender, must continue the quixotic journey to meet "the colossal chrysanthemum topped with a purple aurora," the symbol of the Emperor, at the top of the stone steps.

.....

The primary circumstance to which Ōe's parodic method responds is what he calls "the intrinsic singularity of the Japanese intellectual milieu that constrains a writer to avoid the Emperor System [tenn sei] as subject matter." [This and subsequent quotations of Ōe are taken from Ōe Kenzaburō zensakuhin Vol. 3, Series I, 1966-67.] Ten years earlier, in the story "Seventeen" and its sequel "A Political Boy Is Now Dead," Ōe had taken up the subject of seventeen-year-old Yamaguchi Otoya, who had assassinated the Socialist Party leader, Asanuma Inejiro, in 1960. These stories caused an uproar. All kinds of political groups, right and left, inundated the author with accusations, protests, and threats. To smooth things over, the publisher, Bungakukai, issued "Our Humble Notice" (kinkoku,) formally apologizing to the groups involved for the inconveniences the publication incurred, and withdrew the sequel, "A Political Boy Is Now Dead," from publication. The story is still unavailable to the public to this day. This furor was a blessing in disguise. The accusers unwittingly offered the accused a legitimate reason to articulate his position on the Emperor System and its political implications, a position which had continued to fester within him since the midsummer day of August 15, 1945. Politically, things move at a slow pace in "unrevolutionary" Japan, and Ōe let five years pass by before he opened a series of rebuttals to his critics. The message of his argument was disturbingly clear. In 1966, at the August 15 Memorial Meeting, he lashed out in a public lecture at those who refuse to remember the "rare period, the unprecedented time" and "the uninhibited air, the liberated spirit, lodged deep in the hearts of the masses, that made it possible to reexamine the Emperor System inside out." The ideology of the Emperor System is a most effective kakuremino, "a magic coat that can make the wearer invisible," he argued, which tells the Japanese "you can quit thinking about the war, you do not have to think about it." Ōe continued: "Those who lost their sons in the war continue to think about the present and prewar Japan, about a possible war in the future. Then let us suppose, at a memorial service of the war dead held somewhere else, the Emperor himself is present." Isn't it just possible, Ōe asked, that the same people, upon learning of the Emperor's attendance, might stop thinking altogether, shed "sweet tears," and start glorifying the war period?

Ō is unable to accept the memories of the defeat and postwar Japan cherished by the conservatives and their followers, the kind of "cleaned up" memories that have resulted in the elimination of other memories—the newborn, free, critical spirit that permitted the masses for the first time to question the validity of the Emperor System. He argued that "to recall the time" as a period of political liberation is "to violate a taboo. It has become a proscription. .. . I feel what has been suppressing the arts and the minds of the masses of Japan today is nothing other than the Emperor System"

In the month following the public lecture, Ōe again confronted the "intrinsic peculiarity of the Japanese intellectual milieu" that unabashedly buried "A Political Boy" alive. In the article "Can a Writer Remain Absolutely Antipolitical?" [published in Ōe Kenzaburō zensakuhin] he wrote:

Why is it that those writers who have led such a persistent battle in defense [of a Japanese translation] of Lady Chatterley's Lover did not take up the gauntlet for Fūryūmudan (Fukazawa Shichiro, 1960) or "Seventeen" [which includes the sequel "A Political Boy Is Now Dead"]? It is because both works concern not so much right-wing elements in Japan as everything that the Emperor System evokes. As a novelist, I did not write "Seventeen" and "A Political Boy Is Now Dead" just for the purpose of studying the rightist movement in Japan. My task was to develop the image I have of the Emperor System and its omnipresence, which penetrates and surrounds our entire being. Probably this was obvious to everyone, and consequently, the author was forced to isolate himself. . . this story ["A Political Boy"] incurred various kinds of political misinterpretations from both conservatives and progressives. I have never, at any point in the story, treated the hero with ridicule.

Ōe quotes two short passages from the ill-fated work, which prefigures the ideology that the thirty-five-year-old narrator in "My Tears" dons as his magic coat:

The aroma of the tide stiffened my overworked nostrils, sharp and relentless, about to tear them apart. I opened my eyes, took in the sea at dusk lying beyond framed by the window, and shouted, "Oh, your Majesty!"

I believed I had seen him. I did behold the face of pure white, a light of glittering purple bathing the cheeks, the ears, and the hair, the large ruff with frills of brilliant gold, the scarlet garment donned by those eighteenth-century European kings. The sun going down over the sea is the Emperor himself, the essence of the absolute Emperor like the universe is the sun! Your Majesty, your Majesty, teach me what to do, the minute I prayed from the descending summer sun over the sea I received the revelation.

Trying to commit suicide in solitary confinement, the boy overcomes the fear of death:

A kind of fearless death, given only to a self-immolating soul, a supreme bliss. His Majesty is the only being that can transcend death, removes the claws of terror from death, transforms terror to supreme bliss. . . . Still unconscious and unborn, I am afloat in the embryonic water, a dark sea of the vast universe, my eyes flooded with a luminescence of gold, rose, and purple. Oh, your Majesty, your Majesty!"

It is not surprising to see in the image of this rightist boy the ideal youth cherished dearly by Mishima Yukio and canonized a year before his death in the perfect terrorist hero, Isao, in Runaway Horses (Honba, 1969). Nor is it surprising to see Ōe's chagrin over the death of Mishima, which he calls "an intentional effrontery" and "an insult" directed at all the Japanese who have chosen to live through (ikinobiru) the postwar years to the present. In "The Dead: The Ultimate Vision and We Who Continue To Live," the last chapter of The Postwar as the Contemporary (Dōjidai to shite no sengo), Ōe writes that Mishima, instead of creating a comic novel of black humor and "grotesque realism," justified as an artist the young terrorist's every empty utterance. As a person he rejected criticism by others and rushed into seppuku to "let a flower of destruction bloom just for himself."

Ōe observes that Mishima's pet theories on "tradition," "politics," and "the Emperor," including his final "manifesto," carefully avoided words, like "the other," "reality," and "object," that would reveal the fragility and contradiction in his argument. Such was also the language of literature churned out by the war collaborators. Those ambiguous (aimaina) words supported by "absolute emotions" fed the military propoganda that led the nation into war. Words that had a mystic spirit constantly sustained the nation and endowed the Emperor with power and wisdom (kotodama no tasuke tamahau kuni). The significance of August 15, 1945, is devastating because "postwar Japan set out on its troubled journey exempting the cultural tradition headed by the Emperor System from the war responsibilities." The result was that "a dark, huge mass of resignation" overshadowed the future of postwar writers.

However, Mishima was the only postwar writer who had the audacity to reverse the use of this dark, huge mass of resignation. He laid his life on the line, guarding the colossal cumulus cloud of the cultural tradition with the Emperor System on top, which was crashing down on postwar writers, as if it were a ray of light in the dark that would illuminate his own "aesthetics." The bewitched "words" of equivocation, "words" created with deliberate ambiguity by his law school mentality and presumptuousness—Mishima uttered the "words," as we have seen in Runaway Horses, bedecked with the same ornaments of the fanatical war collaborators. . . .

At this point he publicly insulted all of us who have undertaken the postwar task to build up our literary imagination despite the huge, dark mass of resignation watching over us, and those who have tried to follow in our footsteps. . . . And then, as if to dodge the advancing counterattack . . . together with a host of unverifiable "words," he cut his belly open as fireworks of chrysanthemum banged in the sky, as a defender of the cultural tradition whose pinnacle was the Emperor System, of the nation which "the word-soul aids." He had bought and left behind the safest "stock" of a nation, proven with such brutality a quarter century ago, the unyieldingness of its foundation which even the blood deluge of the countless number of war victims could not shake loose. As the flesh of the beautiful, eloquent youth [Isao] substantiated his ultimate vision, Mishima became one with the boy, a red disk of chrysanthemum illuminated his final vision radiantly.

That the death of Mishima galvanized the composition of "My Tears" is no secret. In the prologue of the second publication of "My Tears," Ōe draws the relationship between Mishima's suicide and the Emperor System: the ostracized "A Political Boy" is still alive and well in ŌE's mind. The devastating reception of the story had led him to seek elsewhere a literary mode that would free him from the "shackles of the Emperor System, a suppressor of political imagination." The most notable thing about Ōe's post 1968 stories that deal with sociopolitical topics is the adoption of black humor, exaggeration, madness, the parodic, and the satiric. "My Tears" maximizes this "legitimacy of the exercise of a free imagination that is politically committed" [Regina Janes, Gabriel García Márquez, 1981], but not bound to the mimetic representation of reality. The work is his challenge, as a writer, to "the cultural tradition head ed by the Emperor System," whereas Mishima wrote Runaway Horses as a justification of that tradition and system. In a world turned upside down, Ōe parodies the "possessed words of equivocation" that allowed Mishima to create the ideal youth, whose eloquent speech is unequalled. The thirty-five-year-old narrator of "My Tears" plays a "double" for both the dead author and the canonized boy, "the wrong side" of everything the Emperor System continues to suggest. Instead of the divine Emperor waiting for the narrator/biographer to wipe his tears away (the title of "My Tears" clearly indicates the presence of the Emperor by the use of the verb "to wipe" in honorific form, nuguitamō), it is his mother's "scratchy thumbs" that "expertly wipe away the tears in the corners of his closed eyes."

At the end of a narrative discourse that zigzags, spins, and seesaws, who is given the final words? "Sooner or later the Japanese are going to change their attitude about what happened, and I intend to live to see it, yessir!" Such is the hope the narrator's mother expresses. "About what happened" (kono koto ni tsuite) refers to August 15, 1945, the one event narrated ç times in connection with the Emperor System. The mother pities her son for the first time: "And here he is thirty-five years old, it's a cruel business! When he was a child he'd dream the teacher at elementary school was asking him IF THE EMPEROR ORDERED YOU TO DIE, WOULD YOU DIE? and he'd sob and repeat the cruel answer in his sleep, YES, I WOULD DIE, I DIE HAPPILY! and he is thirty-five years old and still weeping away as if the teacher was asking him that same question, it's a cruel business, yessir!]]." No matter how he shuts himself up in seclusion, whether he is a conservative or a progressive, Ōe repeats, as long as the Emperor System remains, a Japanese writer cannot disavow his political involvement. Writing, for Ōe, is more than "a personal matter": it is a political act.