[In the following essay, Sakurai discusses the major influences on Ōe's early literary career, such as Japan's military defeat in 1945 and the works of such authors as Jean-Paul Sartre and traditional Haiku poets.]

A highly regarded Japanese novelist, Shòhei Òoka, commented in 1977 that to discuss Kenzaburō Ōe would be to discuss one-quarter of a century of Japanese literature beginning in 1957. Few critics familiar with the development of that literature would disagree. Since becoming established as a writer in 1957 at age twenty-two, Ōe has produced an astonishing body of work that ranks at the forefront of contemporary Japanese fiction. He came on the literary scene a decade after a younger generation of writers referred to as sengoha (Postwar School) had launched a movement to discard outmoded traditions and achieve contemporaneity with world literature by exploring new ideas and techniques. Although the momentum created by the sengoha had already waned or changed direction by the time Ōe began to publish, he nonetheless succeeded in realizing the ideals of the movement and brought postwar literature to new heights.

Kenzaburō Ōe was born on 31 January 1935 in a village called Ōse on the island of Shikoku, the third son of a prominent samurai family. At the end of World War II he was a ten-year-old "village patriot" accustomed to being asked in school, "What would you do if the Emperor commanded you to die?" His knees trembling, he would reply: "I would die, Sir. I would cut open my belly and die." Because he had been taught that Emperor Hirohito was a living god, he was astounded on 15 August 1945 to hear the Emperor go on the radio and announce Japan's surrender. [As he wrote in Genshuku natsunawatari (Solemnly Walking the Tightrope)]:

The strange and disappointing fact was that the Emperor spoke in a human voice like any ordinary man. Though we couldn't understand the speech, we heard his voice. One of my friends could even imitate it cleverly. We surrounded him, a boy in soiled shorts who spoke in the Emperor's voice, and laughed.

Our laughter echoed in the summer morning stillness and disappeared into the clear, high sky. An instant later, anxiety tumbled out of the heavens and seized us impious children. We stared at one another in silence.

Ōe later wrote that the trauma left him squint-eyed for a time. Explaining twenty years later what turned him to fiction writing, Ōe said that the defeat, the feeling of being brought to his knees, "took seed" in August 1945 and grew into a lasting obsession in him and that only through literature could he cope with this obsession and manage to survive.

The defeat in World War II was a source of humiliation and guilt that the Japanese collectively suffered for a decade or more, a shame renewed daily by the presence of the Occupation forces, by the war trials, by the deprivation of daily necessities and by bombed-out city blocks. Powerful machinery was at work in General Douglas MacArthur's general headquarters [GHQ] to erase militarism from Japan forever, and the Japanese went through a long period of self-flagellation over the guilt of their militant past and of self-loathing for their new fifth-rate status. A boy of Ōe's sensitivity and precocity was bound to be deeply affected. The antiheroes of his early works—who resemble the author in many aspects—reflect the psychological ravages of that era. In one short story, "Human Sheep" (1958), Ōe describes a humiliating incident that a student of French like himself suffered on a bus at the hands of some American GI's.

Shortly after August 1945, a more encompassing censorship than the wartime publications code was clamped on the Japanese, and textbooks were probed with particular care for traces of militarism and emperor worship. The national education system was also revised, and when Ōe entered high school twenty months after the war, he was one of the first students to be educated under the new plan modeled after the American public school system.

The curriculum had been changed and he was no longer taught morality—a reading in anecdotes illustrative of traditional virtues such as filial piety and loyalty. The hour was devoted instead to the study of the new constitution speedily prepared by the order of the GHQ in the mold of the American constitution. Ōe's class, in addition, was given books on democracy and taught the subject by teachers recently returned from the war.

The details of Ōe's education have historical relevance. In a country never before vanquished, he is the only major writer ever to receive a secondary education under what was actually American occupation, following curricula devised by education specialists at the American GHQ and accumulating knowledge from books censored by them. The aim of that education was the rejection of traditional Japanese values in favor of the American value system. Receiving that education, Ōe became a strong proponent of democracy and a supporter of the new constitution, advocating them in writing and lectures. He became the spokesman for his generation in the new age and has been active in anti-establishment, human rights and humanitarian movements, demonstrating in the streets and staging hunger strikes.

By comparison, Yukio Mishima, born ten years before Ōe, received his secondary school education at the height of Japan's militarism. In the late fifties and sixties he glorified militarism and the emperor cult in such fictional works as the powerful short story "Patriotism" (1960). With revenues from his writing, he formed a private army of his own, outfitting the hundred members with stylish uniforms designed by a Parisian haut couturier. Mishima then demanded a revision of the constitution that outlawed war and called for a return to the imperial system. To achieve this end, he tried to incite an insurrection in 1970; on failing this, he committed ritual suicide. Subsequently Ōe parodied Mishima in a brilliant short novel, The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away (1972). The protagonist is a seemingly deranged patient in a hospital who tries to relive an event that occurred on 15 August 1945, when his father led a band of army deserters on a suicide mission to rescue Japan from defeat and was shot down by the army. The father had been convinced of being consecrated in death because he was dying for the emperor, who is a living god, and the son spends the rest of his life reliving that glorious moment of consecration revealed to him by a colossal gold chrysanthemum in the sky.

In the village high school, Ōe's ambition had been to become a scientist, not a writer. But his teachers told him: "A scientist? You could never become a scientist." The basis for that opinion has never been discovered. Their student was clearly a genius. At the Scientific Invention Fair he submitted a "continous-type" mousetrap he invented that could conceivably catch, continuously, all the mice on the island of Shikoku. Ōe learned astronomy by reading on his own, and he also had a passion for geometry, solving geometric problems for pleasure. The teachers' cruel pronouncement threw him into a pit of despair, anger and shame and turned him into a lonely, morose, eccentric boy. He quit playing baseball and contracted intercostal neuralgia; unable to get along with others around him any longer, he turned to books for comfort.

Ōe's earliest reading was in tanka and haiku. He had been drawn since early childhood to Shiki Masaoka (1867–1902), a leading Meiji Era poet born in that same region (Ōe later attended the high school in Matsue City where Shiki had been educated). For years he also read Mokichi Saito (1882–1953), a tanka poet strongly influenced by Shiki. Because of his oldest brother's interest in haiku and tanka as a writer and collector, Ōe has admitted, he read most of the postwar publications in these genres. The poems he read should number close to 100,000, since Shiki's 1925 collection alone contained 12,700 haiku and Mokichi was also prolific.

After 1949, Ōe discovered the free-verse poets Tarō Tominaga (1901–25) and Chūya Nakahara (1907–37), to both of whom he acknowledges his indebtedness. The debt was partly owed to French poetry; Tominaga translated Baudelaire and, immensely affected by his poetry, wrote verse in the manner of the French symbolists. Nakahara started writing dadaist aphorisms at age fifteen, produced symbolist poems under the influence of Rimbaud and Verlaine and translated the collected poems of Rimbaud. During the same period, Ōe also became attracted to Poe, Eliot and Auden and later quoted them in his fiction. The titles for his short novels Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness and Leap Before You Look come from Auden. "Although I have been periodically engrossed in French poetry, I keep coming back to Auden," Ōe says.

The poets of Ōe's boyhood were all men of extremely refined sensibility with added capacity to feel deeply because of their tragedies or illnesses. Shiki, for instance, suffered from tuberculosis all his adult life and wrote many of his poems while bedridden; Tominaga died of consumption at age twenty-four. They were lonely and melancholy men easily moved to tears. Their poems were subjective, self-absorbed and emotional, abounding in images from the natural world. Gifted in language and sensitive and withdrawn, especially after his father's sudden death when he was nine, Ōe shared several personal traits with these poets. After reading thousands of their poems annually and with great empathy during his formative years, Ōe naturally developed a literary personality like the personae in the poetry. Ōe's protagonists feel threatened by silence in the woods and sense the breathing of a small animal stirring in the dark. They are frequently fear-stricken, frustrated, humiliated, crushed, chagrined, mortified and ashamed, and are often on the verge of tears. When betrayed, cheated, humiliated, abused and cuckolded, they are too passive, too forgiving, devoid of the will and strength to fight back. Vengeance is unusual in Ōe's world. His characters tend to be self-destructive, sometimes out of a subconscious desire for self-punishment, which is a favorite theme of his in such works as Homo Sexualis (1963) and Man'en gannen no futtobōru (1967; The Silent Cry). Some critics view Ōe's unusual sensibilities as evidence of his essentially childlike nature. One critic even professes that he thinks of Ōe as an overgrown baby. There is undeniably a feeling of childlike innocence and purity about him; but Ōe's habit of overstatement and the influence of his favorite poets also have to be taken into account. In a 1905 tanka, for example, Mokichi described shedding tears while watching some wrestlers. When he was asked the reason for his tears, he explained that it moved him to see the wrestlers working so hard at their trade!

Poetry appears in abundance in Ōe's fiction. Critics called his early short story "The Catch" (1958) [which has also been published as a novella] a prose poem; in other stories some of his sentences resemble avant-garde verses. His writing is dense with natural images, particularly those of the birds and animals he grew up with in his mountain village, and no one can match Ōe's skill in the use of these images. The figures of speech that decorate his prose are occasionally too elaborate in fiction: "Hauling up my flabby, waterlogged body on the hook of consciousness much as one might reel in a dead sea toad, I clattered wildly down the staircase" [The Silent Cry].

In prose, Ōe's favorite book since childhood has been The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a copy of which was given to him during the war. Despite the emperor worship and wartime anti-Americanism, Huck Finn immediately became Ōe's hero. What won Ōe's lasting admiration was the agonizing decision Huck makes not to reveal the whereabouts of a runaway slave and to "go to Hell" instead. To a boy accustomed to being asked, "What would you do if the Emperor commanded you to die?" and not totally convinced of the sincerity of his answer, "I would cut open my belly and die, Sir," this was a supreme act of courage. In a 1966 article titled "Huckleberry Finn and the Hero" Ōe juxtaposed Charles Lindbergh, President John F. Kennedy and Huck Finn as heroes and praised Huck as the "representative American hero of all time." The admiration apparently inspired Ōe's teen-age adventure story Pluck the Flowers, Gun the Kids (1958).

The writings of several postwar Japanese writers riveted Ōe's interest from about 1949. He read all the slick boy's adventure stories written by Jun Ishikawa (b. 1899) after the war, and he was entranced by Postwar School critic Kiyoteru Hanada's "Spirit of the Revival" (1947), an erudite book of literary theory based on Marxism. Deeply affected by Hanada's doctrines, Ōe later used Hanadian dialectics and heeded the critic's urging to writers not to neglect native traditions such as folklore in their pursuit of Western inspirations for their work. In his fiction he employed motifs from folklore such as festivals, sacrifices and burial rites and wrote two major novels based on the myths of his village and the history of his ancestors at a time when other writers were "foreignizing" characters and locales to make their work cosmopolitan. The Silent Cry and The Contemporaneity Game [Dojidai Gemu, also published as A Game of Simultaneity, 1979] both won coveted prizes. When the eight-volume collection of literary and art criticism by the father of modern Japanese criticism, Hideo Kobayashi, started appearing in 1951, Ōe reverently read every page. He could not have had a better preparation for his writing career. When he began writing short stories four years later, they were masterfully plotted and proportioned.

In his fourteenth year Ōe was mesmerized by Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov. He was to write later that almost every year since that time he has spent one to several "holy weeks" reading only Dostoevsky.

While reading Dostoevsky, I was free from anxiety, feeling myself stable, able to maintain an order, not committing suicide or becoming insane or starting an antisocial act. Even when I was unable to sleep, because I could curl up like a fetus and lie hidden in Dostoevsky's womb, I did not fear the shadows of night or death. [Solemnly Walking the Tightrope]

Sometime in late 1949 or early 1950, Ōe read a collection of short stories by Sartre in translation and found his description of the captives terrified of their approaching death in Le mur false. Ōe himself was being stricken nightly by fear of death, and he thought the portrayal could be more effectively handled. Dropping Sartre, he went on to Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Flaubert and did not return to Sartre until three years later, when he read L'âge de raison.

Admitted to Tokyo University in 1954, Ōe enrolled in the Literature Department and moved on two years later to the Department of French Literature. He was introduced to Rabelais by his principal professor, Kazuo Watanabe, an expert on Rabelaisian lore, but in 1956–57 Ōe was too absorbed in Sartre to become attracted to anyone else. Although he was studying classical French grammar and Balzac in the classroom, once he was back in his rooming house he would read absolutely nothing but Sartre. Particularly during vacations, he would devote all day to him—except for the last week, when he would try to write a one-act play or a short story for a prize offered on campus. Ōe's short story "An Odd Job" won the 1957 May Festival Prize and was published in the May issue of the university literary journal. The story attracted attention when Ken Hirano, a highly respected critic of the Postwar School and literary critic of the Mainichi Shimbun, praised it in the newspaper as a modernistic and artful work. Four more pieces by Ōe appeared in the following months in leading literary magazines and established his reputation as a student writer of extraordinary talent: "Proud Are the Dead," "Other People's Legs," "The Plaster Mask" and "Time for Perjury." In January 1958 Ōe won fame by narrowly losing the coveted Akutagawa Prize for 1957 to writer Kōken Kai, his "Proud Are the Dead" vying against Kai's "Naked Emperor." So high was the critics' regard for Ōe's work that he received as many accolades as did Kai. Six months later he was awarded the 1958 prize for "The Catch."

"The Catch" was followed in February and March 1958 by "Human Sheep," "Transportation" and "The Pigeon," and these and the previous five pieces—excepting "Plaster Mask" and "Transportation"—were collected in March 1958 under the title Proud Are the Dead. Regarding these efforts, Ōe, with his usual self-deprecation, credits Sartre:

I thought I was singing with my own voice, but because of my daily habit of bogging down in the Sartrean mire, like a ventriloquist's grotesque, red-cheeked dummy, I was only miming Sartre's voice in a raw shriek. [Solemnly Walking the Tightrope]

Clearly there was no attempt at imitation; but there was much affinity and inspiration. Having survived war, defeat and occupation and being bewildered by the emptiness and enervation of a postwar wasteland similar to Sartre's, Ōe could easily identify with Sartre and his antiheroes. He saw himself and others of his generation as ensnared and incarcerated, devoid of real human solidarity and vitiated by incarceration, and he tried to depict that existence in a group of short stories that became Proud Are the Dead. In "An Odd Job" a student goes to work at a compound where dogs are tethered and beaten to death one by one. The student muses: "And who could say the same thing wouldn't happen to us? Helplessly leashed together, looking alike, hostility lost and individuality with it—us ambiguous Japanese students."

In "Proud Are the Dead" cadavers jostling one another in a tank in the cellar of a university hospital symbolize human existence within walls. The story recalls Le mur, in which the captives await their execution in a similar cellar. "Other People's Legs" describes the world of teenagers confined to wheelchairs for spinal tuberculosis in a sanatorium completely shut off from the outside world. In "Time for Perjury" a youth is tied to a chair and held under guard; in "The Catch" a downed black American airman is "raised" in the cellar by a ten-year-old boy in a wartime mountain village. Readers sensed in these works a certain foreignness; they were like translations from the writings of Camus, Sartre or Kafka. Ken Hirano lauded "The Catch" but commented that it did not describe an authentic Japanese village. With its rich images of animals, tribal chieftain and hunters, it is European in temper. The sanatorium in "Other People's Legs," similarly, is nothing like those found in Japan. But Ōe was interested in philosophy, not authenticity. The critics, many of them specialists in some Western literature, were highly pleased with Ōe's "modernity"—by which they meant Western influence.

In June 1958 Ōe's first full-length novel, Pluck the Flowers, Gun the Kids, appeared to great acclaim. Also based on the theme of confinement, it treats the adventures of a group of teen-agers from a reformatory who occupy a deserted village. This was followed in October by Leap Before You Look, a collection of five novellas and short stories depicting the interrelations of foreigners and Japanese under occupation. In 1958 Ōe was also laboring on his thesis for graduation the following spring, a study of imagery in Sartre's fiction. (Incidentally, when Ōe met Sartre in Paris in 1961 and was asked which French author he read most in college, he was too shy to tell Sartre the truth. He finally whispered, "Racine.")

Ōe's early success as a writer has been the source of his enduring regret that he did not continue with his studies and accumulate experience first. He hears an inner voice that he should have heard in 1957: "What's the hurry, you're still young." Despite his enormous influence, he is not likely to get a sympathetic ear; because of that success, he has been invited abroad many times, starting in 1960 with a visit to China, where he met Mao, and he has become acquainted with several writers whom he admires: Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Gabriel García Márquez, for example, in addition to Sartre. He has gone on to publish eleven more bestselling novels, numerous critiques, reportages and essays, many of the latter on the art of writing. He must be the only author ever to write a bestseller titled The Technique of Fiction [Shosetsu no Hoho, also published as Methods of the Novel, 1978], a book which only the initiated could comprehend. Clearly there is no need for apology. At age forty-nine, Kenzaburō Ōe has decades ahead of him in which to experiment and learn and present more masterpieces to his eager public.