[In the following essay, Yoshida argues for the universality of Ōe's fiction, citing its strong affinities with the "grotesque realism" of the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais.]

In the modern history of Japan the most significant event was the defeat of Japan in the Second World War. It totally undermined the social and value system developed since the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The experience in Hiroshima and Nagasaki makes clear that one single bomb may mean instantaneous and simultaneous death for everybody on earth. And the real meaning of the nuclear age and its imminent danger is fully examined for the first time in the works of Kenzaburo Ōe. Even though the situations, characters, and incidents in his fiction are clearly Japanese, his unparalleled literary imagination makes his provocative and disturbing message universal. The problems he deals with are not only Japanese, but global. Ōe writes for the sake of the world's future.

While majoring in French literature at Tokyo University, Ōe avidly read Pascal, Camus, Sartre, Mailer, Faulkner, and Bellow. Like Shōyō Tsubouchi (1859–1935), who modernized Japanese literature, Ōe became familiar with contemporary trends of world literature, also influenced by wartime experiences and the postwar disorientation. With this background, Ōe has started to reform Japanese literature—to make it more committed and relevant to the human problems peculiar to the twentieth century. Ōe assigns a more active role to literature than that which Tsubouchi had given it nearly one hundred years ago—to "move the heart and stimulate the imagination." For Ōe, literature is not to "stimulate the imagination," but is a product of the imagination which should provide readers with a clear picture of the situation, physical or metaphysical, in which humans exist. Literature may also help the reader deal with the disillusionment that results from a realization of the meaninglessness of life. Furthermore, literature is to provide an individual or personal viewpoint, often antithetical to the ready-made and dominant one; thereby the novel functions as an antidote for such group psychology as exhibited in war.

According to Ōe's concept, therefore, political ideology has a legitimate place in literature; this again directly violates his predecessor's dictum. In his Shosetsu Shinzui (Essence of the Novel, 1885) Tsubouchi declared the independence of literature from what was called the "Political Novel," once fashionable in the pre- and early Meiji Period. The tradition of divorcing literature from political ideology has since been upheld in Japan. In other words, if literature is to remain serious it ought not deal with political issues. Ōe has violated that tradition by bringing into literature such political issues as disputes over nuclear energy, international treaties involving the use of nuclear weaponry, and the possible dangers of maintaining monarchy, even a symbolic monarchy.

In one of his earlier novels, The Young Man Who Arrived Late (Okurete Kita Seinen, 1962), Ōe deals with a young man who is helplessly disoriented after Japan's surrender by the Emperor's declaration of his change of status from divine to human, for the declaration cancels out the responsibilities for the war fought under his name. In a novella entitled The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away (Mizu kara Waga Mamida o Nugui Tamau Hi, 1971) [contained in Ōe's Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness, 1977], Ōe symbolically presents the relationship between the Emperor and his Imperial Army on the eve of World War II and its result manifested in present-day Japan. His latest novel, A Game of Simultaneity (Dōjidai Gēmu, 1979), explores the monarch's influence as a force in centralizing or controlling Japan's diversified folkloric culture.

Ōe's understanding of the world situation and its relationship to Japan makes him believe that political neutrality in literature is unacceptable, for the question involves human annihilation. Ōe's messages in The Flood unto my Soul (Kozui wa Waga Tamashii ni Oyobi, 1973) and The Pinchrunner (Pinchiran'na Chosho, 1976) are clearly antinuclear. [In Ōe Kenzaburo Dojidai Ronshu (Essays on Contemporary Issues), 1981] Ōe asks, "What can literature do when confronted with starving children?" His own answer to this question is that literature ought to be written from the viewpoint of starving people, because they are the majority of the world population. If literature is to be universal, it ought to be written from the perspective of the majority. And this is the only thing that literature can do for starving children. Ōe's message here is that literature should not exist for literature's sake, but should be actively involved in the issues vital to the existence of the majority, that is, the poor and the oppressed.

In an essay entitled "Why Do Human Beings Create Literature?" Ōe contends that the role of literature is as follows:

Literature is a verbal endeavor made in order to recognize the meaning of one's being human at one's very root, with an overall understanding of one's relation to society, the world and the cosmos. Therefore, when a giant corporation, disrupting the natural cycle of life and death, exercises its large-scale violence over human beings—so large that it destroys the fundamental harmony between human beings and their society, the world and the cosmos—literature, standing on a human ground, will continue to protest against such violence.

It is true that the human problems of Tsubouchi's time were of a considerably different nature, but the philosophy of literature in the nineteenth century was to pursue truth in human life and to appreciate life. Basically life was precious and meaningful, and therefore death was tragic. However, toward the end of this century when, in the face of possible obliteration of humanity, death has lost its tragic quality, such political issues as nuclear weaponry and deterioration of the natural environment are not merely political but human issues. Ōe has departed far from the traditional literary tenets laid out by Tsubouchi; he allows wider latitude and gives new energy to literature, thus making it a vital activity of the human mind.

Sex is another element Ōe has been treating in a totally new fashion. In Japanese literary tradition, both before and after Tsubouchi, sex had never been so deeply and extensively explored. Ōe's predecessors always dealt with matters ancillary to human sexuality; therefore, sex was suggested more or less metaphorically or symbolically. This allusive and subtle treatment of sex is completely eliminated in Ōe, and sex is presented directly by depicting characters' sexual organs and acts with anatomical accuracy.

Ōe's treatment of sex seems to present images far removed from those of romantic literature, such as D. H. Lawrence's. In Ōe sex is brutal, repulsive, grossly distorted; therefore it presents a negative image. The sex described is often abnormal in form and in the relationships between the characters involved—abnormal also in the sense that it does not lead to healthy procreation.

The negative image of sex is presented in contrast to the positive image of politics in Ōe's imaginative world. Political human beings are always alert to possible dangers, ready to fight, and therefore tend to differentiate themselves as individuals from the whole of society. Sexual human beings, by contrast, miss the danger signals in their sexual comfort, are satisfied in their stagnant state of mind, and tend to assimilate with society. Ōe, in other words, sees young people in modern Japan in such a stagnant state, and, in order to provoke them, repeatedly uses the motif of depraved sex and its negativity.

Ōe classifies sex in literature into two categories: one involves romantic and erotic treatment of sex; the other is a direct approach toward sex as the human core. Writers choosing the former try to identify themselves with the shadow of the past. The romantic-erotic treatment of sex may create a beautiful metaphorical world of emotion, but the more beautiful that world is, the farther removed it is from the actual state of being human. Ōe posits that literary examination of modern human beings can be done most effectively by the use of explicit sexual terminology:

In the age of Stendhal, a clear mind [of the author] was efficient enough for analyzing the naked human being. In this century, with its two World Wars, a weapon called psychoanalysis was brought into literature. And today sexual terminology, sexual images are effective new weapons. In other words, in modern literature, only sexual images and terminology are shocking enough to break through [the outward protection of human beings]. ["Modern Literature and Sex," in Essays on Contemporary Issues]

Ōe's hyperbolic magnification of depravity in sex in his works seems to suggest a possible apocalypse. It recalls the visual presentation of the theme by Hieronymus Bosch, entitled the Garden of Earthly Delights, or The Last Judgement. The negativity of sex and pessimism concerning the future of mankind in Ōe's world are discussed in a later section of this essay.

Ōe emphasizes "imagination" time after time in his various essays. He certainly sets a higher value on "imagination" than on "realism" in its traditional sense. His incidents, situations, and characters are highly improbable, and yet they are often described with an air of matter-of-factness. Improbability is one of the major reasons why Japanese traditionalist critics review Ōe's works unfavorably. However, improbability in the light of everyday life, Ōe argues [in Methods of the Novel], is an application of the technical theory called "defamiliarization." Victor Shklovsky, a Russian formalist critic, explains why and how a writer defamiliarizes familiar objects.

Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. "If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been." And art exists so that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important. [Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, 1965]

Thus, increasingly, Ōe's imagination defamiliarizes and dehumanizes his characters: they do not have any ordinary names—ordinary names may induce "habitualization"—but often are referred to by an animal name or a general designation such as the "Righteous Man" or the "Man Who Would Not Come Down From Trees."

The major source of Ōe's literary technique is Rabelaisian grotesque realism, another form of defamiliarization. The images in grotesque realism are often of the human body, especially the lower part of it, and its natural material activities such as eating, drinking, defecation, and copulation. These bodily elements are definitely positive in the theory of the grotesque, since bodily activity is closely related to the soil, that is, nature. Nature, in turn, suggests rebirth and revitalization of life. Feces and urine function as intermediaries between human beings and soil; they embody the cycle of life. Ōe contends that in the nuclear age, with its everyday danger of annihilation and nuclear-related pollution, a deep understanding of the unity of human beings and nature in the context of a cosmic order is of vital importance and that the image system of grotesque realism is the most effective literary method to achieve the goal. Ōe concludes:

Literature is a verbal structure that stops any movement directed toward one's inner self—movements that are separated from the material, bodily root of the entire world. Our literature should adopt the image system of grotesque realism as its integral part and, in so doing, should bring about a real regeneration of human life—in this way I intend to formulate the future of Japanese literature. ["The Image System of Grotesque Realism," in Methods of the Novel]

Ōe's literary technique of "defamiliarization" is, of course, directly in tune with Western modernism. This is only natural since he has been under heavy influence from Western literature. In addition, his mentor at the university was a scholar expert on Gargantua and Pantagruel. What is more important about Ōe's new world, however, is that he, as Shimei Futabatei (1864–1909) had a century earlier, has invented a new style—a style more efficient for his new motifs, images, and techniques. To the great dismay of traditionalists, he violates the natural flow of rhythm, natural syntax, elegance, suggestiveness, and sometimes even grammar of the language. Time will tell whether or not his style will influence Japanese culture in general, as was the case with Futabatei.

With all these revolutionary literary tenets, Ōe is an incredibly prolific and serious writer. He started his literary career at the age of twenty-three by winning the Akutagawa Prize for a short story, and since then [up to 1985] he has written eleven novels, about fifty short stories and novellas, and more than two hundred essays. His fiction deals with such human problems as estrangement, madness, and fear of nuclear annihilation; his essays are studies of other writers' works (East and West, present and past), analyses of literary theory, and of social and political criticism. He is popular among young readers but looked at askance by more traditional readers.

Until 1964, Ōe's works were based upon his experiences in, and observations of, society during the chaotic period immediately after Japan's defeat in World War II. (Ōe was ten years old when the war ended.) Specific incidents and episodes used in his fiction are probably pure products of his imagination, but the narrative situations are often identifiable with his own biographical data. His first novel, Plucking Buds and Shooting Lambs (Me-mushiri Kouchi, 1958), is set in a mountain village, perhaps identifiable as his native village; Our Age (Warera no Jidai, 1959), his second, is a story of a university student who, like Ōe himself, majors in French. The Young Man Who Arrived Late seems to reflect both his childhood experience and his university student life, especially the life of student political activists; street demonstrations and other activities by students in protest against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty became more and more violent during the first half of the sixties.

In 1964 Ōe's attention was directed to the possible danger of human annihilation by a nuclear holocaust when his newly born child had to undergo operations because of defective bone structure in the head. Ōe viewed the personal ordeal as overlapping the hardships of the atomic bomb survivors he met in Hiroshima. Between 1964 and 1976 Ōe wrote three major novels whose central motif is the main characters' mentally retarded son; A Personal Matter (Kojinteki na Taiken, 1964), The Flood unto my Soul, and The Pinchrunner. The last two clearly present Ōe's pessimistic view of the likelihood of a nuclear apocalypse. Simultaneously Ōe explores his grim world view based on a notion of the ultimate cosmic confinement of human beings in The Silent Cry (Manen Gan'nen no Futtoboru, 1967) and in A Game of Simultaneity.

We shall discuss in the next two sections of this essay the obvious contradiction between theory and practice. The positive role of literature in society has been emphasized and the techniques of "defamiliarization" including grotesque realism were presented as the regenerating elements in literature and in life as well. The works of Ōe, however, do not convey such overtones, but rather present a pessimistic view of the future. This essay will first examine the relationship between sexual depravity and the nuclear apocalypse and then analyze Ōe's cosmic view and use of subterranean images as negative elements.

Ōe's world of sex is full of images apparently derived from the visual presentation of "the nightmarish humanity" of Hieronymus Bosch in such masterpieces as the Garden of Earthly Delights or The Last Judgement. In return, what Charles De Tolnay writes about Bosch seems to be readily applicable to Ōe:

Whereas Hieronymus Bosch's contemporaries were content to solve formal problems within the frame work of the old religious themes, Bosch from the beginning set himself new tasks; to him art was a language which he used to express a view of the world, and his pictures are open books that address themselves to all the viewer's spiritual faculties. [Hieronymus Bosch, 1966]

Sex becomes a major concern for Ōe, as something deeply rooted in humanity, in his second novel, Our Age. Sex is never shown in a positive light, but always as something nightmarish and obsessive, as in Bosch's pictures. Because of the bold directness with which Ōe treats sex, it tends to create a repulsive effect and to suggest the apocalyptic end of mankind. The main character in Our Age is a decadent student who lives with a prostitute. He happens to find a chance to escape from his girl friend and to go to France in order to start a new life. Later, however, the hero becomes involved in underground revolutionary movements which deprive him of the chance to escape. In this novel, both politics and sex have negative images, and politics actually does ruin this young man's positive effort to get out of his stagnant life. This, of course, contradicts what Ōe formulates about politics and sex in his essays, and, in turn, it deepens the sense of confinement which leads only to despair and madness.

Sexual obsession remains the major motif in the novel Adventures in Everyday Life (Nichijōseikatsu no Boken, 1964). The hero, Saikichi, leads an absurd life centering around various sexual adventures. The elements of absurdity and sex-related slapstick exist already in this novel in germinal form, which Ōe later develops fully in The Pinchrunner. The theme of nuclear apocalypse combined with sexual depravity gradually comes to the forefront of Ōe's imaginative world. Saikichi's suicide is triggered by the realization of his own inability to save the A-bomb victim from the pain of leukemia except by performing euthanasia. The motif of sex, as Ōe asserts, certainly creates negativity in Adventures in Everyday Life, but the negativity does not regenerate or revitalize human existence.

Bird, the protagonist in A Personal Matter, is confronted by a concrete problem—a problem threatening his future freedom in life—a deformed baby. Bird is devastated by a sense of shame since he has just fathered a monster baby and may now be trapped in a cage called "parental responsibilities." He takes shelter in the sexual world of his girl friend, Himiko, and in alcoholism as well, wishing death for the baby. Himiko resembles a nocturnal animal, a typical image of the classic grotesque—active only in the ominous atmosphere of night—and is presented as a sex expert who cures Bird's impotence by offering anal intercourse. The negative image of sex drives the dispirited Bird to a state of enervation. At this moment, Bird suddenly realizes that he cannot keep running away from his responsibilities forever, and decides to take care of the baby with his wife and parents-in-law.

If the perverted sexual acts with Himiko have brought this almost miraculous metamorphosis to Bird—an animal turns into a human being—then Bird's returning to his wife and baby ought to present a positive and vital image. The situation, however, is almost the same as before except that the baby's brain hernia has turned out to be a benign tumor, and the father now conforms to the social norm called "parental responsibilities." Furthermore, if Bird's return to his wife suggests a return to normalcy from the world of perverted sex, then the novel presents a grim prophecy concerning the future of mankind, since that normalcy had produced a deformed child.

In Ōe's world of imagination, deformity, possibly caused by nuclear contamination, is closely related to the obsession with perverted sex. In addition, these two elements combined seem to lead to the notion of an apocalyptic ending of the world. The discovery of nuclear fission serves both as cause and effect. Therefore, deformity is a literary expression, as is the perverted sexual obsession, of the loss of faith in God in an age of crematoria and nuclear extermination; it epitomizes man's inability to reproduce himself. Thus, it becomes the major source of images for Ōe, who upholds the merits of the grotesque as literary expression. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, a Swiss author, who considers the grotesque as the only legitimate contemporary genre, contends that:

… Our world led us inevitably to the grotesque as it did to the atom bomb, just as Hieronymus Bosch's apocalyptic paintings are grotesque in nature. The grotesque, however, is only a sensuous paradox, the shape of a shapelessness, the face of a faceless world; and just as our thinking seems unable to do without the concept of paradox, so is art, our world, which survives only because there is an atom bomb: in fear of it. [Quoted in Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, 1963]

The fear of nuclear holocaust is the main theme of the next novel in our discussion, The Flood unto my Soul. As the title suggests, it is a parody of the Biblical episode of Jonah, who is swallowed by a whale as the consequence of his disobedience to the word of God. The hero, Isana Ōki (Whale-Big Tree), lives in a nuclear shelter with his idiot son, Jin, but becomes involved with a group of social dropouts called the "Free Navigators." Their purpose is to prepare themselves for a seaborne escape, in the event of a nation-wide disaster, by stealing firearms, learning how to operate a schooner, and practicing combat drills. This escape plan is directly associated with another deluge. The novel concludes with Isana's death by drowning in the whale-like shelter in the midst of a shootout with the police.

The first grotesque motif of sex is presented in a character called the "Shrinking Man" and in his fate. The "Shrinking Man" is also a symbolic manifestation of the process of inevitable deformation in Ōe's "Garden of Earthly Delights." The shrinking starts on this man's thirty-second birthday; he feels as if a small metal ball is rolling up and down on his backbone, which makes him restless and leads him to the scales and the measuring tape.

The sensation of shrinking in his body had been confirmed by his decreased measurements. It was a horrible confirmation, indeed. Seeing a picture of himself shrinking faster and faster, finally his inner organs crushed in a body as small as that of a monkey, and dying after a weak hiccup or two, he wept silently and hopelessly. He felt as if all of his emotional faculties had wilted. But at the same time, the shrinking dissolved immediately the sense of complication between body and consciousness, a knotty feeling which had been nagging him for several years. It was an extremely lonely but soothing sensation for him to be liberated from the hangup. [The Flood unto my Soul]

This sense of unity—or oneness—between flesh and consciousness is attained by diminishing all the mental faculties stored in his body except for sex; as his body shrinks, his phallus grows bigger in return. Actually he is gradually turning into one enormous phallus, and thereby becoming an entity whose body and consciousness are nothing but sex.

The ending of The Flood unto my Soul clearly suggests the fate of human beings who have violated the will of God. Furthermore, the fact that Isana is never saved, unlike Jonah, from the stomach of the whale, that is, the nuclear shelter, seems to indicate that the water in which Isana is drowned is actually a global deluge to annihilate mankind. Depraved sex has been a major reason for God's wrath in Biblical episodes, but now the invention of nuclear fission provides another reason since it disrupts the cosmic order; the punishment for this sin is obliteration of mankind by that same nuclear fission.

Suppose in an hour the world's last war broke out, he [Isana] must walk back to his shelter with his son, Jin, before the heat and the shock waves of nuclear explosions hit this city, threading their way through the panicked crowd, with the aplomb and persistence of those who had lived only to prepare themselves for such a day. Until he could officially return the right to use the globe to the trees and the whales, he and his infant son must wait in the shelter calm and relaxed as if they themselves chose to be annihilated. The concrete wall of the shelter would glow with the intense heat and then the shock waves would reach the infant child's ears. Isana's wish, at that instant, would be to hear Jin whisper gently, "The end of the world, this is." [The Flood unto my Soul]

Isana's wish to wait for the last moment "calm and relaxed as if they themselves chose to be annihilated" is probably the manifestation of the Sartrean existential idea that man is doomed but not damned and should remain free to choose his fate. This may sound like nothing but a sophism, since on the eve of Doomsday it is the only option there is, but even so it is quintessential to be the master of one's existence.

The main character in The Pinchrunner, Mori (meaning "forest" in Japanese and "death" in Latin), is the one who chooses his fate, activated and vitalized by the "Will of the Universe." By contrast, his father does not choose but is pushed around by the dominating power, called "Mr. A, the boss." The father, who is referred to only by the name "Mori/father," believes he was contaminated with plutonium when his wife became pregnant with Mori, and that, therefore, Mori is an idiot.

The novel is a fantasy-farce with full use of grotesque techniques and folkloric images. The central idea in the plot is transformation, a switch of identities between the father and son. This supernatural switch is made to take place by the "Will of the Universe." The thirty-eight-year-old father loses twenty years to his son, regaining the eighteen-year-old boy's sexual energy; his eight-year-old idiot son becomes a twenty-eight-year-old mature man and turns out to be a politically oriented assassin.

Ōe seems to be presenting a contrast between the sexually oriented and the politically oriented. The father, sexually oriented, used to work for Mr. A collecting information from foreign-language journals concerning the use of nuclear energy, which obviously helped Mr. A to establish nuclear generating plants. Mori/father later worked in one of these plants and was contaminated by highly toxic nuclear waste. As a result he was retired at full pay. Thus, Ōe creates a character whose situation is seemingly totally free from economic anxieties in the midst of physical dangers. Of course, this is also symbolic of Japan, economically booming, yet highly contaminated. The father is incapable of doing anything effective to save his son from idiocy or to secure his future well-being. Then, the switch takes place. Mori, the son, immediately attacks Mr. A, guided by the "Will of the Universe," while his father, now younger than the son, gets involved in the power struggle between factions of student activists over the issue of which student group should manufacture a nuclear bomb.

In spite of the author's conscious effort to create a ludicrous atmosphere, the characters' laughter, abundant and ringing literally all over the pages, sounds artificial and vacant. The vitality and regeneration expressed by folkloric images are overshadowed by deep pessimism about the possibility of a nuclear apocalypse, which seems even more pessimistic in a work filled with loud laughter.

The Silent Cry was published five years before The Flood unto my Soul, but it contains some strong thematic and technical similarities to the most recent Ōe novel, A Game of Simultaneity. The Silent Cry deals with the repeated experience of a historic incident by its posterity over several generations; in A Game of Simultaneity, the mythical and historical view of Japan in a cosmic context is presented. Increasingly Ōe is trying to grasp the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of human existence in his fatalistic view of life, using images from myth and history. The matter of sex, especially that of incest, is brought to the forefront for literary examination. And the notion that man is doomed and that the only destination for him is Hell, where he will be burned as a punishment for incest, seems to be pervasive. A picture entitled Hell, a family heirloom of the narrators in both novels, like Bosch's Hell, is a visual presentation of the fate of mankind.

The symbolic presentation of the space where human existence is rooted is indispensable for the development of the plot—the experiencing of incidents in the past by characters beyond the chronological sequence of time. Events, characters, narrative situations, all extremely symbolic and metaphorical, are oriented to space but not to temporal sequence. Thus, human experiences in various units of time and space can be analyzed and conceptualized in a systematic way as in a microcosmos, or as in myth, which synthesizes the cosmic picture in its totality.

The Nedokoro brothers (their name means "root-place") in The Silent Cry experience what their great-grandfather and his younger brother had experienced about a hundred years before. The great-granduncle, who escaped from the village in the legend, is the figure representing the antithesis of confinement for the Nedokoro brothers. The truth, however, confirms their fear; the great-granduncle had been kept secretly in the basement of the Nedokoro Mansion for the rest of his life. The confined view of life is also omnipresent in the incestuous relations between the brother and sister. Takashi, the younger brother, confesses:

… I made up a tale about us [Takashi and his sister] being a couple of aristocrats whose family had come down in the world, and took an exaggerated pride in our descent from the great-grandfather and his brother…. I told her we were a special elite of two, and we wouldn't and mustn't get interested in anybody apart from each other…. [The Silent Cry]

This close tie between the brother and sister not only evolves into an obsession with incest, but also points to a primordial sexual unity, that is, hermaphroditism.

The narrator and his twin sister in A Game of Simultaneity present this sexual obsession in a more metaphorical and yet clearer way. They do not commit incest per se, but the brother cannot satisfy himself in sexual intercourse unless he imagines his sister's naked body. They are also a parody of the beginning part of the Japanese creation myth. The narrator of the novel, or the "one who records the myth and history of their village-nation-microcosmos," is named Tsuyuki: his sister, Tsuyumi. This slight difference in the last syllables in their names undoubtedly alludes to the incestuous brother and sister, Izanagi and Izanami, in the creation myth. Furthermore, the brother and sister in the novel are recorded as one person in the census bureau in order to cut down the heavy poll tax. The actual image of a hermaphrodite conceived by the narrator is a girl with a well-shaped penis and large testicles.

Another mythical aspect of the novel is the narrative situation. It suggests the process in which the Kojiki (The Chronicles of Ancient Matters) was compiled in the eighth century. The narrator's father, a Shinto priest, orders the son to keep a record of what he relates as the myth and history of the "village-nation-microcosmos." Unlike Hieda no Are, who told one authoritative version of the myth, the "Father/priest" provides many versions in plural points of view and the narrator tells them to his sister, not to the Emperor.

Events are told from plural viewpoints, and the chronological sequence of the events is intentionally rearranged, which makes it hard to pin down what actually happens in what order. It is safe, however, to assume that this much is clear: the village-nation-microcosmos was founded some time in the middle of the feudal period (around 1700) on the island of Shikoku by a number of expatriated samurai. These founding fathers live to be more than two hundred years old and become legendary giants. The leader of this group, named the "Destroyer," has been killed several times but always revives; his existence is ubiquitous, especially for the villagers. Ōe's nomenclature is always highly symbolic, but in this case, since the "Destroyer" is actually the "creator," it is paradoxical as well. This paradoxical nomenclature gives rise to several possible interpretations, which we shall discuss later. After the village-nation-microcosmos loses the "Fifty-Day War" against the Imperial Army, it is merged into a nation called Japan. The work is a satire of the modern world with its worship of science-technology, an attempt to examine human existence in relation to cosmology, and, above all, a dream-like, unreal story, lacking orientation to any everyday actuality, but told with stunning reality.

The fifty-day war is perhaps a caricature of the history of wars. It is basically jungle guerrilla warfare at the beginning, depending on the maze-like forest, bows and poison arrows (made out of bicycle spokes), knives, and a huge pond of human bodily waste. Then they start to use guns—guns converted from imported toy guns. The Imperial Army's field artillery shakes up the village, and it finally surrenders when the enemy threatens to burn down the forest.

The dehumanization and indiscriminate massacre of modern war, the cold bloodedness armed with insane logic reveals a grotesque picture; the villagers not recorded in the census paper are sentenced to death because they "do not exist."

Other aspects of history re-created in the novel are the agricultural land reform, disintegration of the multi-generation family and its replacement by the nuclear family, and liberation from sexual taboos—all of which took place in postwar Japan under the control of the American Occupation Army. The overwhelming power of Washington over Japan is presented as an inexplicable great noise, a supernatural phenomenon, filling the entire basin, afflicting everyone in the village. The quality and amount of the noise vary, depending on an individual as well as on the area in the basin, and, therefore, people start to leave their homes and property for a place where the damage to their eardrums and brains is minimal. This is a well-made parable; the sarcasm is the invention of earplugs—a character identifiable as the Emperor is the one who escapes all the postwar reforms by plugging up his ears.

The episode is not set in the postwar period, of course, in the history of the village-nation-microcosmos, which leaves ample room for ambiguity; and ambiguity in turn allows many other interpretations. One prime example of ambiguity is the "Destroyer." The "Destroyer" is an explosives expert and herbalist as well. Ironically he dies once while working at a dam construction site, by the accidental explosion of his own dynamite. But somehow he revives and returns. As an herbalist, he has a large herb garden and he is respected as a healer. Later, however, he is killed with the poison that his herb garden produced. In these episodes, the "Destroyer" seems to represent science-technology in which the ambivalence of construction-destruction, healer-killer, and life-death is an attribute.

The myth and history of the village-nation-microcosmos, told by the Father/priest to the narrator, is also listened to by the twin brothers, Apogii (apogee) and Perigii (perigee), specialists in celestial mechanics, as their names suggest. They try to find cosmological significance in the myth and history of the village and to locate its rightful unit of time and space in the universe. It is possible that the "Destroyer" is the embodiment of "entropy," the theory that the amount of disorder in the cosmos only increases as time passes. This is paradoxical in that one cannot keep creating without destroying what one has just created; in the final analysis, the figure of the "Destroyer" is a metaphorical composite both abstract and concrete, provoking a sense of ambiguity and ambivalence.

Ambiguity in the turn of events, as in the case of the "Destroyer," is often achieved by presenting more than one narrative, not exactly overlapping one another. This means Ōe consciously tries to minimize the effects of actuality in order to create a dream-like world with its own reality. The less actuality the novel attains, the more elusive and complex the structure of the novel becomes. The Father/priest begins his myth and history with the same repetitive phrase, "Some are not true stories, but you must listen as if they tell what actually happened. Understand?" This folkloric technique used extensively tends to resist the reader's effort to draw a clear picture of what is actually happening in the novel. Even though each incident is described clearly, the resulting picture is blurred since so many layers of images are superimposed.

Another ambiguity is the matter of time. There are six chapters in the novel, each being a letter from the narrator to his sister. The subject matter in each chapter has its own unity, with barely recognizable chronology. However, it is extremely difficult to establish the chronological relationship among the incidents in different chapters. Again, each incident is often presented with detailed realism, but if one tried to place the incident, judging from the metaphorically suggested meaning, in an actual historical period, one would find himself in a chronological maze with no outlet. Furthermore, in the last chapter, the narrator, wandering in the forest, with his naked body painted red, picks up pieces of the "Destroyer's" body, still unspoiled (even though they have been there for some years), in an attempt to reconstruct the "Destroyer." He also sees behind the trees the people who will be involved in the events yet to take place in the future.

What Ōe is experimenting with in this novel is condensing the passage of time to bring mythical and historical incidents hazy in the background to the foreground, and thereby to examine what human existence is, not only at this present moment but in a historical perspective. The novel must embrace the universe. It is a kind of universality that can go beyond one unit of time and space. For that purpose Ōe is trying to minimize life-like actuality and the obvious link between cause and effect. Thus, we have a huge picture of a dream-like, unreal world in which a multitude of incidents is displayed with vivid reality, like the works of Hieronymus Bosch. The picture is able to express even a millennium of human history. The narrator meditates on time in the cosmic framework as follows:

… if one visits those planets in a spaceship, one will find each planet has its own time; in other words, there is another unit of time and space. If one can see an almost unlimited number of units of time and space on a huge expanse of spacescape, then one can see all the events in every branch of the global history of mankind taking place simultaneously. In that case, one can choose a single reality quite arbitrarily, as if playing a game, and rearrange the history of mankind as one wishes it to be…. [A Game of Simultaneity]

The timeless "Destroyer" in the timeless forest is the leitmotif of Ōe's cosmology, and the image system of grotesque realism ties his characters to the soil of the forest. However, the outcome of the novel still suggests a pessimistic view of life mainly plagued by depraved, incestuous sex. Politics destroys individuals; history buries people; and totalitarianism sends those who do not conform to the slaughterhouse.

The mythical element in this novel seems to suggest that human life is doomed in the endless cycle of incest, which invariably leads to insanity. If myth presents a clear picture of human existence in its totality in relationship to the world and the cosmos, we are becoming more and more insane as we continue to live generation after generation, since the poison is coming from the very act of reproduction. Like Mitsusaburo in The Silent Cry, one must accept the result of his insane brother's adultery; like Isana and his idiot son in The Flood unto my Soul, one must accept the result of nuclear science. There seems to be no opening in the womb-like or tomb-like village, and man in his claustrophobia is directed downward.

In the Western literary tradition that often inspired Ōe, the downward, subterranean human psyche, that is, the realm of grotesque realism, is associated with positive images, such as birth, revitalization, and regeneration. Mikhail Bakhtin argues in Rabelais and His World:

… Degradation here means coming down to earth, the contact with earth as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the same time. To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better…. [Rabelais and His World]

As we have discussed Ōe's works so far, however, it is hard to discover even an inkling of such positive connotation as to "bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better." Ōe certainly presents pictures grim enough to alarm readers, but, instead of suggesting the advent of new hope, he perpetuates an ominous possibility that the outcome of rebirth and regeneration will be worse yet, for example, as in the form of insanity or of physical deformity. This unerasable pessimism probably derives from his observations that the natural flow of birth-death-rebirth is already extensively disrupted by the nuclear bombing in Japan and ever-spreading radioactive contamination all over the world. It is his uncompromising, penetrating insight that enables him to see the world and human existence in it with its innate madness. This literary theme, deeply rooted in the conditions of Japan and the world as well, is treated in Western modernism, and thus, Ōe has created his own new world of imagination, universally relevant, in the age of nuclear anxiety.