[In the following review, Loughman offers an overview of the major thematic concerns in Seventeen and J.]

Ōe Kenzaburō (see WLT 69:1, pp. 5-9) has never made a secret of his affinity with those postwar writers who sought to decentralize the value of the emperor and “to liberate the Japanese from the curse of the emperor system which haunted their minds, even at the subconscious level.” At the same time he understands the collective need for unity expressed in the acceptance of the emperor as the absolute authority. Both these ideas bear on Seventeen (orig. Sebunchin, 1961), the first of two short novels in the volume under review. The time of publication is significant, right after a year of violent demonstrations culminating in the October 1960 assassination of the Socialist Party leader by a seventeen-year-old fanatical rightist. That event was the inspiration for Seventeen, a two-part work of which only the first section is included here. The second part, “A Political Youth Dies” (“Seiji Shonen Shisu,” 1961), subtitled “Seventeen Part II” and published one month after part I, includes the assassination and the boy's subsequent suicide. The outrage and threats which followed publication were such that the work was suppressed and has never again been printed. Masao Miyoshi's introduction includes an informative summary of the political background.

Seventeen begins as a tale of disturbed adolescence. At seventeen, neither child nor adult, the narrator seeks some core of identity, some center of meaning amid the confusion of feelings which assail him: insecurity, inadequacy, self-disgust, anger, loneliness. He gets no help from his parents, especially his father, who acts out his version of American liberalism by being indifferent to his son's problems. The narrator's chronic masturbation is less sexual than it is a refuge in self-absorption from the hostile outer world: “If only this world would offer me a hand I could grasp with passion, in simplicity and trust.”

The turning point comes when a classmate invites him to become part of a claque for a right-wing speaker who defends forcefully the atrocities of Japanese militarism. The narrator is transformed by the speaker's words, which identify the enemy for him. The intensity of his cheers and applause attracts the attention of the speaker, who proclaims the narrator as the chosen son. The boy grasps this hand offered to him, devotion to the emperor. By the end of the novella, it is devotion gone mad: “To my golden vision I promise a bloodbath.” It is easy to find mockery in scenes such as the narrator masturbating and reaching orgasm as he envisions the emperor as a golden being, a god; yet one can accept Ōe's declaration that he never intended to ridicule this character. Rather, he is examining the nature of fanaticism and the conditions, both personal and social, which produce it. The novel builds logically and convincingly from the anguish of adolescence to the hysteria of political fanaticism.

Sexual Humans (Seiteki ningen, 1963), titled J here, is a lesser work, connected with Seventeen through the issue of identity and the atmosphere of distortion. The first of the two parts begins with the principal character J in his Jaguar heading with six others toward his vacation home in a remote fishing village to shoot scenes for a pornographic film set in hell. Among the drunken group are J's wife and his naked eighteen-year-old mistress. The opening scene is visually effective and symbolic. A number of villagers block the road as they stand staring at a house to humiliate the adulterous woman inside. The primitive villagers believe that the paucity of fish—critics have noted the wasteland motif—is due to the presence of evil spirits. Ironically, by moving aside to let the car pass, they are allowing the evil spirits to enter.

The rest of part 1 consists of casual sexual encounters marked by deviance and maladjustment, Ōe's familiar metaphor for the distorted condition of society. J has sex, unsatisfactorily, first with his mistress and then with his frigid wife, whose eroticism is being satisfied vicariously through the making of a pornographic film. For J, whose first wife committed suicide after learning of his homosexual affairs, his wife's frigidity and boyish body are the source of her appeal. All the while the group's sexual antics are being witnessed by a ten-year-old village boy who, when he is discovered, rushes through a closed glass door and screams to the villagers, to no avail, that he has seen killer devils, the image with which the first part concludes.

Part 2 opens with J having sunk further into a tawdry, degraded existence as a chikan, a pervert, here one who molests women on crowded commuter trains by ejaculating against their bodies. He travels with a sixty-year-old pervert like himself, and they act as lookouts for each other to prevent being caught. In this part, J's role is mostly secondary to that of a young chikan, whom they rescue from being turned over to the police. Instead of being grateful, the young man is angry because they have denied him the fear and self-punishment that are part of his pleasure. He tells them of his intention to perform a decisive act that will allow him to become his true self, an act involving rape and murder that would identify him as a true pervert. Unconvincingly, J recognizes that in attempting to be safe, he is a fraudulent chikan and acquiesces to a conventional life by accepting a job in his father's steel company. Instead, however, leaving behind his Jaguar—the emblem of success that frames the novel—he boards a train, molests a young woman, and is caught. Overcome with fear, he regards his tears as compensation for those his wife cried on the night she committed suicide.

In his act of atonement and his courting of failure through his exposure as a pervert, J acquires some substance; but the novel attempts more than it accomplishes. Ōe flirts with ideas such as the loss of soul that accompanies material success and the potentiality of being expressed by the young man who tries to become his true self as pervert yet performs as hero. In the end, however, the novel does not go beyond a portrait of a few degraded lives.