[In the following essay, Swain investigates the major influences on Ōe's fiction and nonfiction, particularly the impact of the birth of his mentally and physically handicapped son.]

On the occasion of receiving the 1994 Nobel Prize in literature, novelist Kenzaburo Oe explained that “the fundamental method of my writing has always been to start from personal matters and then link them with society, the state, and the world in general.” Oe's personal starting point was a heavily wooded mountain area on Japan's Shikoku Island, where he was born in 1935. Oe (pronounced Oh-eh) loves trees and has a lifelong habit of talking to them on long walks. According to critic Masao Miyoshi, Oe “remembers everything” and can cite the names of almost all the trees in the world in Japanese, English and Latin. His sense of primal identity is securely rooted in his native place; even now, despite international fame and longtime residence in Tokyo, he speaks of himself as a “marginal” person with only an “off-center existence in the world.”

Even so, he is authentically cosmopolitan, at least in the world of literature. After his father died in 1944, Oe immersed himself in reading; one early favorite was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The adult Oe is an avid student of languages and literature and reads Dante in Italian, Confucius in Chinese, Faulkner in English, Rabelais and Sartre in French, the formalists in Russian and The Tale of Genji in the original (ancient Japanese).

While attending the University of Tokyo (1954-58), Oe came under the lasting influence of Kazuo Watanabe, a scholar of French Renaissance literature whose study of François Rabelais was, Oe says, “one of the most distinguished scholarly achievements of the Japanese intellectual world.”

Watanabe influenced Oe in two crucial ways. One was in method: from Watanabe's translation of Rabelais, Oe learned of the “image system of grotesque realism,” a mode of literary expression that has enabled Oe to eschew the traditional Japanese literary habits of indirection and suggestive innuendo and to develop instead a more universal style of dealing directly with reality as experienced, yet without sacrificing subtlety.

The other influence was humanism, which Watanabe saw as the quintessence of European culture. In a series of critical biographies of various European men and women, Watanabe sought to teach humanistic values such as tolerance and an awareness of self-deception and the possibility of betrayal by technology. For Oe, humanism became synonymous with what is decent, humane and sane, values not easily conveyed through “grotesque realism,” yet vital to Oe's chosen role as a writer.

Oe's own favorite among European writers is W. B. Yeats, another Nobel Prize winner, who was applauded by the Irish Senate for helping to protect his people from being stampeded into war by an insane enthusiasm for destruction. Oe feels these very words apply to his own nation's history in the 1930s and early 1940s.

War-wasted Japan in 1945 faced the enormous task of rebuilding and, at the same time, reinventing itself. People faced severe shortages of food, housing and jobs, yet also needed to purge themselves of fanatical militarism and myth-laden imperialism. Oe's teenage years coincided with the Allied (mainly U.S.) occupation of Japan, which took the first crucial steps in converting Japan from a hierarchical military dictatorship into a peaceful democratic society. Over 200,000 wartime government, business and military leaders were purged, as thousands of socialist and communist leaders (jailed during wartime) were freed and labor unions were encouraged. The heart of the American remodeling of Japan was the 1947 “peace constitution,” which committed the nation to a war-renunciation article under which Japan promised it would not maintain land, sea or air forces.

The occupation story, however, is full of ironies. The economy's failure to restart and develop as needed, the 1949 communist victory in China and the outbreak of the Korean War brought sharp reversals: this time the leftists were purged, while the rightists were rehabilitated (these old warriors soon became good cold warriors). And less than a month after the Korean War began, occupation officials ordered Japan to form the National Police Reserve—the forerunner of today's Self-Defense Forces. The occupation had undercut its own goals of demilitarization and democracy. The public felt betrayed.

The sense of betrayal deepened when Japan regained its sovereignty in the 1951 peace treaty that came at a high price: a security pact tied a rearmed Japan to U.S. global strategies based on nuclear power—the very force that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the security treaty came up for renewal in 1960, Oe became a leading spokesman for the thousands who filled the streets to oppose it. They lost the political battle (the treaty was forced through the national legislature in early morning hours when no opposition delegates were present), but the contest helped swell the ranks of serious readers—a distinct advantage for Oe and other writers throughout the postwar decades.

By the late 1970s, however, these writers sensed that the nation had an even deeper problem: spiritual decline. Japan's greatest modern writer, Soseki Natsume, whose life spanned Japan's first half century of modernizing, had warned that the nation's modernization was not an achievement to be proud of but rather “a tidal wave that had swept from European shores” and inflamed “the life appetites” with such force as to suppress “the instinct for morality.” Oe and others saw that postwar affluence had rekindled the curse of “greedy consumerism,” generating another serious “spiritual deficit.” The three-decade postwar literary effort to redefine and realize the good society based on peace and democracy was yielding to a shallow, apolitical “entertainment literature.” Many feared that Japanese literature was “treading its own path toward extinction.”

In his novels Oe uses “grotesque realism” to almost gross effect in depicting excessive appetite, particularly obesity and the postwar sex obsession. The insanity of war has been replaced not with the sanity and decency needed in a new democracy, but with vain and mindless self-indulgence. As it is Oe's habit “to start from personal matters,” his novels include much that is cast as autobiographical. Indeed, if one reads only his novels, he might be taken as little more than an après-guerre reprobate. In some of his essays, however, Oe comes across as the epitome of the cultured, decent humanism he espouses. While Oe's works—short stories, novels and essays—are said to number in the hundreds, until recently few essays have been made accessible in English.

In 1963, Oe was overwhelmed by two critical events. His first child, a son, was born with cerebral hernia and required remedial surgery; even if the son's life were saved, doctors said, he would very likely suffer severe disabilities. Two months later, while still struggling with whether to go ahead with the surgery, Oe set out for Hiroshima to report on a large international rally to abolish nuclear weapons—a gathering so influenced by cold war polarization that it ended, as expected, in the splintering of Japan's peace movement. Back home, Oe and his wife agreed to surgery for their son, which proved successful. These two events completely altered both Oe's literary work and his personal life; he refers to the turnabout as a nonreligious “conversion.”

Oe recorded the Hiroshima experience in monthly essays over three years; these were issued in the 1965 book Hiroshima Notes, which has been reprinted every year since.

It was not the politicization of the peace struggle that permanently affected Oe. Rather, it was being confronted with the grim and often hideous misery of the A-bomb victims—a massive public counterpart to the acute personal despair he felt over his son's plight. He found the survivors, who had every reason to despair, to be “people who did not kill themselves in spite of everything.” In their dogged courage to live what life was left to them, and also in the heroic efforts of the doctors and nurses who treated them, he found precisely what he needed to restore his own sense of human dignity and responsibility. How his renewed strength enabled him to struggle toward acceptance of his disabled son is portrayed in the largely autobiographical novel A Personal Matter.

How different these two books are. The Hiroshima experience did not fit Oe's writing format; it was not initially a personal experience which could be linked to society, state and world. It was the opposite: a national, even global tragedy that came to him by way of invitation from an esteemed friend, then the editor of Japan's leading intellectual journal, Sekai (World). And the only “grotesque realism” of the essays in Hiroshima Notes is the actual experience of Hiroshima victims; the prose is a study in textured thought and tempered phrase.

The tragedy of his afflicted son, however, was an intensely personal experience that erupted in the very bosom of his family, and A Personal Matter is written in typically “grotesque” style. In one passage Bird, the father, sits in a barber's chair worrying over his malformed baby:

The death of a vegetable baby—Bird examined his son's calamity from the angle that stabbed deepest. The death of a vegetable baby with only vegetable functions was not accompanied by suffering. Fine, but what did death mean to a baby like that? Or, for that matter, life? The bud of existence appeared on a plain of nothingness that stretched for zillions of years and there it grew for nine months. Of course, there was no consciousness in a fetus, it simply curled in a ball and existed, filling utterly a warm, dark, mucous world. Then, perilously, into the external world. It was cold there, and hard, scratchy, dry and fiercely bright. The outside world was not so confined that the baby could fill it by himself: he must live with countless strangers. But for a baby like a vegetable, that stay in the external world would be nothing more than a few hours of occult suffering he couldn't account for. Then the suffocating instant, and once again, on that plain of nothingness zillions of years long, the fine sand of nothingness itself.

Bird could think of nothing better than to rid himself of this infant monster. He runs away from it, and his responsibility, in many directions. With little thought of his (also suffering) wife at home, Bird shacks up with a compliant girl named Himiko, and they dream of going to faraway Africa. But Bird's better side eventually takes over. He agrees to a remedial operation, the first step away from killing his baby. Himiko raises objections:

“If you tried to take him back to the hospital he'd die in the car on the way. Then where would you be? They'd arrest you, that's where.”

“If that happened, it would mean that I'd killed the baby with my own two hands. And I'd deserve whatever I got. I guess I'd be able to take the responsibility.”

Bird spoke calmly. He felt that he was now evading deception's final trap, and he was restoring his faith in himself.

Himiko glowered at Bird with tears collecting in her eyes; she appeared to be groping frantically for a new psychological attack, and when at last a strategy occurred, she leaped at it: “Let's say you let them operate and saved the baby's life, what would you have then, Bird? You told me yourself that your son would never be more than a vegetable! Don't you see, it's not only that you'd be creating misery for yourself, you'd be nurturing a life that meant absolutely nothing to this world! Do you suppose that would be for the baby's good? Do you, Bird?”

“It's for my own good. It's so I can stop being a man who's always running away,” Bird said.

But Himiko still refused to understand. She stared distrustfully at Bird, challenging him still, and then she labored to smile despite the tears welling in her eyes and mockingly said: “So you're going to manhandle a baby with the faculties of a vegetable into staying alive—Bird! is that part of your new humanism?”

In real life Oe and his wife made and have kept a devoted, lifelong commitment to their son Hikari (“light”). As critic Miyoshi has said, “Ever since Oe [and his wife] decided to bring him up as a normal human being, Hikari has been in every page of his work as in every minute of his life.” As this personal tragedy became linked to Hiroshima in Oe's writing, Hikari became Oe's metaphorical “light” for scrutinizing victimhood anywhere—Hiroshima, Okinawa (Japan's most marginalized prefecture) and elsewhere.

In 1996 two more of Oe's works appeared in English. These are distinctly different from each other. We turn first to An Echo of Heaven, which in the 1989 original was titled Jinsei no shinseki (“Relatives in Life”), a title suggested by Plutarch's notion of “sadness as an unwelcome ‘relative in life.’” It is a sad story, yet one that allows Oe some freedom to explore transcendental possibilities that, to my knowledge, had thus far been posed in none of his other novels.

This freedom is arranged by a fictional treatment of a parent who shares Oe's primary problem—a mentally and physically handicapped child. In this case the central figure is a woman named Marie (Mah-ree-eh). She is a Betty Boop beauty (Oe's term), a cultured college teacher with little interest in writing. She is divorced, a free spirit with strong physical appetites which she indulges at will. Her firstborn, a son, shares Hikari's condition and is enrolled in the same school, so she and the Oe couple become friends. Marie's second son, crippled in an accident, is a wheelchair-bound paralytic. One day, without any warning, the two boys go off to a seaside cliff and commit what appears to be premeditated suicide by leaping into the churning waves below.

The rest of the story centers on Marie's attempts to deal with her grief and, as it turns out, to seek atonement. Flannery O'Connor is Marie's college specialty, so she has a ready Catholic role model at hand, along with O'Connor's sense of redemption as a lifelong process. Marie's quest takes her to a Catholic study group in Tokyo, a Filipino guerrilla-theater group on tour in Japan, a touch of Swedenborg in a California commune, and finally a more compelling experience in Mexico of peasants' faith in mutual forgiveness. The translator handles these varied venues quite well.

For an Oe novel, the middle chapters—especially those on the Filipino theater group and the California commune—seem rather clumsy, even shallow and simplistic at times, as though Oe had slipped below his usual standards. On reflection, I think this apparent “clumsiness” is intentional, for it is, after all, Marie's own stumbling struggle to rationalize her fate that is the problem. The reader is being prepared for the final phase of her quest.

Marie goes to Mexico to seek release from the tormenting loss of her sons by working on a communal farm. The idea for this comes from Balzac's Le Curé de village, in which the heroine labors in a large-scale irrigation project to assuage her guilt for past sins.

On the Mexican farm, living among “relatives in life,” Marie embraces a radically new lifestyle of selfless service. She does not believe her own sins were the cause of her children's tragic fate, and no “transcendental explanation” could make her believe so. But she has exhausted many paths of intellectualizing, and the turn to simple work among simple people is healing. She becomes her natural self again—except that she forswears sex for good, only to be brutally raped. Her end comes from breast cancer. The Mexican promoter of her farm project reflects:

Marie has cancer, and is dying, as the saint of Cacoyagua Farm. … Knowing this was like being hit over the head, and it forced me to think again about belief. … Her sons died a hideous death. Thoughts of it haunted her, and there was no escape—for her, this was reality. To forget the pain and sadness, she worked hard, not for herself but for other people. There was no lie in this, either, but when I asked her to come to the farm, I suggested she tell herself she was playing a part. And then—turning what began as an act into the real thing, played out on the stage of life and death, with no way out—the cancer appeared. …

Near death herself, Marie still worries about the poor women on the farm. She has left everything she owns to us, as the whole village knows, though we don't intend to use it for ourselves. All the preparations—for dying a saint's death—have been made. And I like to think it's God who made them. What Marie herself would say about that, though, I don't know … for even now I sometimes can't tell what she really feels.

This, I think, is vintage Oe: revered as a saint, a real one in Mexican Catholic terms, Marie remains an “unbeliever” to the very end—so far as anyone knows.

Yet this “what if” novel is really not about differences—what if I were a woman, without family ties, free to roam the world and explore transcendental options? The novel's point is Oe's own: What if, through some negligence of mine, my son were lost forever? What would I, what could I, do? Then answer is clear: no amount of intellectualizing could allay the heavy sense of loss and guilt.

The other new work. A Healing Family, is a wonderfully terse, true and timely discourse. At last one need not wonder if the autobiographical is “for real” or skillfully made to seem so. Nor need we be bothered by “grotesque realism.” Family is the most straightforward, the most unpretentious and most moving portrait of Oe in the context of family. And the translation is seamless, almost as if Oe had penned the English himself.

Hikari, Oe recalls, was in one sense “reborn” when he underwent successful surgery to correct his brain abnormality. But it was soon clear that his mental development would be retarded. For several years he did not speak, though he responded quickly to bird calls and to classical music regularly played at home to soothe his feelings. Then one day at age six, when he was walking in the woods with his father, he said in a voice that exactly mimicked the voice on a phonograph record of bird calls (also regularly played for him), “That's a water rail.” This short naming of the bird was Hikari's first intelligible use of language.

Because Hikari responded even more readily to musical notes, a piano teacher was engaged to train him. Instead of the usual finger exercises, she devised ways for Hikari to pick out chords. Before long he was composing simple pieces; later on, his compositions were collected on first one CD and then others, and have enjoyed wide and warm public reception.

From the outset Oe was deeply troubled as to how he could know his son's inner feelings, especially as Hikari had so little access to words. To find that music is Hikari's language was a delight. “When I hear [his works] performed by Mrs. Tamura [his teacher] and other musicians,” writes Oe, “I feel in awe of the richness of his inner life. … I am not someone who believes in any faith, but I find it hard to deny that there is something … something akin perhaps to ‘grace’ in this music; indeed, listening to Hikari's music, being exposed to the world beyond our everyday experience in which it seems to participate, makes me appreciate in it the full meaning of this word: not only ‘gracefulness’ and ‘virtue’ but ‘a prayer of thanks.’”

Hikari reached the peak of his physical development about the time he entered middle school. He began to suffer occasional seizures, put on weight and became less active. He remained in the care of his physician, a man whom Oe himself came to respect highly. After the doctor died, Oe received some photocopied papers from the doctor's wife. One line, recalling Oe's difficulty in deciding on the initial surgery, electrified him.

Without the surgery, Hikari wouldn't have survived; and yet this young father had hesitated some time before giving his consent. The fact was recorded there, in Dr. Moriyama's diary, reminding me yet again that if there is a god, some higher being who judges us, then when my time comes I will be unable to face this being with a clear conscience, condemned in advance by this one piece of evidence alone. Still, the line in the diary contains more than my guilt, for it also reminds me that having decided, even after hesitating, ultimately I too was reborn along with Hikari.

The lesson was unmistakable: the doctor's healing extended beyond Hikari; he served as a healer for the whole family.

Oe has been profoundly affected by other doctors, particularly Fumio Shigeto, former director of the Atomic Bomb Hospital in Hiroshima, whose steady professionalism in the face of seemingly impossible conditions typified an axiom of humanism that Oe had learned from Watanabe: “Neither too much hope nor too much despair.” But there was more to Shigeto's role: he arrived at the A-bomb Hospital “equipped with a specialized knowledge of radiology” that enabled him to understand what he was up against. Oe calls such coalescing of skill and situation “vital moments,” moments when various disparate elements come together at just the right time and place. Normally such moments are viewed as part of life's natural processes. But by dint of cumulative experience Oe adds: “There have been times when such moments have seemed like signs of something else: examples—albeit rather flashy ones—of some supreme being's perfect timing; a sort of cosmic double play.”

Indeed, the “accident” of Hikari's abnormal birth eventually came to be seen by Oe as such a moment of “perfect timing.” At age 28 Oe experienced an identity crisis more commonly associated with “mid-life.” His writing career seemed to be at an impasse. Then “my son's birth burst like a bombshell; and it was through the pain of this experience that I somehow regained my equilibrium. … In a strange way, Hikari's birth, too, was a case of ‘perfect timing.’”

Twenty-five years ago, my first son was born with brain damage. This was a blow, to say the least; and yet, as a writer, I must acknowledge the fact that the central theme of my work, throughout much of my career, has been the way my family has managed to live with this handicapped child. Indeed, I would have to admit that the very ideas that I hold about society and the world at large—my thoughts, even, about whatever there might be that transcends our limited reality—are based on and learned through living with him.

Over the long haul of daily life, however, not all can be serendipitous moments. The Oe family routine was complicated: monitoring Hikari's medications and accompanying him to and from school; care of the wife's elderly and increasingly forgetful mother; raising two other, normal children; time-outs for a very busy and devoted mother (her hobby is painting wild flowers, and some of her works illustrate this volume); and, of course, Oe does his prodigious writing at home—often while Hikari lies on the floor listening to classical music. The family's daily routines are stabilized by a common-sense axiom: “We've got no choice. Let's just get on with it.”

As might be suspected, the appearance of Flannery O'Connor in An Echo of Heaven was not mere happenstance. Oe has been deeply influenced by The Habit of Being, the collection of her letters in which O'Connor draws on Jacques Maritain's definition of habit as that by which human beings live their lives. Hikari's “life habit” is musical composition. Oe's is writing. Each family member has his or her life habit, and the respective person-habit combinations are mutually respected and supported. Of course, as in all families, anger and irritation arise.

“Still, though it may seem at times that something is always being lost or broken as our family rattles along day by day, it is just as certain that things somehow get mended and rehabilitated.”

O'Connor's works stirred Oe at even deeper levels. “She once wrote something to the effect that the sentimental attitudes toward handicapped children, which encourage the habit of hiding their pain from human eyes, are of a piece with the kind of thinking that sent smoke billowing from the chimneys of Auschwitz.” This thought led Oe to reflect:

On a more personal level, I can imagine a very concrete example of what happens to a society that shuts out its disabled by asking myself how we ourselves [the Oe family] would have turned out if we hadn't made Hikari an indispensable part of our family. I imagine a cheerless house where cold drafts blow through the gaps left by his absence; and, after his exclusion, a family whose bonds grow weaker and weaker. In our case, I know it was only by virtue of having included Hikari in the family that we actually managed to weather our various crises.

I have lifted up those places in the book that seem to open to, or sometimes yearn for, transcendent reality. Some Western readers, especially those in the Christian tradition, might want to urge Oe on toward canonical sureties, where all life's tragedies and darkness are overcome by the ultimate triumph of grace and goodness. Others might urge him toward a cosmic universalism wherein the ironies and absurdities of life are all answered by some new knowledge that brings an all-encompassing resolution. And with the leads Oe has given us, who can resist the expectations of charisma, of special gifts for special people at special times?

Yet Oe remains where he began: a humanist, an existentialist, whose epiphanies occur right here in this world, within the complications and absurdities of history, and most of all, in his immediate family because of, not despite, the presence of one whose limitations become the occasion to speak of grace and thanks.

It is not difficult to understand why Oe pits this gracious marginality over against all the powers of centrality, including the imperial traditions of Japan, for the truth is that he reverses the center of gravity. Until the kingdom comes, we'll need Oe's kind of sane, humane, decent and gracious humanism.