SOURCE: Dalglish, James. “An Author in Search of a Story.” Japan Quarterly 43, no. 3 (July-September 1996): 90-2.

[In the following review, Dalglish asserts that An Echo of Heaven can be viewed as a wholly original novel within the context of modern Japanese literature, labelling it as “a work riven with postmodern uncertainty.”]

An Echo of Heaven, the English translation of Nobel laureate Ōe Kenzaburō's 1989 Jinsei no shinseki, is an intriguing work that evades definition. It is sprinkled with diversely engaging themes—sexuality, religion, literature and (possibly) saintliness. There are handicapped children (no surprise), suicide pacts, cults, whiffs of millenarianism and abrupt shifts of scene among Japan, the United States and Mexico. It also features an author (Ōe) in search of a story.

What kind of book is it? It might be a novel, as the publisher implies, but it reads more like a memoir. At times, it plods like an essay, at others it leaps into parable or allegory. In other words, it is a work riven with postmodern uncertainty.

Marie Kuraki, the focus of the novel (if it is a novel), is an intelligent, sensitive woman with a Ph.D. in English whom Ōe meets in the sophisticated, late-1960s Tokyo milieu of leftist causes and parents with liberal concerns. Like Ōe, she is the parent of a retarded son, Musan. Marie might well have remained a normal mother and wife but for the tragic double suicide of Musan and his brother Michio, who has been crippled as the result of a school bullying-induced accident.

The bizarre double suicide, which she replays obsessively in her mind in an effort to comprehend the motives that led the two to leap into the sea from a cliff in Izu, is the key to her life. Her family and marriage shattered, Marie gives herself up to the task of finding a project—an “enterprise”—that will not only explain her sons' actions but also “avenge” them and justify her life.

Marie—her name is technically Japanese but emblematic of the story to come—joins a Catholic studies group and then a religious cult, which emigrates to the United States, where its leader, the ambiguous “Little Father,” dies of tuberculosis. Marie inherits his mantle of leadership, but disbands the group and accepts an offer to work on a rural collective in Mexico run by a devout businessman who believes Marie's energy and mater dolorosa glamour will help bind the group into a stable community. Although Ōe loses touch with her at this point, he learns of her curious and unsought beatification by the simple Indian peasant folk whom she has touched by her intelligence, dedication and feminine charisma. She contracts cancer and dies, leaving the communal farm with a vision of sainthood. Quite an accomplishment and one that Ōe's book is at pains to explicate.

For Marie Kuraki is in many ways not cut out for the role of saint. From the start, she is endowed with another quality that contrasts with her intellectual, ethical side, a quality coyly summarized by Ōe as her “Betty Boop” image. Ōe's physical descriptions of Marie are terse, emphasizing a stereotypical trait such as her red lipstick or high heels, but from her effects on Ōe and other men, we gather that Marie is, well, a very sexy woman.

Ōe gets involved indirectly with this side of her life when she comes to him to help resolve the problem caused by a former lover's attempt to blackmail her with a tape recording of their lovemaking. They meet at a swimming pool, and as they swim together, Ōe notes tufts of pubic hair protruding from her bathing suit.

In Mexico City, where he is a visiting lecturer, Ōe has an erotic dream of Marie in which she delivers a prophetic interpretation of her sons' suicide and then flashes her pubis at him. At his country home, where Marie comes to visit, the happily married Ōe has a chance to satisfy his obsession, but tepidly refrains.

The spiritual and the physical are bound up in Marie in a way that disturbs and fascinates. None of the episodes of her life is unmarked by her sexual power, not even the last one in which she undertakes a vow of abstinence. The final pages of the book describe the shocking circumstances of Marie's rape by a brutal Japanese-Mexican named Macho Mitsuo, an outrage that would seem to add to the store of her sufferings except for the insidious suggestion that she came to orgasm during one of these acts.

Ōe's way of telling the story comes to be one of its major themes as he and Marie, through their correspondence and conversations, discuss possible ways her tragedy might be understood. It is indeed interesting how, for both of them, Marie's tragedy is not only a personal problem but a dilemma that engages their highest philosophical faculties.

The story flipflops between literature and life as Marie and Ōe, each in their own way, use their favorite texts to mediate the issues that arise in Marie's life. For Marie, it is the Catholic novelist Flannery O'Connor, whose concept of fiction as “manners and mystery” has helped her make sense of her personal tragedy. She comes to believe that the suicides of her sons were not acts of despair but, at the last moment, were illuminated by the kind of “mystery” O'Connor had written about.

Ōe, rooted in the French tradition, finds Balzac's Un Curé de Village, with its story of a woman's sin and redemption an appropriate guide to the mythic dimensions of Marie's spiritual plight

This preoccupation with the ways in which Marie's story can be told is shared by the other characters in the book. The story opens with a letter to Ōe from a friend of Marie—who describes a film he is making in Mexico about Marie's life—which he wants to call Like a Mistress, from the Irish poet W. B. Yeats' “There have been men who loved the future like a mistress. …” We also learn that Ōe has agreed to write a story about Marie upon which the scenario will be based. The whole book in fact is the result of Ōe's attempt to comply with this request. A friend of Ōe comments that Marie, in her long, revealing letters to Ōe, has been implicitly cooperating with this effort.

The theme of fictionalization becomes clear in the last phase of Marie's life, in which she consciously plays the role of a Latin mater dolorosa—whom she resembles with her huge black eyes and sun-darkened face. Marie, it seems, has been specifically recruited by the commune leader to play the role of mater dolorosa among the peasants in order to inspire them with her image of suffering and sacrifice, a role she finds a natural fit and perhaps comes to believe, although standing apart from organized religion to the end. Finally, after her death, Marie's story will be canonized in the film shown again and again to the villagers among whom she achieved the status of sainthood.

For Ōe this is a sticking point. “Because I have no real belief …,” he writes, “I find it impossible to approach the concept of a saint. …” This might lead us to believe that Ōe's purpose in assembling these materials is to cast doubt on the mixed motives that go into religious faith—but the book's final pages indicate otherwise. As he watches the videos of her final hours and then the curious scene of her burial, Marie has several more lessons to teach him.

First is the pitiful scene of Marie's nude, emaciated, cancer-ridden body. Marie holds one hand on her “oddly luxuriant muff” and with the other she holds “her right hand in a V-sign at her chest, the hint of a smile on her face.” The second is the video of Marie's burial in which Ōe makes out the figure of a powerful, crippled man digging her grave. This is the notorious Macho Mitsuo, Marie's rapist, who was savagely beaten by the villagers but has returned to the village to pay his final respects to the woman he desecrated. The scene is so moving, so mythic in its demonstration of Marie's strange power to heal the harshest antagonisms, that Ōe's skepticism is shaken.

Ōe admits his tenuous hope that the example of Marie's life and his efforts on her behalf, will lead him to a glimpse of the transcendent—the “echo of heaven”—that Marie might actually have captured through her tragedy and redemption. Like a typical postmodern, however, he offers his work as no more than “my own story, one acceptable to me. …”

An Echo of Heaven is not a great novel. Its characters, except for Marie and Ōe, are wooden and one-dimensional and dialogue is too often used as a conduit for raw chunks of information.

If we look at the book, however, as a cousin to the Platonic dialogue or certain 18th century philosophical narratives, its rich discussion of ideas may not seem out of place.

This is not to say that Ōe's approach is old-fashioned. Rather, it seems that, instead of writing a conventional novel about Marie, Ōe chose an open literary form—a “dialogical” form—in which his authorial voice is merely one among many. With its verbatim inclusions of correspondence and conversations with a variety of sources, the book appears to be a group effort, much as if Ōe were assembling a documentary. An Echo of Heaven is thus not so much a finished product as it is the record of Ōe's attempt to come to grips with his subject, and as such, it remains open to multiple interpretations. Ōe in fact hints that this is his purpose when he divulges his interest in Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian theorist and author of the famous essay, “The Dialogical Imagination.”

Seen in this light, An Echo of Heaven is revealed as a typically postmodern literary product and a highly original one in the context of modern Japanese literature. In any case, its plain style and deep humanity will appeal to those who are open to experimental form and not hopelessly prejudiced against content in literature.

The translation by Margaret Mitsutani is self-effacing and effective in conveying Ōe's unusually limpid and unadorned prose style.