SOURCE: Ōe, Kenzaburō, and Sam Staggs. “Kenzaburo Oe: After the Nobel, a New Direction.” Publishers Weekly 242, no. 32 (7 August 1995): 438-39.

[In the following interview, Ōe discusses his background as an existentialist and recounts the controversy surrounding his acceptance of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature.]

Kenzaburo Oe is the last existentialist. Changing trends in literature and philosophy have reduced the outsized reputations of such existentialist giants as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, but it seems no one has told Oe that—or if so, he paid no attention. “It doesn't matter,” he says flatly when asked to comment on the diminished fortunes of his literary parents. To him, the heroes of his youth are still big. It's literature that got small.

For almost 40 years, Oe has been the faithful Japanese acolyte of his French mentors, filling book after book with images and metaphors drawn from the existentialist canon: hospitals, disease, absurd violence, the death of children, crime and nausea. Put another way, Oe's fiction resembles the most didactic films of Jean-Luc Godard. His novels often read like philosophical treatises; characters interrupt the spare narrative line to deliver speeches on such topics as the pluralistic universe.

And so, in a sense, it's not surprising that Oe's first novel, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, published in Japan in 1958, was not translated into English until this year. His writing is definitely an acquired taste. But when Oe won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, editors and publishers discovered they had acquired a taste for his books overnight.

The exception was Marion Boyars, who had bought Nip the Buds 10 months before the announcement that Oe had won the coveted prize. Before the Nobel, Oe was anything but hot; Boyars had no competition in bidding for English-language rights to his novel. She was, however, a longtime admirer of his work who had published, in 1978, a collection of Oe's novellas called Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness. It sold 500 copies.

For Boyars, who publishes in the U.S. and Britain, loyalty to her author is paying off. With commercial success virtually assured as a result of the Nobel Prize, Oe has become, if not a Grisham-esque hot property, at least a warm one. Boyars has just brought out her second Oe book of 1995, Hiroshima Notes (Forecasts, June 19), a collection of essays about the atomic bomb's victims, issued here on the 50th anniversary of the U.S. attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The book, which appeared in Japan in 1965, sold 600,000 copies there; Oe has written a new introduction. It, too, was already in the Boyars pipeline before Oe's elevation. Paperback rights to both books were snapped up by Grove.

Unlike Sartre, who declined to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, Oe traveled to Sweden last December and delivered the customary laureate's address. While there, however, he disconcerted many listeners, and some interviewers, by announcing that he planned to stop writing fiction. One journalist speculated, perhaps unkindly, that it was a case of “take the money and run.” Certainly the prize money of ＄900,000 was worth collecting. Oe says now that “the money from the Nobel Prize will give me the liberty to take a sabbatical from writing. I hope to study for several years, and then I hope to create a new form of expression.” He won't discuss possible shapes that this new form might take.

Those who found Oe's surprise announcement at the festivities something of an anticlimax were soon surprised again, for shortly after his return to Japan he refused the Bunka Kunsho—the Order of Culture award—which is one of Japan's highest honors. No stranger to controversy, Oe was castigated in the Japanese media for what many perceived as an insult to the Emperor, who bestows the award. It was also pointed out that the Order of Culture prize carries a net value of only ＄40,000.

‘A MAN OF THE PERIPHERY’

Meeting with PW just after his participation in the “Cultural Olympiad,” the gathering of Nobel laureates in Atlanta, and during his publication tour for Nip the Buds, Oe seems to enjoy the book signings and the tight schedule of interviews. He is warmly welcomed in this country, where no one resents his affront to the Emperor of Japan. Asked whether his refusal of the imperial award was an aesthetic or a political decision, Oe declares in halting English: “I rejected the award because it comes from the Emperor. One goes to the palace and receives it, but my creed is I don't want to go in front of His Majesty. I want to live like the ordinary people and not make any personal relationship with the Emperor. I hope to be a man of the periphery, independent of the pyramid of Emperor culture.”

But wouldn't living like “ordinary people” preclude accepting the Nobel Prize from the King of Sweden, who presents it on behalf of the Swedish Academy? Oe disagrees, explaining “the Swedish Academy is only partially connected with the Swedish Royal Family, so I have no reason to say no. It is only the Emperor I object to.”

Pausing a moment, Oe says frankly, “I was losing my readers in Japan. In the '60s my books sold 100,000 copies in hardcover, but now only 30,000. Thanks to the Nobel Prize, I think I am recovering readers in Japan. I can also publish my new works in English. That is very important to me.”

Despite his scant success in the English-language market, Oe, 60, is one of Japan's most prolific authors. During his 37-year career he has turned out close to a dozen novels, almost as many volumes of essays, and a half-dozen short-story collections. Among the handful of his books translated into English, A Personal Matter (Grove, 1969), is the best known.

This novel, which might almost pass for autobiography, chronicles the trauma of a young father following the birth of a baby who is grotesquely deformed. The infant has two heads.

A Personal Matter was written in 1964, the year after Oe's son Hikari was born. Severely brain-damaged, the child was further disfigured by a huge growth that resembled a second head. The option of corrective surgery offered stark choices. Without the operation, the baby was sure to die; even if surgery succeeded, the boy would never be normal.

Like the protagonist of A Personal Matter, Oe wrestled with the wrenching choices and eventually he and his wife decided in favor of the operation. The story turned out more surprisingly than any denouement in Oe's fiction, because today Hikari Oe, aged 32, is a noted composer. Though Hikari's language abilities are severely impaired, his knowledge of and talent for music are remarkable. His compositions are available on two CDs, the first of which has sold some 80,000 copies in Japan.

Oe and his wife, Yukari, have two other grown children, who are pursuing careers in library science and agriculture. The family lives in a suburb of Tokyo, in a European-style house where, according to Oe, “there is no tatami. That's because my son, Hikari, has difficulty standing up from a tatami mat on the floor, so we have chairs and other European furniture.” Oe says that their garden, a small orchard created by his wife, is also non-Japanese. In it are 20 specimens of camellias and twice as many kinds of azaleas. Yukari Oe recently received a gardening award from the city of Tokyo.

Oe's fiction, like his house, rebels against Japanese taste and traditions. Eschewing the narrative economy and seamless style that often characterizes the work of his contemporaries, like Yukio Mishima and Junichiro Tanizaki, his novels, or at least those available in English, are loosely structured. They lack a distinct beginning, middle and end, and characters often function as the author's mouthpiece. Asked whether he consciously decided to deemphasize formal elements in his fiction, Oe says, “When I began writing novels, I was a young man. I didn't think about structure or characterization. I wrote my novels very naturally, just the way they came to me.”

Oe doesn't dispute the assertions of critics who claim that his work violates the tendency to vagueness inherent in the Japanese language, and also its natural rhythms. “I don't write to create beauty,” he says. “I write for the contemporary Japanese. I want to show them how we look. I hope they will say, after reading my books, ‘This is us, this is what we look like and how we experience our society.’”

In spite of such stated insularity, Oe's books have been widely translated into Russian. He reports the translation of 20 works, with sales of each running around half a million copies. One reason, perhaps, is that the author—and his works—were often ideologically aligned with official policies of the former Soviet Union.

A RENDEZVOUS WITH MAO

Oe has been identified with left-wing politics since his student days at Tokyo University, and, in 1960, he traveled to China to meet Mao Zedong. An admirer of Mao, despite what he acknowledges as the Chinese dictator's depredations, Oe recalls traveling a long distance at midnight to a secret destination for his rendezvous with Mao and Chou En-lai.

“I went with a delegation of several other Japanese authors who were protesting the Japan-U.S.A. security treaty,” Oe recalls. “I was the youngest member, and Mao said to me, ‘Oe, how old are you?’ I said, ‘I am 25 years old.’ Then Mao quoted from the writings of his youth, ‘The best revolutionary is young and poor.’ I said, ‘Yes, I am young, yes, I am poor, but I am also rather famous.’ Mao laughed, but the conversation didn't continue because one of the Japanese Communists in our group, horrified that I dared to joke with Mao, quickly changed the subject.”

Oe was right about being famous, for he had gained national recognition during his student days with publication of his first work, a novella titled “Shiiku” (1958), translated as “Prize Stock” and included in the Marion Boyars collection Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness. Oe's 1959 novel, Warera no jidai, changed fame into notoriety. (The novel hasn't been translated into English; its title means “our age.”) This novel's protagonists use violence and unconventional sexuality as a means of escaping the emptiness of their lives. Critics deplored the dark pessimism of the book during a period supposed to mark a new, bright epoch in modern Japanese history.

A year after his encounter with Mao, Oe met Sartre in Paris. As a student majoring in French literature, Oe had written his senior thesis on Sartre. Later, after translating one of Sartre's essays into Japanese, Oe was commissioned by a Tokyo magazine to interview the leading exponent of French existentialism. “The interview took place at La Coupole restaurant,” Oe recalls. “Afterwards, we went to the Place de la Bastille where Simone de Beauvoir joined us and we all took part in an anti-OAS [Organization of American States] demonstration that was taking place in Paris that day.”

Oe met Sartre and de Beauvoir on several later occasions, but relations grew strained; Sartre and Oe had an ideological falling-out over the nuclear armament of the People's Republic of China, and there was no reconciliation.

“Some time ago I felt that I had said good-bye to existentialism,” Oe declares. “But I was wrong. Now I'm finishing up my final fiction, the last novel I will ever publish. In it, I write about the death of a small, innocent child. Camus wrote about the same thing. So I didn't say good-bye to existentialism, only adieu to Sartre.” The existentialist song had ended, but the melody will persist, at least until Oe stops writing fiction altogether.