[In the following essay, Ōe discusses his attitude toward and utilization of the “I-novel” form and reviews significant influences on his life and work.]

Looking back upon my literary career, I would say that, from the outset, the setting of my literature has been my native village in a small valley deep in the forests of Shikoku, one of Japan's four main islands. The village is roughly in the central part of the island, just north of the watershed of the Shikoku Mountain Range. The premonition of a young writer is all I can say that prompted me to start writing about my native village. In the beginning, I wrote without much perspective that the village would later occupy a large core part of my literature.

My first work was a short story titled “The Catch” [also translated as “Prize Stock”—Ed.]. The time of the story is near the end of the Pacific War, and the account begins with the shooting down of a U.S. bomber on an air-raid mission. A black airman falls by parachute into the deep woods that surround the mountain village and is taken prisoner by the villagers, most of whom are farmers. I have been told that during the Pacific War, at least, there were no black American airmen. During my boyhood years, however, there was a tale—although highly doubtful as fact—narrated in the village as a piece of “new folklore,” telling of farmers in the mountains of Kyushu (a large island neighboring Shikoku) murdering a black American soldier who had parachuted from his bomber. Thus my story is based solely on a rumor that bears reality in terms of narrative folklore.

As in Dionysian mythology, the black airman in the story gradually becomes an object of faith among the villagers, especially among the young boys, who savor the excitement of a festival. Toward the climax of their excitement, tragedy falls with the murder of the black man. In the story, my imagination unfolds in a manner found more in the realm of myth than in folklore, although, of course, folklore of similar content is recounted synchronically in many parts of the world.

The story has a pivotal significance in my literary career, due in part to the fact that it is one of my thematic works which deal with my childhood experiences in an ultranationalistic society during the Pacific War, and more fundamentally because of the “structure” and “place” of the imagined world it depicts. Certainly, the topographic characteristics of the place I describe in the story resemble my native village in the valley. However, the more important fact is that, after I wrote the story, its actual landscape receded into the background while the topography I portrayed in it advanced to the fore. As a matter of fact, writing this story “reduced,” so to speak, my actual native village in the Shikoku mountains “to nothingness.” It was nothing but my imagined world of the village that laid the foundation for my later construction of a universe with a vivid reality and with a mythic and folkloric framework.

After “The Catch,” I wrote my first novel, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids. When I wrote this longer work, I was already half aware of the meaning of what I have discussed so far. I say I was only half aware because I was not at all conscious then of the “history” that had been incorporated into, and remained in, the folklore of the region. Of this I shall speak later.

In “The Catch” an enemy soldier, a foreigner whose skin is clearly different in color from that of a Japanese, suddenly enters the mountain village scene. The soldier clearly represents, almost to the point of allegory, what lies “outside” of the village. In Nip the Buds it is the reformatory boys, escaping from the aftermath of the air raids on the cities, who come to the village from “outside.” When the boys arrive, the village is already cut off from the towns and city downstream due to a minor flood, and the villagers have started to believe that a plague has broken out. Although I was not aware of it at the time I was writing the novel, I believe that the flood and the plague are, quite evidently, a metaphor of war.

Fearing the epidemic, the villagers temporarily abandon their homes. The boys, to whom the narrow passage to the outside world is closed, soon discover that there is no one but themselves in the village, except for a young soldier who deserted his unit, a young girl whom the villagers believed to be afflicted with the plague and who was thus left behind when they evacuated, and a Korean boy born in Japan. Korea had been annexed by Japan in those days, and this boy, stripped of his fatherland like his fellow Koreans, is discriminated against in Japanese society as a Japan-born Korean. All the characters are misfits in Japanese society, and their existence within it is marginal at best.

However, these individuals willingly accept their “place” and take full responsibility for their acquiescence. Because the residents flee en masse, the “village society” as such becomes nonexistent until they return and put the boys on trial for vandalizing the village during their absence. Before this happens, however, what the boys first discover about this remote community is the village as a topographic structure.

As snow falls, the birds of the forest come down to the village, thus establishing a certain relationship between the local topography and the boys. The boys begin hunting in the woods, after which they hold a festival to celebrate their catch, thus bearing witness to the birth of a myth intertwined with the topographic meaning of the region.

I used the personal pronoun “I” for one of the reformatory boys who had been evacuated to the village only to be abandoned immediately by the locals, and wrote the story from his point of view, his “outsider” eyes making fresh discoveries of the village as a “place.” The person writing the novel, however, is myself, an “insider” born and raised in the village, but one who has left it for a life in the city. For both the person in the story relating it and for me writing it, the inside-outside dichotomy concerning “place” continually recurs. This dichotomy appears repeatedly in my later novels as well.

In Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids I laid bare, from the viewpoint of a youthful outsider, the first overall picture of the imagined universe of the forest valley. The temporal setting of the novel was the mid-1940s, near the close of the Pacific War and roughly fifteen years before the work's composition. The account incorporates elements that clearly have much in common with my own inner experiences as a child. How was this possible? Simply put, it was because, as a child, I had been ostracized by the village community. Although it was a farming village, my family was not engaged in agriculture. Our family business was shipping, to the city, the bark of a plant from which banknotes are made. We bought the bark from the farmers who, during their off season, grew the plant as a secondary source of income. Since we controlled a portion of the farmers' meager cash intake, our relationship with them was, obviously, a subtle one. After the sudden death of my father, our family was isolated, the reality of which was reflected in my relations with my peers both at school and outside of it.

I had always been the “black sheep” among the village children anyway, since my mother supplied me with books that seemed fit for only city children to read. This fact explains why I was able, in Nip the Buds, to empathize more easily with the group of boys who came from the city, from somewhere totally outside of the village, and who accepted their life in such a remote locale—its topography and daily activities, including a festival that sprang up spontaneously—than with the adults and children of the village, all of whom abandoned their home immediately upon suspecting an outbreak of the plague when one of the boys started running a fever. Together with the abandoned sick girl and the deserter, the Japan-born Korean, who was discriminated against and was excluded from the villagers' emergency evacuation, is readily accepted by the boys as one of the new residents of the village alongside themselves.

In the latter half of the novel, all suspicion of a plague is dispelled and the evacuees return to the village with the village headman. The boys are charged with the offense of trespassing in the village during the villagers' absence and are interrogated. The crime is one of infringing not only upon private property, which is material, but also upon the spiritual realm, for the boys had held a festival as well. All the boys except the defiant protagonist of the novel succumb to the village headman. Although in my first draft the protagonist dies a gruesome death, the published novel ends with his being beaten nearly to death but managing to escape.

The completion of the universe of my imagination in Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids made it only natural that the motif which would penetrate my entire literary career was entrusted in the “I” who had run through the dark forest to escape to the world “outside.” The final paragraph of the novel reads:

But I didn't know what to do to get away through the night forest, fleeing from the brutal villagers, and escape harm. I didn't even know if I still had the strength to run any more. I was only a child, tired, insanely angry, tearful, shivering with cold and hunger. Suddenly a wind blew up, carrying the sound of the villagers' footsteps growing nearer, closing in on me. I got up, clenching my teeth, and dashed into the deeper darkness between the trees and the darker undergrowth.

I was born in 1935, and grew up on the island of Shikoku, one of the four main islands of Japan. At Tokyo University, I majored in modern French literature and literary thought under the tutelage of Professor Kazuo Watanabe, a specialist in the work of François Rabelais. Professor Watanabe was my patron (to use the French word) throughout my college years and beyond, but for me, a student whose native tongue was far removed from French, Rabelais's language was forbidding. In the well-known chapter where Panurge meets Pantagruel for the first time and invokes every human tongue that comes to his mind, not one word he exclaims even remotely resembles Japanese. However, as I matured as a writer, I was pushed forward, as it were, by this very experience and came across Mikhail Bakhtin's study of Rabelais, through which I learned various ways to enrich my writing. This enabled me to publish a novel while I was still an undergraduate student. Japanese writers customarily make their debut by writing short stories, and “The Catch,” which I wrote in 1958, won a literary award (the Akutagawa Prize) that served as a “token” of my initiation into Japan's higher literary circles. I completed Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids that same year and decided to make writing my career.

The Silent Cry, which I wrote in 1967, tells of my two divided selves, so to speak, returning to the topographic structure of the forest village (nascent in my two earlier works) and then arriving at the realization of “place” in a manner that would complete the structure. The novel is about two brothers living a tragedy during the time the village is cut off (again as in my previous work) from the other villages and small towns downstream. The elder brother is a sedentary onlooker, the younger one a doer or activist who strives to reenact, in the form of parody, the revolutionary goal he was unable to achieve in Tokyo.

An early scene where the two brothers take a long bus ride back to the village they had left a few years before is a symbolic one. Although the brothers are not aware of it, the trip traces a mythical descent into the netherworld of night and death. Their journey is a return to the “place” where, some one hundred years ago, an historic event—namely, a peasant revolt—took place, plunging the family headlong into tragedy. The younger of the two brothers experienced defeat in 1960 as the left-wing leader of a student movement at the time of the large-scale popular opposition to the Japan-America Security Treaty. In 1860, exactly one hundred years earlier, an official who advocated the opening of Japan to the world was assassinated. That was also the year a seaworthy Japanese vessel first reached the shores of America.

The experience of defeat in the student movement is already deeply internalized within the young student leader. His sense of defeat is exacerbated by the fact that he had once been a member of a youthful theatrical troupe that toured the United States apologizing to the citizens of the U.S. for having opposed the Security Treaty. Returning to his native village, he organizes a band of youths for the purpose of attacking a new supermarket built with a view toward controlling the local economy. As a training exercise in concerted group action, he forms a football team that practices on the playground of the village elementary school.

In the episode that tells of their plan to attack the supermarket, there is an element that is clearly mythic in its symbolism. The supermarket owner, whose power as a wealthy man extends over a vast area of the region, including the big cities on the island of Shikoku, is a Japan-born Korean known as the “Emperor of the Supermarkets.” Though the symbols conflict, one being positive and the other negative, this “emperor” shares a hidden bond with the Japan-born Korean boy who, in Nip the Buds, is confined, during the turmoil of a wartime epidemic, to a particular “place” together with the boys who had come from “outside.” The elder of the two brothers was killed immediately after the war, in a clash between youths of the village and others from the Korean settlement.

As a revolt, the attack on the supermarket fails, and the younger brother, who called the attack “a riot of the imagination,” kills himself. The elder brother leaves the village for the second time, determined to live a new life. Before going, however, he decides to dismantle a piece of architecture the villagers call “the storehouse,” a structure that has played a symbolic role in this village in the valley. He will sell the structure to the Emperor of the Supermarkets, who plans to transport and rebuild it in a certain small city. The dismantling of the storehouse brings to light facts of a hundred years ago that point to the role models of the two brothers—that is, to their great-grandfather and his younger brother, the older having been an onlooker and a maintainer of order, the younger a doer and a revolutionary. Now, however, the facts indicate that there was also a third role, one which, for the surviving older brother, serves as a clue enabling him to discover yet another role for himself. The fact that the “I” who is given the task of recording the story is the elder brother gave me cause to create continuity in the narrative of my novels that come after The Silent Cry.

As noted earlier, I wrote Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids as if I had been lured in by the mythic universe which the topographic structure of the forest village elicits. It is clear that war as a current societal event—which is but another fragment of “history”—casts its shadow upon the story. I did not, however, venture to take a firm hold of the clues of “history” that presented themselves in the story and continue from there to write about how the topographic structure of the village was intertwined with the “history” of the villagers. The chain of clues seemed like a movie filmed with a camera fixed always to shoot the present, catching vividly the inner feelings of the performing cast.

In The Silent Cry, however, “history” makes a rough entry into the story, and the various events that take place within the unique topography have a dual structure. The novel contrasts the years 1860 and 1960, which, though a century apart, interact to impart meaning to each other. A clue to reinterpreting the meaning of the novel as a whole is unearthed as the final curtain is about to fall—or, should I say, when the “aftermath” of the two incidents separated by a hundred years is about to settle—on the tragic events of the present. The clue lies in the dismantling of the “storehouse” and the discovery of a secret cellar beneath it. It was assumed that, after the failure of the 1860 peasant revolt, the leader had left the closed-in confines of the region, had enjoyed a larger sphere of activity in an open city, and had participated in Japanese society's move toward modernization, that he had had access not only to information on domestic matters but to new information on what was happening in foreign countries. However, it becomes clear toward the end of the novel that this person had confined himself in the cellar of the storehouse and lived out the rest of his life merely writing letters. This final chapter is titled “Retrial.” The story up to this point reveals one aspect of a dually structured “history,” but it is here that this “history” unfolds to reveal a further duality, encouraging the surviving individuals who live in the temporal present of the novel to opt for a different way of life in the future. The choice, however, is for each individual to make.

What prompted me to introduce “history” into The Silent Cry was the native folklore I used to listen to, and which has been alive in me all along. The topographic structure of the village that permeates not only the settings but the themes of my novels was something my eyes saw as a child, and I grew up listening to its tales. I reconfirmed the topographic structure on two different levels as I wrote The Silent Cry. The first was the folkloric tradition of the region I had heard from my mother and my grandmother. When I wrote this novel, I paid particular attention to accounts of and references to the two peasant revolts, which, in the story, occur approximately one hundred years ago. My grandmother had lived her childhood and girlhood years in the same social environment as the people who had taken part in the two incidents. In the stories she told, therefore, she always added her memories of the people she had known.

My grandmother was an idiosyncratic and gifted narrator who was able to relate all her experiences in exactly the same narrative style as the tales she had heard and had learned to recite. That is to say, she created new folklore, and, in doing so, re-created the region's folklore of yore. Moreover, she set each tale she told within the topographic structure of the village where we—the narrator (my grandmother) and the listener (myself)—lived. This gave objective reality to her narrative and, at the same time, confirmed the folkloric or, synonymously, mythic significance of each place in the village topography. I received training from my grandmother in embellishing and deducing a folkloric/mythic significance from the forest, the river, and other small details of the village. This training led me to create new folklore of my own about various aspects of the village, or even each tall tree, and then to wrap a mythic significance around them.

I spent my childhood years in this way because the role both my grandmother and my mother had in the village was that of narrator of the oral tradition, and also because, as noted above, I had been ostracized by the other children. My grandmother and mother managed a small shrine at their own expense and rendered service to it for free. Their shrine was the object of a local faith in the Taoist tradition and was different from the other shrines, founded upon Shinto mythology.

The other motive is directly rooted in the village autumn festival, which the farmers discontinued at their own initiative during the war years but which they restored in 1945, immediately after Japan's defeat in the Pacific War. Those most actively involved in organizing the festival were young, demobilized soldiers who, instead of adapting to the daily life of the village, were attracted to the non-everyday atmosphere of a festival. A dance was held on the playground of an elementary school, where, on the scaffold, a farmer sang a dance song titled “Kodoki” (meaning roughly “in the style of personal speaking”). The song told of the region's two peasant upheavals in the form of epic poetry. Its main feature was that it had lyrics pertaining to the surrounding forest and all the village place-names woven into it in the order the events of the revolts took place. To me, “Kodoki” was a story of the topographic structure of the village and a festive narrative performance of the folkloric/mythic tales I had heard from my grandmother.

The two circumstances served as a catalyst for me to evoke once again the village the two brothers in The Silent Cry had left behind for Tokyo, and to arrive at a methodology enabling me to tie together, within the topographic structure of the village, a 1960s story with another of a hundred years ago. The Silent Cry is a work that marked a fresh start for me as a writer. At the same time, it made me aware of the fact that, although I was living a writer's life in Tokyo, in order for me to rediscover myself fully, I had to continue making an inner, soul-searching return to the forest village I had left behind, and from there create for my novels a mythic universe through which I could “relive” my life. And this is how I escaped the clutches of a crisis.

2

Insofar as a writer writes while living an everyday life, a true crisis reveals itself in the form of an internal entangling of his creative activity with his actual life. In my case, this started in 1963, when my son was born with a cranial deformity. Although the operation to correct his condition was successful and he managed to survive, his life was destined to be that of a mentally handicapped child. Certainly, I spared no effort to save the infant's life, though I knew he would have to live with a mental disorder. But what was I to do to coexist with him? This being a real-life question, I was able to respond to it quickly. I wrote A Personal Matter in order to reconfirm the meaning of my response and the meaning of the action I had taken.

Unusual for my earlier works, the protagonist of this novel—that is, the individual who goes through the same experience as the writer—is cast in the third person. I named him “Bird,” a designation which carries a slightly allegorical nuance. The fact that I could not give him a name that readily passes as a Japanese male's first name evidences a certain stubbornness or hesitation on my part toward this central figure in the novel, a feeling I have not been able to put in clear focus even after all these years. I had thought of simply casting him as a first-person narrator, or of giving him as neutral a name as possible, one that would strike the reader as extremely remote from that of an actual person. What I did, therefore, was to employ the unique Japanese system of inscription and write, in katakana (the syllabary used for foreign words and names), the English word bird above the Japanese word for it, denoting to the readers that the name I had given the protagonist was to be read as “Bird,” which was but a scheme to “neutralize” him further. Bird is made to bear full responsibility for the treatment—including emergency surgery—of an infant who the doctors predict is certain to have both a serious mental handicap and hampered body movements.

Bird shrinks in fear at the thought of himself and his wife—still a young couple—shouldering such a Herculean burden for the rest of their lives, should the operation succeed. Although circumstances in Tokyo hospitals do not actually allow for a life-saving operation to be put off, I wrote as if such a delay were possible and had Bird agonize at making the choice. In addition to his daily suffering, I introduced into the story an event that brings back a relationship he had had during his late teenage years.

At one point Bird puts the baby in the hands of a doctor who will tacitly take illegal measures to end its life, an action which is but an irresponsible path of escape a young man in dire straits dreams of. Shortly thereafter, however, he decides to turn down an offer from his former girlfriend which would save him from his plight by having him escape to a foreign land, thus relieving him of all responsibility for the child.

“Bird, you are going to have to endure all kinds of pain,” Himiko said. It was meant as encouragement. “So long, Bird. Take care of yourself!”

Bird nodded, and left the bar.

The taxi raced down the wet streets at horrendous speed. If I die in an accident now before I save the baby, my whole twenty-seven years of life will have meant exactly nothing. Bird was stricken with a sense of fear more profound than any he had ever known.

In real life, I requested that my son undergo a cranial operation, which turned out to be successful. By this time, I had also recovered from the disheartening psychological dilemma I had been faced with since my son's birth, the fact of which, I believe, led to a rather abbreviated treatment of the plot in the few pages that follow the passage I have just quoted. My presentation of the theme of the novel actually ends with the quote, but I received criticism that I was being overly optimistic with the quick unfolding of the plot in the last few pages. Nevertheless, it was through my writing of this work that I was able to overcome the difficulty my son's birth had brought upon me.

In the few years that followed, however, I gradually became aware of what constituted the core of the crisis in which I had long been trapped. I had decided to live my life in coexistence with a mentally handicapped child—or, I should say, it was this very coexistence that I decided would serve as the focal point around which my life with my wife would revolve. The choice I made meant that, as a writer who had compounded the universe of his imagination with the history of his own internal development during Japan's war years in a peripheral forest village on Shikoku island, I would also wholly incorporate into my novels this experience with my handicapped son.

Two problems arose in my attempt to do this. The first was how to deal with the rule concerning classification of contemporary Japanese literature. One distinct category in contemporary Japanese fiction is the so-called “I-novel,” a genre customarily relegated to a low position in the Japanese literary world. These are novels in which the writer writes about himself in the first person. Some may ask if they aren't the same as the Bildungsromane of Europe (novels dealing with the writer's early life and formative development) or if there aren't fictional works in other countries, especially in the realm of the short story, wherein the writer speaks or narrates in the first person. These questions suggest that I may be making a wrong assumption here.

However, the Japanese “I-novel” does not portray, for example, the process of a young boy—one who happens to use the personal pronoun “I”—growing up to become a full-fledged personality. Neither does it depict, in the form of parody, his chain of failures at becoming a true individual. The “I-novel” merely discloses, in an utterly synonymous and repetitive manner, the life the writer is living at the moment he is penning his novel. He writes, “This is how I am writing this novel as I am writing this novel.” No Wilhelm Meister or Augie March can be created in the Japanese “I-novel.” Other people may ask if a short story wherein the writer portrays a dramatic event in his life by using first-person narration—as in the case of John Cheever's excellent stories—isn't an example of what I call an “I-novel.” Among Cheever's works there is a story titled “Goodbye, My Brother.” This is a tale of the narrator's younger brother's visit to his mother's summer house for a family reunion. The younger brother is a killjoy who spoils every moment of the narrator's short vacation at his favorite place. The motif, or plot, is surely one that can be found in an “I-novel,” but toward the end of the story, the narrator clubs his brother's head with a piece of driftwood he finds on the beach. The “I-novel” would not allow this, for such an act goes beyond the limit of imagination this genre imposes upon itself.

I had made coexistence with my mentally handicapped child the axis upon which my life and my wife's life would revolve. I thought too that as long as I was a writer, I had to make this very coexistence with my child one of the main themes of my literature. However, I had no intention of abiding by the imagination-restricting taboo of the “I-novel.” Instead, what I thought I would do was introduce a new methodology into it.

Some people say that I write about what is more than closely related to my life in the first person in an environment that boasts the “I-novel” as one of its traditions. “If so,” they say, “why should you exercise self-control in following the logic of imaginative development that we find in novels in general? What should keep you from freely leaping over the barrier?” These are questions readers would obviously ask of me, especially my readers outside Japan. This is a matter that concerns the relationship between a writer and his reader. When a Japanese writer chooses to use a first-person narrator and begins to tell about a topic that has to do with his personal life, and the reader is already familiar with this writer to some extent, the reader does not doubt that it is an “I-novel” he or she is about to read. If, however, as in Cheever's short story, the writer includes a scene where he wields a piece of driftwood over his brother's head, the reader will fault the writer, or even find him ethically repulsive, for having gone beyond the pale of the “I-novel” imagination.

In portraying events that occur in my family where I coexist with my handicapped child, I had to enter into a new contract with my readers, first proclaiming to them that what they were going to read was not an “I-novel.” At the same time, I wanted to express how deeply connected the themes of my novels were to my life with my handicapped son. In other words, I wanted to continue saying to my readers that the themes of my novels and stories were rooted in my actual life. This was the critical task I had set myself within the literary world of Japan, where the tradition of the “I-novel” has thrived since the time of the country's modernization.

In 1983, I wrote Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age. Twenty years had passed since the writing of A Personal Matter, and the work is the final realization of two tasks I had always striven to accomplish: transcending the “I-novel” tradition, which Japanese writers, critics, and readers have steadfastly shared since the beginning of Japan's modernization, and arriving at a free form of expression; and living my actual life while keeping the imaginative life of a writer alive, with both lives revolving around coexistence with my handicapped son.

As a writer, I never wished to write an “I-novel.” I always wanted to write in a manner that would convince my critics and readers of this intent. What I did, to continue my career as a writer, was always to have, aside from the particular novel I might be working on at any given time, another object of intellectual concern on which I could concentrate. Here I do not mean the large mass of topical essays I worked on while I wrote my novels. In the year my handicapped son was born, I started field study of the victims of Hiroshima, where the world's first atomic bomb was dropped. Doctors who had themselves been victims of the bomb but who nevertheless immediately began treating the victims pointed out to me the basic direction in which I should carry out my research. Although these doctors commenced treatment of the victims without any knowledge of the true nature of the bomb that had been dropped on the city, their efforts slowly but steadily started to bear fruit. The accumulation of medical knowledge peculiar to the twentieth century, which began with the treatment of the A-bomb victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, contributed for example to the successful treatment of those suffering from radiation effects of the 1980s Chernobyl nuclear-reactor accident in the Ukraine.

Based on such research, I wrote Hiroshima Notes, and simultaneously I conducted other research on Okinawa, which in the past had been independent from Japanese political power but then was forced to “Japanize” when Japan embarked on modernization. Studying Ryukyu (Okinawan) culture, which, despite its location on the periphery of the Japanese cultural zone, continues to exhibit its own characteristics in Asia, encouraged me immensely in my self-training in writing, for I wished to examine Japanese culture from the viewpoint of the mountain village of Shikoku, also a peripheral region of Japan. The results of my study of Okinawa are reflected in several of my works, including The Silent Cry.

Okinawa Notes is a collection of essays portraying the Okinawa which, during World War II, became the only Japanese soil on which a land war victimizing civilians was fought. The essays describe the postwar political situation in which, cut off from mainland Japan, the Okinawan islands came to be exploited by United States military bases. Even today, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Okinawa continue to be themes of my essays on current issues.

In addition to writing essays and novels, I had all along another, third object of keen intellectual interest. The best-organized literary fruit of what I continued to study was Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age, a novel comprising eight short stories. The novel integrates what, on the one hand, is my continued awareness of the significance of my life with my handicapped son, and, on the other, the result of my study to understand the mythical universe of William Blake's Prophecies. I did not want my critics and readers to infer from such an eight-story serial an “I-novelish,” everyday life report of a family with a handicapped child. I believe that the stories, each being a study of Blake's mythic universe as well, were effective in warding off such an inference.

At the same time, by immersing myself for years in the study of Blake's Prophecies, I wanted to understand the fundamental meaning that my life of coexistence with my handicapped son conferred upon my soul. I was well aware of what lay ahead of me while I wrote A Personal Matter, that my life was going to be one of a long coexistence with a handicapped child. Before writing that novel, I wrote a novelette titled “Aghwee, the Sky Monster,” about a young artist who legally gets rid of his infant child born with the same handicap as my son and who later learns that, for him, all roads of life have been closed. I was strongly aware that there would be no life for me other than that of coexistence with my handicapped son. However, I could not imagine very well the trials and tribulations that I would go through, and neither could I imagine very well the joys I would feel when, one by one, I overcame those obstacles. However, since I had written a dialogue concerning Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell in my work as early as A Personal Matter, I must already have had a certain premonition of the things that were to unfold.

The last story in Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age includes a scene in which my son, coming home from his dormitory at a high school for the handicapped, declares to his family his intention to live an independent life. This, actually, is an impossibility, for my son needs the family to look after him every day. However, my writing of my son's declaration to become independent brought about in me a realization I would venture to call “an awakening of the soul.” His declaration to pursue an independent life, and my soul's awakening at that jolt, continue to live in me today more deeply than ever. I wrote:

Son, truly we ought not to call you Eeyore anymore, as we called you in your infancy, but start calling you Hikari instead. You have reached that age. You, Hikari, and your younger brother Sakurao, shall soon stand before us as two young men. I felt, welling within my heart, the words in Blake's introduction to “Milton,” which I recited habitually: “Rouse up, O, young men of the New Age! Set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have hirelings in the camp, the court and the university, who would, if they could, for ever depress mental and prolong corporeal war!”

Guided by Blake, I saw visions of my sons as young men of a new age, in which, it being an abominable one of nuclear weapons, they would have to, all the more, set their foreheads steadfastly against the hirelings; and I felt, too, as if I had been reborn as another youth standing beside them. The words that the Tree of Life utters in encouragement to the whole of humankind struck home as I pondered upon myself greeting old age and having to bear the pain of death: “Fear not, Albion: unless I die thou canst not live. But if I die I shall arise again & thou with me.”

Even so, there was a crisis of a different kind that had taken relentless hold of me in my life with my handicapped child, a crisis deeply connected with my literary career. That is to say, it had to do with one aspect of my daily life wherein literary imagination plays a central role. I had been living in Tokyo with my handicapped son. The writing of my novels, however, entailed a daily, lucid reconfirmation of the importance of the mythic—or folkloric—universe sustained by the topographic structure of the Shikoku forest village I had left behind. Because I had left my native village at the end of my boyhood years, or rather at the beginning of my youth, the village as I had known it came to possess an unshakable certainty despite the changes time wrought upon it.

The peripheral villages of the nation have changed greatly in the half century since I left my village. One telling example involves the concrete-banked rivers now divorced from the lives of the villagers. In my native village, the river there still winds deep through the valley. However, compared to the river of my childhood, which was closely intertwined with the lives of the village people, it is now a dead river. If this is an exaggeration, the river is at best one that has been tamed and is no longer a radiating source of diverse meanings. To those of us who remember it as it was years ago, the river was filled with humankind's expectations and all that went beyond them. It was a fantastic, dangerous, and at times violent force that confronted humankind, playing a major role in the folklore and myth of the region. Children of the village no longer speak its idiosyncratic language. Hence, their imagination is no longer released by the peculiar folklore or myths their mothers and grandmothers might relate to them. They grow up watching lackluster, plot-devoid “variety talk shows” rife with gossip of the entertainment world, nurturing the mundane and paltry illusion that they are living, synchronically, the same reality as the show-business personalities themselves.

If I had continued to live in my native village, I too would probably have found it difficult to maintain, for fifty years, my receptiveness of the mythic or folkloric universe of the forest I was told about during my infant and boyhood years. I would perhaps have lived like the young household head of the old village family of whom I wrote in my 1987 work Letters to the Years Dear to My Heart. The young man had planned a major reform in the village's production and distribution system, and while actually organizing the village youths who would implement the reform, he became embroiled in a minor sexual incident. It was, however, this minor incident that revealed to him, in the form of an epiphany, life's fundamental importance. Yet, because of the incident, he became totally alienated from the people of the region. He thus turned his back upon its myths and folklore and lived the rest of his life as an amateur specialist in Dante.

I wrote this novel as if I were thrust forward by a pressure from behind, by the mounting fear of the transmission crisis of the folklore and myths of the forest village. The same can be said for my 1995 work The Blazing Green Tree and my 1999 work Somersault. In these two works I depicted individuals who strive to organize a religious group or usher in a new, urban form of education in a region for which I used, as a backdrop, the topographic structure and mythic/folkloric imagination of the same village. That is to say, the sense of crisis which pressured me to write these novels has only been half resolved—only half and not more, even by what I am going to relate now. Ahead of me lies the greater task of consolidation that I need to accomplish in the little time I have left for myself. What I am doing now is presenting to you an interim report of how things are progressing.

My aged mother continued to live in my native village even after I had left it. After the death of my father, which came on the heels of my grandmother's passing, my mother took upon herself the roles the two of them had played in life. She succeeded my grandmother as the narrator of the myths, folklore, and history of the region. This was fine, but what was crucial for me was the fact that, with my elder brothers and sisters having left the village to go to school in a small town, and with my younger brother and sister still in their infancy, I alone was made heir to the world of the oral tradition that my grandmother had passed on to my mother. Since I had already then been ostracized by the village children, and because I was basically imagination-prone, this was not a wholly unwelcome turn of events: private lessons more suited to me were soon to commence.

In addition to relating the regional myths to me, my mother supplied me with books. She never bothered to look at books which the government, at that time of ultranationalism, published for the sake of propaganda. Toward the end of the war, even when circumstances did not allow many books to be published, she used to spend a whole day traveling from the village to a regional town to barter, in exchange for rice, books for me such as The Wonderful Travels of Nils Holgerson or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Although the content of these books had nothing to do with my surrounding reality, it was deeply connected to what I experienced in my mind when, alone, I entered the forest, and to the sense of the mythic/folkloric universe I felt all around me with my whole body.

My mother did not leave her native forest village even after I departed for Tokyo, embarked upon my career as a writer, married, and had a family. She showed no interest in the novels I wrote or in what the media reported about me. Her interest in me was restored, however, when her grandson with a handicap was born. I learned from my younger sister, who also continued to live in the village, that our mother ignored the officially recognized household altar found in every home in the village, the Shinto altar based on a nationally systemized mythology. She told me that our mother spent a long time every day praying to the “god of darkness,” whose altar stood in the soot-darkened corner beside the old-fashioned furnace where she burned firewood. This altar was dedicated to the “unquiet souls” of the leaders murdered in two uprisings, one prior to the Meiji Restoration and one after it. There are, in Shikoku, large altars that in this way enshrine each new “departed soul.”

My mother made her very first visit to help my wife as our son was about to undergo his first major operation. When the barber who had accepted the task of shaving the baby's head hesitated in fear upon seeing the soft, defective part of his cranium, my mother took the razor out of his hands, completed the job herself, and said to him, “With your courage, you could never take part in a peasant revolt!”

When our son started to show clear signs of a mental disorder, my mother said to my wife and me that she would take custody of the child and live together with him in a house she had prepared in the forest village. My wife and I declined her offer, for we had already decided on a life with our son in Tokyo. Our son grew up with his mental disorder, there being no remedy for it. However, the little pieces of music he started to compose became the source of my mother's utmost delight in her later years. In 1986 I published M/T and the Marvels of the Forest, wherein, based on my mother's words to my wife and me, I wrote the following passage:

When Hikari-san came by himself to visit me as I lay ill on my futon, he sat beside me and continued to listen quietly to music from the radio! When there was no broadcast of classical music, I narrated to him stories of the village that were handed down to us! He listened patiently, but when I asked him if he understood what I, an old woman, was telling him, he replied, encouraging me: “I understand because you're speaking in Japanese! Not to worry, please!” Later, when it was time for a music program, he turned on the radio in a manner that seemed very reserved, so as not to offend me. I'm sorry, he must have been going through torture listening to my stories. …

When I played, on the tape recorder, Hikari-san's music you sent me, and listened to “Kowasuhito” [The Destroyer], I felt as if, all of a sudden, my whole frame was filled with an overflowing light, and all around me too!

If I were to put in words how I felt then, I would say, Oh, thank heavens, Hikari-san took to his heart all I narrated to him, and composed this music for me in return. … Hikarisan had not found my long storytelling a torture. It was, after all, like a discussion we had to return together to “The Marvels of the Forest.” That's how I felt! But at that moment, I felt as if a sudden light was overflowing from within me, and later, as I repeatedly listened to the tape, I thought to myself that, although the title of the piece was “The Destroyer,” the music was that of “The Marvels of the Forest,” and that in the beginning “The Destroyer” too was one form of life within “The Marvels of the Forest,” and because he returned to it, there's nothing strange about my thinking this way about the music. And I have come to think that I had always listened to this music when I lived amid “The Marvels of the Forest” long, long ago.

There were crises for my mother as there were for me. With the new generation not accepting the village folklore or myths she told, my mother lived by herself in the forest village in almost total reticence. She was disappointed at the fact that the boy who had been her most careful listener left the village for Tokyo. Her disappointment was further deepened when I dashed her hopes by not returning to the village after I finished my university studies. My becoming a writer, and especially my writing of Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, which portrays the village through the eyes of a boy from “outside,” hurt my mother. She took it as my intentional rebellion against her, which implanted in her a long-enduring wrath toward me.

Her ire was compounded by my introducing into my novels my interpretation of the tales she had related to me ranging from the mythic/folkloric genre to the historical genre that concerns events at the beginning of Japan's early modernization. Were I to speak in my defense, however, I would say that I had wished to create my own world of the novel, or better, a totally new universe of the novel for the myths and folklore I had heard from my grandmother and mother, the implication of which is that I had created a narrative independent of theirs. It is also a critical narrative, confronting their narrative from “outside,” just as in Nip the Buds, where the perspective is that of a youth who comes to the village from the outside and, in the end, escapes from it.

At times I experimented with making a parody of the entire village history my grandmother and mother related to me, and also of what is recorded as village history from the time of Japan's early modernization. Expressly, I made a piercing parody of the role my father played during this period of Japanese history. I criticized my father's mode of thought as one founded upon an ultranationalist ideology incompatible with the peripheral nature of the village. I wrote a number of novels that revolve around this critical plot line, the first of which was my 1971 novella The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears.

I thought that a parody of my father, extending to the mythical ideology of the absolute emperor, would complement, from a negative angle, the myths and folklore of the people on the periphery as told by my grandmother and my mother. I also wanted to shed light upon what was lacking in my grandmother's and mother's tales by contrasting the mythic/folkloric imagination of Dante and Yeats with that of my forest village. The conflict between my mother as a reader of my novels and me peaked with the release of my Contemporary Games in 1979. My younger sister told me at that time about my mother's lamenting that she had chosen the worst person of all to whom to tell the myths and folklore of the region.

On the other hand, I thought I faced a crisis too. With both my life in Tokyo and my literature centering on my handicapped son, I felt I was completely estranged from both the original form of the topographic structure of the Shikoku forest I had shaped when I was a child, and from the imaginative power rooted therein.

However, it was my handicapped son, who grew up with his limited mental faculty intact—who grew by tilling his limited soil, as it were, and by deepening it always—who acted as the mediator, not only between my mother and me but also between me and the imaginative universe of the village tales my mother represented. In structural terms, my mother and I had stood in conflict as two contradictory clauses, each of which was transformed in various ways. For me, every transformation I went through took the form of a novel. I presume that, for my mother, transformations critical of me took place in her reticent self with each novel I produced. My son had reunited us, however, with him assuming the mediator role, helping us transcend our conflicting views. And it was his music that played a vital role.

The scene toward the end of M/T and the Marvels of the Forest which I quoted at length a while ago describes the role he played. The M in M/T stands for “Matriarch” and the T for “Trickster.” My mother made it a daily routine to listen to Hikari's CDs in the same place in the village, which time had not changed. When she passed away, I finally arrived at the clear realization that I had been a trickster who, try as he might to escape from the mythic universe of his matriarch, had repeatedly been called back to it.

It was again through my sister, who had looked after my mother until her death, that I was informed of her final words of reconciliation with me. My mother said that the stories I wrote concerning the mythic/folkloric universe of the region were all true—to the smallest details—and that the best thing which could have been done by me, who had left the village for the “outside” world, was to express in music, through a handicapped child, that which is fundamental to all that is embodied in the mythic/folkloric universe of the region. This music, she said, was the music that kept ringing out in the past and will continue to ring out in the future in the topographic structure of the region. I hear it ringing in my heart now.