[In the following essay, Wilson discusses Ōe's preoccupation with sexual “submission and liberation” in Our Times, noting that most Japanese critics responded negatively to the work's avant-garde subject matter.]

In 1934 Henry Miller wrote Tropic of Cancer, which became available to the American public for the first time in 1960. He wrote Sexus in 1949, but it was not published in the United States until 1965. Norman Mailer's The Deer Park appeared in 1955, “The Time of Her Time” in 1959, by which time both American novelists were already causes célèbres in Japan. An avid reader of both writers' work, Ōe published in July 1959 Our Times (Warera no jidai), his best-known sexually “repulsive” work, which annoyed almost all Japanese critics. It is no exaggeration to say that, without the controversial works of the two avant-garde American writers, the unfavorable reviews of Our Times might have driven Ōe to total despair. He was acutely aware that the “assessment of the sexual in Japanese literature is the lowest, the worst, in comparison to any other subject matter under the sun.”¹ His determination to employ the sexual as the most vital methodology never diminished in the “quagmire of bad reviews.” A foreign scholar of Japanese literature who was well known for her quips once said to him: “You look up words in a physiological dictionary instead of a language dictionary when you write novels, don't you?” He replied humorously, “That's correct. And I write with my genitals instead of a fountain pen!”²

Prior to the composition of the series of short stories that culminates in Our Times, Ōe admitted that he was a “writer for so-called country lads.” He was resolved to break free from that label and establish himself as an “antipastoral, realistic writer.”³ To achieve this goal, he looked to the avant-garde literature of the twentieth century, whose “daring decision” is to “incorporate into the novel an unreal (hontōrashiku nai) abnormality, which, it has been said, exists only in the real world, and has no business in the fictional world.”⁴

With this declaration, Ōe immediately preoccupied himself with the paradox of Japan's surrender and postwar period, which means both submission and liberation at the same time. “When the nation lost a war,” he once wrote about himself in the third person, “one patriotic boy in a village found that he had to cope with a gigantic seed of submission. At the same time he also began his apprenticeship, living through the postwar period with a gigantic seed of liberation and renewal.”⁵ What the little boy faced was the state of ambivalence: “like a watercolor … on which you laminate different colors before each dries up, a sense of submission, liberation, and renewal, running over and interfering with each other subtly and ambiguously, coexisting and creating a special coloration.”⁶ How should one outgrow (ikino-biru) this sense of submission without being crushed by its image, without running away from it? One must “go back to the very fundamental roots of a consciousness of submission, or the human roots of a consciousness equipped with flesh and bones, lymphatic fluids, a stomach and intestinal fluids, and genitals.”⁷

The choice of the sexual with its “unflagging, destructive, and shocking power” as subject also derives from his determination to surpass the postwar generation. When a Japanese literary historian talks about “postwar literature,” he assumes the following four points as characteristic features of its definition: 1) it refers to those works produced during the period 1945-1952; 2) it has wedded the sexual/political with literature; 3) it has strong overtones of the existentialist worldview; 4) it signals a break with the “I-novel” tradition.⁸ Ōe's envy of the postwar generation was twofold: he was too young to become a postwar writer, and too young to be the contemporary reader of that generation.⁹ However, he quickly realized that postwar writers had not exhausted sex and politics as new literary ingredients: “I eventually began to muster enough courage and believed that I also had the freedom to write about politics and sex, that I was free to do so.”¹⁰ The legitimization of politics/sex as a novelistic methodology, the existential outlook, and the renunciation of the confessional “I-novel” dominate the literary universe of Ōe's narratives written between 1958 and 1961.

In a series of works that focus on the theme of Occupied Japan, Ōe relies on the metaphor of an unemployed young man under the sway of a maternal prostitute who caters only to foreigners. The sexual image is deeply bound up with the political one because the young man as a “sexual being” is unable to commit himself to the making of history, to altering the world. He is, the protagonist in Our Times declares, “in a state of ‘moratorium’ awaiting the moment of execution in solitary confinement” (182).¹¹ He has neither the power to become a “political being” nor the courage to commit suicide. This is the “adversity and the plight of the stagnating Japanese youths” that Ōe relentlessly pursues, to the dismay of many critics. His young man is an antihero who seems to deny the benefit of democracy and freedom given to the Japanese people. Ōe explains himself in the afterword in a collection of “postwar” stories, entitled Leap before You Look: “My intention was to let a theme unfold through these stories. … The theme that is repeated throughout them is the [tripartite] relationship of a foreigner as the big power [Z], a Japanese who is more or less placed in a humiliating position [X], and, sandwiched between the two, the third party [Y] (sometimes a prostitute who caters only to foreigners or an interpreter). To tie all these stories together, I adhered consistently to the sexual image, or the image imbued with sexuality, a choice that is strongly linked with the main theme. Consequently I am prepared to accept the criticism that I have exaggerated the dark, woeful side of sexuality inherent in the tripartite relationship of the subjugator, the subjugated, and the intermediary.”¹²

Ōe starts this exploration of the tripartite relationship with “Sheep” (“Ningen no hitsuji,” February 1958), the model for all the other XYZ stories, which I call “tales of a gigolo,” meaning a man supported by a prostitute. Although the young protagonist, a college student, has no sexual relationship with a prostitute, he becomes involved with one by circumstance. Two humiliating incidents constitute the story: the young man, on the way home from tutoring French, rides on a bus where a prostitute and American soldiers, all of them drunk, force him and several other male riders to act like “sheep,” bending over with their buttocks exposed. The “subjugators” abruptly get off the bus, but the young man is further humiliated by one of his own people, a schoolteacher, who takes him to the police and exposes the “sheep” incident.

As the story opens, the young man is in no mood to experience a disequilibrium of any kind: “I was exhausted and sleepy and couldn't stand up straight” (141/167).¹³ All he wants to do is go home and lie down. At this point he comes into physical contact with two of the principal characters of the story. First, his foot gets “caught in the hem of a raincoat that trailed on the floor” (141/167). It belongs to the teacher whom he must confront later. Second, the young man is hemmed in by the prostitute and a young G.I.: “The woman pressed her flabby body against mine and screamed in Japanese” (142/167). Yelling that she wants to go to bed with the young Japanese, it is the woman who incites the young soldier to humiliate the narrator and other Japanese males.

Whatever befalls the young college student happens accidentally. Under normal circumstances he would have been spared the degrading experience. He has not asked for it, and most people would have let him go. Unable to foresee the approaching danger, he says to himself: “He [the soldier] is only playing a joke on me. I don't know what I am to do, I thought … at least I am in no danger. All I have to do is stand like this. He will eventually let me go” (144/169). However, the accidental combination of his extreme exhaustion and the drunkenness of the prostitute and the G.I.s makes the tragicomic complications inescapable.

Apart from this cause, the absolute condition that governs the entire “Leap before You Look” stories is Occupied Japan. When the teacher reports at the police box, a young officer says: “Wait a minute. I'm not sure how to handle this by myself,” and he adds, “I want to be very careful how I deal with problems connected with the camp” (151/173). A middle-aged policeman who takes over also expresses his colleague's anxiety: “We must deal with cases like this very carefully, otherwise we'll run into complications” (152/174). They do not even bother to suppress “a lewd laugh,” however, when the teacher gives the details.

We can't get involved in such a confusing case as this—where the victim himself hasn't said a word. And don't expect the papers to take it up either, said the middle-aged policeman. We're not dealing with a murder or an injury. They've slapped his bare bottom. They've sung. The young policeman quickly averted his face and smothered a laugh. …

Still looking down, I tried to slip out of the police box, but the teacher maneuvered himself to block my move and, with feet firmly planted, had cut off my retreat.

Come on, please, he said in an earnest voice as if pleading with me. One of you's got to sacrifice himself for that incident. You may want to keep quiet and forget about it, but take the plunge and carry out the role. Be the sacrificial lamb.

(153/175)

In “Sheep” Ōe describes the relationship of XYZ that forces X (a young man) to play “sheep” twice. X is humiliated by both parties, Y (the prostitute, schoolteacher, policemen) and Z (the American soldiers as the big power). I shall now take up four narratives in which Ōe specifically experiments with variations of the XYZ relationship first introduced in “Sheep.”

In “Leap before You Look” (“Miru mae ni tobe,” June 1958), a twenty-year-old college student tells the story of his life with a thirty-five-year-old prostitute, Yoshie, who takes only foreigners as her customers. To follow Ōe's paradigm, the college student is X, the subjugated; Yoshie's “professional” lover, Gabriel, the subjugator, Z; and Yoshie the intermediary, Y.

The story starts with a description of the courtyard surrounded by departmental offices, where the narrator walks across the enclosure, longing for spring. “I began to feel a bitter calm getting hold of both my mind and body. It was not at all unpleasant. It simply meant that I felt a bit less cheery and youthful for a twenty-year-old” (319).¹⁴ He continues, “But that year spring was late.” This sentence implies two things: 1) spring, which gives abundant sunlight, lush leaves and the dazzling sky—the symbol of youth—does not somehow belong to him; 2) he is going to narrate to the reader a series of events that have already happened. As he crosses the courtyard at the end of winter, he sees an object, a faucet. “I realized that I was thirsty. I stopped. I had been thirsty during the entire winter” (319). He tells us that the tap water had been contaminated and the university has issued a warning that it would cause diarrhea. In other words, he knows the danger and ignores the warning.

Thus, the first page of the story already contains the basic information we have to know about the narrator. He is passive and apathetic. He first sees the object, a faucet, probably without any desire for water, because he is not looking for a faucet. He happens to see it. Then he realizes that he is thirsty. Despite the warning, he drinks the contaminated water. He could have waited to get good water somewhere else, but he does not. It is not so much urgency, we are told in his soliloquy, as indifference that drives him. He is indifferent to politics, the search for a lover, or a disease-to-come, and to reality in general. Two episodes are sufficient to illustrate his apathy, which derives from his egocentricity. First, he loathes the activists at the university, so eager to protest the Algerian War. He knows that blood is shed, but petitioning against the war does not interest him. When he has to pass by the activists, he feigns that he does not see them. He pretends that he is “a malnourished kid avoiding a bully.” He refuses to sign the petition and is struck in the face by one of the activists. Even when his nose starts bleeding, he is determined more than ever not to sign the petition.

Secondly, the narrator's passive attitude and self-centered personality is revealed in his conversations with Gabriel:

Suddenly Gabriel said, “You were saying you wanted to fight in Egypt or in Vietnam.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said in quiet intoxication from the booze. “I want to fight. I'm sick and tired of peace. I wish that a war would break out.” …

“I've missed a lot having been born late.” I yawned and stretched my back. …

“So that's why you said you wanted to fight in Egypt or in Vietnam,” Gabriel repeated. “Right?”

“I will fight and sleep in the mud with the Egyptians. …”

“When they will send me this fall to Vietnam as a foreign correspondent, there's a possibility that I may be able to take you with me.”

I felt strangled.

“Do you intend to go?” Gabriel said coldly. He was not drunk.

(325-26)

The title of the story comes from a verse which Gabriel hums after these conversations, “Look if you like, but you will have to leap.” Gabriel preaches to the young college student jeeringly. “For life in general: whatever you do, you leap first before you look. There are two kinds of fellows, one who looks, the other who leaps” (326). Gabriel catches the narrator off guard, and forces him to admit his pretensions.

So far, the equilibrium in the narrator's life has been disrupted twice by his uncalled-for confrontations with Gabriel and the activist. These disequilibriums are soon brought back to the initial equilibrium: the narrator begins to forget about the humiliating experiences, and his life goes back to the former routines “with a bitter calm.” At dawn Yoshie comes home and makes love to the narrator, who is half-asleep: the habitual practice of a two-year cohabitation.

Here, the story is more or less back to the starting point. The narrator is not any wiser or more enlightened after his encounters with Gabriel and the university activist, the two incidents of disequilibrium. The third disequilibrium occurs when the narrator, Yoshie, and Gabriel get drunk at a striptease joint and Gabriel starts humiliating Yoshie by descriptions of his lovemaking with her. Gabriel also reveals his contempt for Japanese: “I was a G.I. in the Korean War. A bunch of us G.I.s once threw a little, dirty Japanese into a cesspool and drowned him. Instead of lynching us, the Japanese crowd just watched us” (330). The narrator takes his revenge on Gabriel by knocking him unconscious while he relieves himself in the dark outside. Time is a great healer for the narrator and Yoshie. They make love day and night and “by the end of summer, we forgot about the incident, an incident a bit comical and cruel.”

Now, the story must start all over again. This time the narrator agrees to tutor a young woman, Yūko, who must study French to take an entrance examination for a music school. Yūko happens to be the fully clothed singer at the striptease joint, whom he once made fun of with Yoshie and Gabriel. The sexual relationship between the narrator and Yūko develops and Yūko's pregnancy—an accident—becomes the key for him to put an end to a life that is “too sterile.” He abandons Yoshie in order to marry Yūko. Yūko learns that she has T.B. and must abort the baby. Abortion shatters the narrator's dream of starting a new life with Yūko. They break up; the narrator and Yoshie run into each other and the story seems to start all over again, except this time he finds himself impotent.

In “A Dark River, Heavy Oars” (“Kurai kawa, omoi kai,” July 1958),¹⁵ a twelve- or thirteen-year-old junior high school boy is left behind alone while the rest of the family goes out. A prostitute lives next door and is kept by a black G.I., named Peterson. The two have a quarrel and Peterson leaves. The prostitute invites the boy to come for dinner and he gets drunk for the first time in his life. They make love. The boy falls in love with the prostitute and decides to marry her the next morning. Back in his room, the boy dozes off while he hears Peterson's return and the love-making of Peterson and the woman. On the following morning she denies knowing the boy. He realizes that he has been used as a plaything. In humiliation he has to go back to his own life, which he hates: studying to pass an entrance examination to a good high school, which in turn promises him entry to a good university with excellent employment possibilities.

The third story in which Ōe repeats the theme of a Japanese under the sway of a prostitute is called “Cheers” (“Kassai,” September 1958).¹⁶ The triangular relationship of XYZ consists, respectively, of a twenty-three-year-old college student, Natsuo, a bisexual prostitute, Yasuko, and a forty-year-old French homosexual, Lucien. The narrator in “Cheers” tells us: 1) Natsuo is not hopeful for anything other than living with Yasuko; 2) he has hopes only for trivial things; 3) he has no intention of seeking a future. The intrusion of Yasuko disrupts the equilibrium of life with Lucien. Without consulting Natsuo, Lucien hires Yasuko as a short-term housekeeper. Natsuo and Yasuko make love and Natsuo realizes that he is no longer afraid of women. He decides to marry her. Lucien interferes and reveals to Natsuo that she is bisexual. Yasuko being the factor of disorientation, when she is removed Natsuo is brought back to the status quo: the humiliation of being loved by a Frenchman who despises Natsuo's fellow countrymen as dirty, yellow-skinned people. “Why am I an exception?” Natsuo feebly asks Lucien.

X, Y, and Z in the first three stories are the constants. Each story does not develop a plot, but unfolds a theme, a variation of a triangular relationship among the constants. In “Leap before You Look,” X and Y lead a more or less contented life together; in “A Dark River, Heavy Oars” it is Y and Z who live together; and in “Cheers,” it is X and Z who have established a basically compatible relationship. These three sets of relationships show the three possible variations of pairs found in XYZ: X-Y, Y-Z, X-Z. How to break up the pairs is the central issue of each story. In “Leap before You Look” the X-Y relationship is violated by the presence of Yūko. The X-Yūko pair takes over the X-Y pair. Marrying the pregnant Yūko becomes X's only hope, i.e., escape, from the status quo. In this case, the constant Z has virtually no direct impact on the X-Y relationship. “A Dark River, Heavy Oars” presents X as an element of disorientation that threatens the Y-Z pair. It is X who wants to escape from the boredom and stagnation by marrying Y. The homosexual relationship of X-Z in “Cheers” becomes strained by the appearance of Y. Heterosexuality is the key to X's freedom. X almost succeeds in escaping the cul-de-sac by marrying Y.

Our Times, the last of the series of stories that explore the image of Occupied Japan, is also Ōe's most ambitious undertaking that employs the sexual as a literary device: “I personally like this novel,” Ōe wrote in an essay “Eccentricity, Abnormality, Danger in Sex,” because “I do not think I will ever write another novel which is filled only with sexual words.”

The fourth variation of the tripartite relationship of XYZ in this “infamous” novel concentrates again on the X-Y pair. This time, however, both Yasuo, X, and Yoriko, Y, seek a way out. Yasuo wants to start a new life by going to France. Yoriko, carrying his baby, sees him as her only escape from prostitution.¹⁷

The first chapter of Our Times describes Yasuo contemplating metaphysics in the act of lovemaking with Yoriko:

To cogitate on metaphysics in the continual rhythmic motion of pleasure, to preoccupy oneself with the function of spirit, this is no vulgar pastime. Slightly comical, but it is definitely stuff for grown-ups. As he soaked his elastic muscles and smooth skin in pleasure, and caressed the soft body, broken out in perspiration, of a middle-aged woman he loved, Minami Yasuo gave himself up to solitary contemplation. Solitary contemplation: but the thinking is impregnated with a sense of despair and self-abhorrence that goes in circles, a sort of desperate feeling. His lover permitted him to meditate during their lovemaking. She was a sensible and mature woman. She had enough experience to know that a young man would not be engrossed in her vagina while in embrace. She did not want it, either. So long as the young man on top of her, by contemplating something other than her body, would prolong the duration of lovemaking, she had nothing to complain about. So she moaned in pleasure.

What one can positively call “hope” does not exist for Japanese youth. Minami Yasuo continued to cogitate with his eyes shut, knitting his eyebrows, and, in order to stabilize the position of his belly slippery from sweat, he propped himself up firmly with his elbows and knees as he extracted loud moans from the soft, hot body underneath him.

(129)

Lovemaking is directly equated with the pitiful conditions into which the postwar generation is thrown. Yasuo is shackled by Yoriko, immobilized by her clinging body. His feelings are ambivalent: “It was not that he disliked to be on her body. It was simply just too hot. The sweat clung to the skin and did not evaporate” (134). Lovemaking is an indirect threat to Yasuo, because he is frightened of Yoriko's pregnancy. He keeps saying to himself that he can find no way out, that he must escape.

A sexual act in Our Times means several different things. First, it is a surrender to the feminine world. To break up with Yoriko is, therefore, a liberation from a vagina, the damp Japanese soil, human relationships, and everything that is feminine. Yasuo feels that he has been “raped for an interminable time.” Secondly, the repetitiousness of the act of sexual intercourse corresponds to the everyday routines in the closed world of the X-Y pair: “What you and I are going to do for the next twenty years,” Yasuo says to himself, “is to shake our butts, breathe heavily, and dump five liters of sperm mixed with filth down into the dark drainage pipe. Sexual intercourse, 365 multiplied by twenty and add five for leap years, which is the number of our copulations. … Excretion, our 7,305 copulations are nothing but acts of elimination” (145-46). Thirdly, lovemaking defines “the sexual being” which looks upon “the political being” with envy and resignation. The X-Y pair insures Yasuo the status of “the sexual being”: “My God, I'm a half-dead young creature, something indecent, flabby and disgusting, kept in a paradise that's cut off from everything tragic” (137).

This sense of entrapment, a cul-de-sac, is shared by the other three characters in Our Times. Parallel to the main plot of the X-Y relationship runs the subplot, a story of three young men who struggle to survive as a jazz band, with a dream to lead the life of vagabonds. The trio consists of Yasuji the clarinetist, Taka the drummer, and Shigeru the pianist, who is Yasuo's younger brother.¹⁸

In the submission of his prize essay to the French embassy, Yasuo sees, or hopes to see, alternatives to the status quo in “solitary confinement.” He wins the essay contest and is awarded a scholarship for three years of study in France. He signs the contract and abandons Yoriko, who begs for a quiet life with him and the baby-to-come. He meets an Arab who persuades him to work for the Front Liberátion Nationale while in France. The French embassy finds this out, and Yasuo chooses not to betray the Arab friend who has offered him a sense of solidarité. In the end Yasuo loses everything—a chance to escape to France, Yoriko, who eventually marries one of her clients, Wilson, and Shigeru, Yasuo's only encumbrance, who chooses to commit suicide.

Yasuo is the Japanese youth who has been born too late for the heroic era. The only thing he can do is not to betray his friendship with the Arab. Our Times ends with his words, which echo the sentiments of the postwar generation: “Suicide, a heroic action, is the very decisive action we can accomplish in total solitude. Suicide is the only way out of stagnation. … We know it, there is nothing in the world to stop us from doing it. But we continue to live, unable to muster enough courage to kill ourselves. We love, hate, make love, join in political activities, dabble in homosexuality, murder, and try to gain fame. … This is our times” (302).

The narrator in “Leap before You Look” concludes that he is too frightened and may never be able to make up his mind to leap. The narrator in “Cheers” tells us of Natsuo: “Politics was beyond his reach. Even reality was no match for him. He was committed to absolutely nothing” (71). In each story, X is told by Y or Z that his attempt to escape is a hopeless one, because it is not a real way out, but reexperiencing the same thing with a different partner. In “Leap before You Look” when the narrator wants to leave Yoshie for Yūko, Yoshie retorts, “You mean your life will cease to be sterile by living with her?” (343). In “Cheers” when Natsuo tells Lucien that he has made love to Yasuko and intends to marry her, Lucien simply laughs at him, “Is that all?” Yoriko confronts Yasuo in Our Times: “All of a sudden, you have something to hope for? Just because you are going to France?” (252).

Throughout Ōe's four stories the protagonist, X, undergoes absolutely no change in terms of psychological development or spiritual growth.¹⁹ In X's world, there is no reward or punishment, no trial to go through, no transgression to commit. Ōe's stories contain a potential plot, an event that could have been developed into a plot. Each protagonist of the four stories fails to make a new start, whether it is to “leap,” to “gamble,” or to “go abroad.” The ending is inconclusive and X's philosophy ambivalent. How the X-Y pair comes to establish a relationship, or what will happen to X at the end of the story, is of little importance to Ōe.

Although Ōe has chosen in his pre-1964 works to “rewrite” four times the theme of Occupied Japan, he has not developed the theme, but has been content to describe it in variations. He has chosen only to portray the apathy, the stagnation, and the cul-de-sac of the postwar generation. As a young writer, Ōe's main concern is to identify with the problems of postwar Japanese youth, not to develop a synthesis.

Notes

1. “Our Times and Myself” (“Warera no jidai to boku jishin”), in The Solemn Tightrope Walking (Genshuku na tsunawatari) (Bungei Shunjū, 1965), p. 244. In 1956, Tanizaki Junichiro—the only other Japanese writer at this time to explore sexuality with fervor—wrote, at the age of seventy-three, his famous voyeuristic novel The Key (Kagi). And in this voyeurism lies the fundamental difference between Tanizaki's treatment of the sexual and Ōe's. The aged author reveled in a dark eroticism; the young novelist crusaded to demystify sex.

2. “Eccentricity, Abnormality, and Danger in Sex” (“Sei no kikaisa to ijō to kiken”), Tightrope Walking, p. 239.

3. “Our Times and Myself,” p. 244.

4. “Sex in the Twentieth-Century Novel” (“Nijusseiki shōsetsu no sei”), Tightrope Walking, p. 261.

5. “Does Literature Have to Really Be Chosen?” (“Hontō ni bungaku ga erabareneba naranai ka?”), OKZ, vol. 1, series I, p. 368.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., p. 373.

8. Honda Shūgo, A Narrative: The History of Postwar Literature (Monogatari—sengo bungakushi) (Shinchōsha, 1966), pp. 751-90. There is a rather confused controversy over the existence and content of postwar literature. Some literary critics totally deny its significance by saying that postwar literature was actually “literature under the Occupation” (senryōka no bungaku) and contributed nothing new. See ibid. pp. 109-18. An article by another such critic, Etō Jun, was the cause of Honda's furious rebuttal concerning the validity of postwar literature: Etō calls postwar literature an “abortive flower” (ada bana) that bloomed under the political rule of the Occupation, whereas Honda gives full credit to the efforts made by postwar writers to produce something new. Etō's article appears in Asahi Shimbun, evening edition, August 28 and 29, 1978, and Honda's response in September 2 and 3, 1978. Ōe also refutes Etō's argument in Reading a Method (Hōhō o yomu) (Kōdansha, 1980), pp. 7-30.

9. “How Did I Accept Postwar Literature?” (“Sengobungaku o dō uketometa ka”), Tightrope Walking, p. 186.

10. Ibid.

11. All references to Our Times are from OKZ, vol. 2, series I.

12. Supplement no. 3 to OKZ, vol. 2, series I, p. 16.

13. All references to “Sheep” are from OKZ, vol. 1, series I. Translated by Frank T. Motofuji, Japan Quarterly 17, 2 (1970): 167-77. I have slightly altered his translation.

14. All references to “Leap before You Look” are from OKZ, vol. 1, series I. The title of the story comes from W. H. Auden's poem by the same title. The first stanza goes: “The sense of danger must not disappear: / The way is certainly both short and steep, / However gradual it looks from here; / Look if you like, but you will have to leap.” Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957 (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), p. 200.

15. The story appears in OKZ, vol. 2, series I, pp. 5-22.

16. The story appears in OKZ, vol. 2, series I, pp. 51-80.

17. Structurally, Our Times is a mixture of NOW and THEN, what is occurring now and remembrances, alternating one chapter of the X-Y story with that of the three young men in and out of trouble.

18. Toward the end of the story we realize the reason for the inclusion of the trio's story in Our Times: 1) thematically, the obsessive yearning for the purchase of a large truck by the trio, the desire for mobility, is a reflection of the closed world of the postwar generation represented by Yasuo; 2) in terms of plot, the erosion of their comradeship and Yasuo's subsequent rescue efforts for Shigeru lead to the disclosure of the Yasuo-Arab alliance, and ultimately to the dissolution of Yasuo's only way out, the escape to France.

19. X becomes the hero who is not given any prohibition to violate, or a forbidden boundary which he must cross in the “closed vs. open” opposition that is an essential feature of the spatial structure of a story. According to Lotman's theory, Ōe's stories are “plotless,” because “the movement of the plot, the event, is the crossing of that forbidden border which the plotless structure establishes.” In terms of “artistic space,” when the hero merely moves within the space assigned to him it cannot be called an event. An event becomes a plot only when the hero crosses “the basic topological border in the plot's spatial structure.” Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. Ronald Vroon, Michigan Slavic Contributions, No. 7 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1977), p. 238. The emphasis is Lotman's.