SOURCE: Wilson, Michiko Niikuni. “Kenzaburo Ōe: An Imaginative Anarchist with a Heart.” Georgia Review 49, no. 1 (spring 1993): 344-50.

[In the following essay, Wilson considers the major themes in Ōe's short stories and novels, primarily focusing on Ōe's works which revolve around father-son relationships.]

If there is one poem that captivated Ōe's imagination early in his career, it is “The Little Boy Lost” by William Blake. The poem projects the powerful image of a boy in quest of dialogue with his father, who has abandoned his son. The long, arduous soul-searching journey of Ōe, the Blakean “little boy lost,” began in a village in a virgin forest of Shikoku Island. This tiny village, which has become for Ōe the equivalent of García Márquez's fictional Macondo, is where the writer returns again and again to reaffirm the mythological world of what he calls the “village = nation = minicosmos.” Through the creation of the myth and history of this tiny nation which dares to assert its independence from Japan, the “little boy lost” encounters the “little boy found,” Ōe's central character of many different names: The Idiot Son, Eeyore, Mori, Jin, and Hikari.

Ōe's real son, the thirty-one-year-old Hikari (whose name means “light”), accompanied his father to the Nobel Prize award ceremony in the belief that he, not his father, was to receive the prize. In a key sense, Hikari was right. Ōe's literature is unthinkable without Hikari. Ōe's passionate desire to engage the reader in a dialogue—and to involve the reader actively in the process of deciphering multilayered texts that resonate with diverse voices—is rooted in the everyday life he leads with Hikari, the son who did not utter a word (ningen no kotoba) until he was six. The father/writer, whose primary medium of communication would otherwise be the “one-dimensional” language of writing, insists on speaking with a son to whom human speech is no more significant than the songs of a wild bird. Yet out of this joust with a windmill comes a literature sparkling with an innocently intuitive grasp of reality, seething with anger against injustice, bubbling over with tenderness for humanity, and crackling with cosmic laughter—all served up à la François Rabelais.

Here is a writer—the most democratic, the most political, and the most scholarly in Japan—whose insistent voice for the sake of human decency and sanity symbolizes not only Japan's conscience but also the world's. Ōe has great respect for the goodness of the earth: its trees, its whales, its birds. As a boy he would choose to sleep in a tree to have a good night's rest. Village oral tradition told him that, when a person died in the valley, his or her soul would first climb up into the sky and then settle in the root of a tree, awaiting resurrection in the future. And Hikari is the confirmation of the existence of Blake's “little boy found,” whose soul communes with the trees and wild birds. Hikari's first words, “That's a water rail (kuina desu),” were uttered in the midst of a forest while the father carried the boy on his shoulders. Up to that time, the only sound to which Hikari had responded had been the constantly repeated playing of records of wild bird songs. For the first six years of his life no other sound had really reached him.

Ōe's works of the “idiot son” cycle, written between 1964 and 1976, consistently center on the image of Hikari and himself. The first two works, “Agwhee the Sky Monster” and A Personal Matter, play off each other, one posing the question “Should I kill the monster baby?” and the other asking “Or should I live with the monster?” A Personal Matter is a story of the young father's rite of passage, describing first his wishful thinking that somehow he could be freed from the horrible situation of living with a being in a vegetable state, then his decision to accept the challenge. In “Father, Where are You Going?” and “Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness,” Ōe continues his obsessive soul-searching via the life of a father who mocks his idiot son (named Eeyore in “Teach Us”), only to be mocked in turn by his own cynicism and anxiety.

Ten years into his life with Hikari, groping his way through his own inner darkness, trying to tune into his son's psyche, Ōe found himself continually guided by the ray of light that seemed to emanate from the child. This period in Ōe's writing immediately preceded the one in which he shifted to a comprehensive re-creation of the myth and history of the “village = nation = minicosmos.” He began to feel that the rebirth of the mythological world of the tiny village must be accompanied by the death and destruction of the “little boy lost.”

The fifth story in the idiot-son cycle of narratives, The Waters Have Come in unto My Soul, is an apocalyptic tale of the end of the world as we know it. Ōe chose a symbolic name for the father—Isana Ōki (Mr. Brave-Fish Big-Tree)—and paired him with a son, Jin (possibly the Arabic word Djinn, a spirit which can assume various forms, or perhaps a facetious reference in Japanese to identifying the nationality of a person—as in Nihon-jin, “a Japanese,” or Amerika-jin, “an American”—except that in this case Jin is unattached to any nationality). In this novel the father and son, who had previously appeared as an inseparable duo, must go different ways to save the earth, the trees, the whales, and humankind from destruction. The old must die before the new can be initiated; the father sacrifices his life for the young son in the hope that the boy who talks with birds might serve as a prophet to restore humanity's conscience.

In The Waters we see a symbolic shift from the father (as the image of protector and nurturer) to the son, a shift already begun in the earlier “Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness.” The image of the helpless hospitalized infant—at the mercy of adults, particularly his own father—prompted Ōe to consider the boy as already dead. As Ōe stood in the city of Hiroshima at a 1963 ceremony commemorating the death of the atomic-bomb victims, he joined the crowd at night to float paper lanterns (symbols of the souls of the victims) on the river. He released two: one for himself, the other for Hikari. He later realized that in his confused state of mind he had already pronounced himself and his son dead. “Do not despair, yet do not build up too much hope” was the motto of those who took care of the atomic-bomb patients at the hospital.

Ōe repented abandoning his son to the dead. In response to Yukio Mishima's criticism of the happy ending of A Personal Matter, Ōe has said in a recent interview: “It is very easy to write about the dark side of humanity, about the antisocial aspects of human life (as Mishima has said I should). But I felt I had to create a literature that was directed towards light and hope. My attitude towards life in A Personal Matter was still very superficial. My understanding of the significance of Hikari was also very shallow. I decided to rewrite the story. I have been rewriting it ever since.”

Repetition is a very important narrative device for Ōe. Each time he repeats incidents, images, and dialogues, or reintroduces characters, the newer work contains some element that had hitherto been missing, some understanding that brought the writer one step closer to what that event/image/dialogue meant for him—what he meant to say but was not quite aware of. Ōe calls himself a “late bloomer” (okute) who seems to grasp the real significance of what he has written only long after it is finished. This then becomes the impetus for him to rewrite the significant elements of the completed work in his next project.

It is less important for Ōe that a certain event has occurred in his life than it is for him to experience how that event penetrates through the very pores and veins of Ōe the writer who witnesses or undergoes it. Once filtered through his flesh and spirit, such a moment carries with it a different interpretation as well as its own intrinsic value. Added to this interpretive dimension is the creation of an emotional, intellectual, and historical time and space which grow and expand, subtly influencing the original impact of the event. What pours out of Ōe in each new work is a deeper and clearer understanding of what he has learned from the creative process. This is why his works resonate with and relate to each other, moving in an upward spiral toward what he calls “the great day” (the title of the last volume of his new trilogy, The Flaming Green Tree).

Reexamination and self-analysis also mark The Pinch Runner Memorandum, the sixth and apparently last rewriting of the idiot-son cycle. In this attempt to link the novelistic to everyday reality, Ōe layers different levels of reality onto the narrative structure. The first level operates within the reality of Ōe the writer, the father of an impaired son, Hikari. Parallel to this level is the world of Mori (meaning “death” in Latin and “forest” in Japanese), and his father called Mori-father, whom Ōe meets at a special school for the handicapped children. Mori-father tells a story of his own: Ōe the ghostwriter writes it down. The words of the raconteur sometimes resonate and sometimes clash with the scribe's voice, yet never in a disruptive way. Overarching these two strata of reality is Mori's voiceless voice transmitted to his father through the conduit of their clasped hands. The three narrative movements may remind us of a piece by Mozart or Beethoven, each instrument competing and harmonizing with the other in an extraordinary counterpoint. (This characteristic multivocal, multifaceted narrative structure shares similarities with Hikari's own creative process in musical composition. He is now a very successful composer of neoclassical music and has already recorded two CD's.)

In The Pinch Runner Memorandum, Ōe adopts the world of the fantastic by switching the identities of the father and the son. Mori-father loses twenty years while Mori gains twenty. Through this miraculous transformation, Mori becomes independent of his father for the first time, and in his “switched-over” twenty-eight-year-old body turns things around for Mori-father. Massive and majestic like an ancient tree, Mori protects and nurtures the anxious eighteen-year-old Mori-father, who finally musters enough courage to fight the underworld kingpin, the “Big Shot A,” side by side with Mori. In a climactic scene where Ōe incorporates a system of images involved in carnivalization and grotesque realism, Mori and Mori-father join a gang of clowns assembled to exorcise an evil spirit from the kingpin, sometimes called “The Patron,” who is dying of cancer. Mori dresses up as a decrepit old man, symbolically escalating his switchover by one hundred years. In contrast, Mori-father is outfitted in a one-piece kangaroo baby costume. With this image of a kangaroo baby, Ōe is rewriting his earlier story “Agwhee the Sky Monster,” in which an unnamed infant ghost haunts the half-crazed father in the form of a Harvey-like rabbit.

What, then, does Mori represent in the mythological world of Ōe? Throughout The Pinch Runner Memorandum the symbolic presence of Mori as a prophet and savior, and as the cosmic will of humankind, demonstrates what Ōe wishes to see: the spirit of communitas, the communion of equal individuals in a humanistic collectivity. He imagines an alternative society that lies beneath the real society, connected by a passage through which individuals can freely go out into the world, a subterranean society where birth, death, and resurrection can occur in a continuous cycle. The power of the weak, the power of marginals, the power of the trickster, the power that counters the emperor-centered, rice-field-based, male-dominated, institutionalized Japan—these are the intellectual bases for Ōe's myth and history of the village = nation = minicosmos.

The Game of Contemporaneity, which Ōe wrote three years after The Pinch Runner Memorandum, articulates his sociopolitical and cultural beliefs in their most passionate and comprehensive form. This story, Ōe's re-creation of a myth based upon local legends, also allows him to further hone his skill as a raconteur and shows what an unpredictably humorous writer he is. If The Pinch Runner Memorandum can be seen as a piano concerto, The Game of Contemporaneity stands as a full-length symphony. Centering his narrative on the trickster figure, The One Who Destroys (kowasu hito), Ōe recounts the rise and fall of a five-hundred-year-old giant, who is also the central strategist of a group of dissident warriors expelled by the emperor to the margins (shūen), deep into the forest, where they became demons. One of the crowning moments for the egalitarian mastermind comes when he leads the village = nation = minicosmos in the Fifty-Day War, a revolt against the Great Japanese Imperial Army.

Cosmic laughter, black humor, satire, and grotesque realism permeate the text. In a battle of wits in which the enemy commander “No-Name Captain” always loses ground before the enormously resourceful guerrilla army, the world's most democratic mobile military organization, Ōe subtly satirizes both World War II and the Vietnam War. As long as the enemy persists in initiating hand-to-hand combat, the rebel army matches them with the most unexpected humane tactics. When “No-Name Captain” threatens to destroy the entire virgin forest, however, environmentalism takes precedence over all the sociopolitical and cultural ideologies the villagers harbor in their desire to be independent of Japan. To save the forest, the imaginative anarchists lay down their arms and accept the terms of unconditional surrender to the Great Japanese Imperial Army. Though never recorded in the official version of Japanese history, the details are handed down by the village priest in the story as part of the oral tradition, which his son the scribe duly writes down.

This 1979 novel is a testimony to Kenzaburo Ōe's consistency in being ambiguously Japanese. The same writer/scholar one day in October 1994 joyfully agreed to accept the world's most prestigious literary award, but then—on the following day—chose to decline Japan's highest honor, the Imperial Order of Culture, without a moment's hesitation. The Japanese are less experienced than Americans in dealing with such bold dissent, and a dissident in their country is regarded as distinctly less Japanese. Was Ōe being anti-Japanese or simply anarchistic?

To those around Ōe, most of whom consider themselves dutiful middle-class citizens, his action is an enigma beyond their emotional and intellectual grasp—not because they find him particularly anti-Japanese (after all, their democracy allows individual choice) but because they almost never question the official version of history and tradition. This truly disturbs Ōe. Japanese postwar democracy never really had a chance to deal with the vestiges of the prewar Japanese cultural construct, one of which was/is the Imperial Order of Culture. Ōe's refusal of that award while accepting the Nobel Prize symbolizes everything he has insisted on in his work for the last thirty-seven years. Indeed, in his post-Nobel interview with Kevin Rafferty, he gave himself the very creative label of “an imaginative anarchist” to describe the nature of his tricksterlike role as a writer.

Ōe's delight in becoming a Nobel laureate is animated by the fact that the decision came from Swedish citizens, not their government. The prize has validated his own position at the margins as a preserver of both the oral tradition and the unofficial version of his people's history. Further, the prize has marked the recognition of diverse voices in Japan, voices of dissent and protest, even as it also placed Ōe's work unequivocally within the corpus of world literature.

He accepted the prize, he said, not really for himself but as the representative of a group of postwar writers—Masuji Ibuse, Shōhei Ōoka, and Kōbo Abe—any one of whom might have won the Nobel Prize if he were still alive. Equally important for Ōe is the fact that he accepted the prize for Asia as well. He has long been a passionate advocate for Asian literature in general, calling attention to the plight of such dissidents as Korean poet Kim Chi Ha, whose prophetic voice has provoked violence from his own countrymen. Ōe thus departs from one traditional view of Japanese literature as a unique, isolated, and exotic entity which has not cast off, but has in fact perpetuated, a deep-rooted prejudice among Japanese against the neighboring Asian nations.

As if to confirm his own ambiguous position of being Japanese yet nurtured in world literature (Yeats, Rabelais, Sartre, Faulkner, Twain, Blake, Bakhtin, Dante, and Spinoza, to name but a few), Ōe turned to one of W. B. Yeats's poems, “Vacillation,” for the title of the second book of his in-progress trilogy, The Flaming Green Tree. The image of a tree, half of it “glittering flame” and the other half “all green,” symbolizes Ōe's mythological world with its two mutually exclusive and opposing forces (the “death” and “forest/rebirth” of Mori's name) caught in an ambiguous betwixt-and-between state. Here Ōe poses his ultimate question: Can a human soul really be saved? Ōe has always been an intuitive/spiritual writer, but the trilogy is the most spiritual of all his works. He has recently published the first and second volumes, Until the Savior Is Whacked on the Head, and Vacillation, and is in the process of revising the first draft of To the Great Day—whose last word, he tells us, is “Rejoice.”

In The Flaming Green Tree Ōe recycles many of the names of characters that appeared in his earlier works; sometimes the same character appears but often the same name is used with a different person. For example, the obese woman Jin and Ghee the Hermit from The Football Game of the First Year of Manen reappear as a retarded boy and a savior. Saa-chan, the hearing-impaired girl in The Pinch Runner Memorandum, is transformed into the scribe for the entire trilogy. The savior, whom Ōbaa (Great Grandma) of the village in the valley begins to call Big Brother Ghee, is actually Takashi—the name Ōe used for the younger brother of the protagonist in The Football Game, a tale of two peasant uprisings that took place in the 1860's in the valley (as reconstructed by Takashi one hundred years later). Also, Big Brother Ghee reappears as a central figure in To the Nostalgic Year: A Letter.

The cumulative effect upon the reader of the recycled names and events is a kind of nostalgia (natsukashisa). It is as if we relive every episode, every experience we have encountered previously, but with a fresh perspective, with a new state of mind, with a new knowledge of reality, the world, and the universe. Such a return home, to one's birthplace, has been inseparable from the healing process of Ōe's soul, and it has evolved in tandem with the personal life of Hikari, who has found his independence and his sense of self in music and composition. The trilogy is both a requiem for the “little boy lost” and a celebration of Hikari's independence. Ōe has recently said, “As I finish the trilogy, I feel my son's presence receding further and further away from me. That is one of the reasons I've decided this would be my last novel.” The young father who was resolved to save the helpless infant has gradually grown into the realization that it was he who needed his son for salvation. Ōe has now let him go and thus has freed his own soul.