SOURCE: Tachibana, Reiko. “Structures of Power: Ōe Kenzaburō's ‘Shiiku’ (‘Prize Stock’).” World Literature Today 76, no. 2 (spring 2002): 37-48.

[In the following essay, Tachibana analyzes thematic aspects of Ōe's “Prize Stock,” perceiving the story to be a study of power in a Japanese village community.]

The literary talents of Ōe Kenzaburō, winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature, were recognized in Japan in 1958, when his short story “Shiiku” (Eng. “The Catch” or “Prize Stock”)¹ won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize.² Ōe, age twenty-three, was then a student at Tokyo University. Drawing in part on childhood memories—memories he acknowledges were preserved as “not factual but mental” (Kaku no taika to “ningen” no koe, 100)—“Shiiku” is set in a remote village in a valley, rather like Ōe's hometown on the island of Shikoku, and its main character is a boy who has a younger brother, as Ōe did.³

As a child, Ōe later explained, he had been taught that people from outside his little village were what Alfred Kurella calls “aliéné” (crazy or mad).⁴ Indeed, there had been few such strangers among the village populace. The quiet homogeneity of the village, however, started to change during the war, when unwelcome evacuees from the cities moved in. Under those circumstances, Ōe remembered—correctly or incorrectly—that a teacher at school had told his class about an enemy plane that had crashed on the southernmost main island of Japan. The teacher told the children that two soldiers were captured, one a white man who was then killed with bamboo spears, the other a black man who became a prisoner of war (Ōe, 1979, 220). Fear and hatred toward the enemy soldier were aroused in the young Ōe's mind upon hearing about the incident, and he imagined the POW appearing in his own secluded community as an aliéné—a mad person, a demon.

Incorporating this memory of childhood hostility toward an outsider, Ōe's “Shiiku” is a shocking and violent wartime tale in which a black American airman, whose plane has crashed over Japan, is captured and kept in a cellar by the villagers who find him. The prisoner and several of the local children share moments of friendship, but in a sudden and ugly turn of events the captive seizes one of the youngsters as a hostage and locks himself and the boy in the cellar. Villagers break into the cellar, and the captive uses his hostage as a shield. When the child's father smashes the captive's brain with a hatchet, the boy is simultaneously maimed.

Although it was “Shiiku” that brought Ōe fame, and he is now widely read in the West, oddly enough there has been relatively little critical discussion of this story either in Japan or in the United States. This may be because the racial elements in “Shiiku,” which seem to stand at the forefront of the narrative, would not constitute a typical focus of interest for Japanese critics, whereas the same racial elements may be problematic for Western critics, since the child narrator's depiction of the black airman fits some of the stereotypes that many readers, particularly in the States, rightly find uncomfortable. The captive soldier is associated with animal and sexual imagery, he is called a “black beast” (156), and in one scene he attempts to copulate with a goat.⁵

In Japan, an exception to this general silence about the story's racial elements is a book chapter by Shibata Shoji, which discusses Ōe's “positive” use of the black soldier to move the narrative to a mythic level (29), arguing that the tale's presentation of a mythological world is achieved in part through the attempt at “human-animal intercourse between the soldier and a female goat” (34).⁶ Aside from Shibata's analysis, Japanese critics such as Matsubara Shin'ichi, insofar as they discuss this story at all, have mainly praised Ōe's ability to create an imaginative world (Gunzō, 1995, 107), focusing on his vivid description of the pastoral landscape in which the group of children and the soldier ostensibly and briefly live in harmony with nature. Watanabe Hiroshi points out the elements of death and confinement that intrude into this world (16), while Matsubara studies its development of the relationship between victim and victimizer (Gunzō, 1995, 110).⁷ Only two substantial commentaries on this story seem to have been published in the USA. Michiko Wilson briefly discusses “Shiiku” in terms of the Arcadian and primordial world of the child/infant motif;⁸ Susan Napier, on the other hand, proposes in more detail that Ōe's mythological world exists on two levels, that the story creates a “mythic and romantic” world through the eyes of a young boy even as, “through the narrative of his loss of innocence, it sends out an unambiguous ideological message that war is evil” (Escape, 27).

Although the pastoral and mythic levels of “Shiiku” are surely significant, I would argue here that the focus of the story is a study of power and the paths through which it circulates, and that its handling of the issue of race can be understood in this context. As Foucault explains in his History of Sexuality, power must be understood “as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate” (92). That is, power is exercised through a series of “innumerable points, in their interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations” (92-93). Despite its fantastic and symbolic elements, Ōe's story is basically a realistic depiction of the dispersion of power in a Japanese village community. Its inherent relationships of hierarchy are exacerbated by the presence of the black soldier, who, as a prisoner of war, puts nearly all of the villagers' power differentials into play.

THE BLACKNESS OF THE PRISONER.

Ōe's use of the black airman is significant for several reasons.⁹ Historically, if the captive is to be understood as an airman in the usual sense of someone trained as a pilot, navigator, or other member of a plane's crew, then the incident as depicted in the tale could not have taken place, for during World War II, as far as I have been able to determine, no African American airmen flew over Japan. There were indeed black flyers in the U.S. forces—they constituted the famous squadron known as the Tuskegee Airmen—but they fought only in Europe and were not sent to the Pacific Theater.¹⁰ Nevertheless, as mentioned, Ōe has reported that his teacher at school told the class about an enemy plane crash in which a black man became a POW.¹¹ The schoolteacher's choice in making the surviving airman black, if indeed it was his choice, may represent either a deliberate decision, or a confusion of memory, or the result of erroneous information supplied by others, or perhaps a combination of several factors, including the possibility that an African American was indeed present in a plane as a passenger—for example, as a journalist—rather than as part of the crew.¹²

For a Japanese reader, the blackness of the soldier helps to create the effect of ika or defamiliarization, according to the theories of the Russian Formalists, which Ōe knew. In a passage that Ōe elsewhere quotes from Shklovsky, art is said to defamiliarize things that have become habitual or automatic: “The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an esthetic end in itself” (12).¹³ Ōe's selection of the racial element to highlight in the tale prolongs the audience's perception by resisting or contravening the image of America (the West) held by the Japanese at the time, which was that it was a country where power, including military power, was held only by members of the white race. For example, the Imperial Japanese Army declared war against the U.S. and England on 8 December 1941 under the slogan “Down with White Imperialism” in Asia.¹⁴ During the war, Japanese radio propaganda repeatedly emphasized the cruel treatment by the Allied forces of black members of the American army, and, implying a natural alliance among people of color, called upon blacks to help drive out the white devils from Asia.¹⁵ In the story, a child named Harelip thus declares, “He's a black man, he's no enemy!” (124). But the villagers' merciless treatment of the black soldier defamiliarizes the propaganda of the Imperial Army as well as the wartime stereotype of the enemy as white. Though the Japanese term for black people is kokujin, in the story Ōe also uses, deliberately, the derogatory term kuronbō to demonstrate the villagers' power over the soldier and their contempt for him.¹⁶

Furthermore, for postwar Japanese readers, who are better informed about U.S. history, the black man kept in the cellar, with the iron chain on his ankles, not only emphasizes this captive's animal-like status in the village, but also implies another picture of oppression—that of the slaves from Africa, brought to America in chains and kept like animals in the cellar-like holds of ships. The image also recalls the situation of black people in America in the 1940s and 1950s: discriminated against as a race, treated like second-class citizens or subhuman beings, and confined to a restricted world through segregation. Despite the acknowledgment of their bravery and achievements during the war, the Tuskegee Airmen, for example, were a segregated unit; their sacrifices in fighting the Nazis in the name of democracy and justice did not help liberate them from their own oppressed situation, and they reported receiving more respect overseas than at home.¹⁷ Yet Ōe's story precludes any sense of righteousness on the part of postwar Japan. In his 1959 essay titled “The Image of the Postwar Generation,” he describes what he sees as the “hypocrisy” of the Japanese people in this respect. Hearing about the harsh discrimination against blacks in the U.S., the majority of Japanese people sympathized with them, despite the fact that racially mixed children in Japan (many of them orphans), especially children with dark skins born of Japanese mothers and African American fathers during the Occupation, were similarly discriminated against.

Ōe concludes that the Japanese could point out the need for “justice” for blacks in the U.S. since it was not their problem, but someone else's (Ōe Kenzaburō dōjidai ronshu 1, 15-17). In “Shiiku” he makes it evident that fear and hostility toward racial difference are indeed a Japanese problem too. Ōe's presentation of the soldier as black thus implies sociohistorical contexts in both Japan and the United States.

CHILDREN, ADULTS, AND GENDER.

The blackness of the soldier, however, is only one element in a complex set of power relations that the story explores. The events of “Shiiku” take place in early summer near the end of a war (presumably World War II) and are recounted through the narrative voice of an innocent young boy called Frog (Kaeru),¹⁸ an elementary-school student who is about ten years old, or the same age as Ōe himself at the end of the war. The remote little settlement, always set apart, is now further cut off from the nearest town because of a food: when “a landslide crushed the suspension bridge that was the shortest route to the town, the elementary school annex in our village was closed, mail delivery stopped, and our adults, when a trip was unavoidable, reached the town by walking [a] narrow, crumbly path” (114). Even the dead are confined in a makeshift burial ground near the village, rather than being transported to the usual crematorium in town.

In this constricted situation, an enemy soldier—a black American airman—suddenly falls from the open sky. His airplane has accidentally crashed in the hills, and its other two occupants have been killed. Only the soldier, who freed himself from the plane before it landed, survives to drift down in a parachute. He soon becomes a prisoner, or what the villagers call “a catch” (emono), a term alluding to the fact that the village makes its living by hunting. The capture of the airman catalyzes the village into a battlefield of power struggles as filtered through the understanding of Frog, the child narrator. After many hours' “anticipation that was like madness” (122) on the part of the children, who know that all the (male) adults have gone to pursue the enemy soldier, Frog describes the children's mingled fear and excitement upon first seeing him:¹⁹ “The catch, instead of a flying suit of burnt-ocher silk and black leather flying shoes, wore a khaki jacket and pants and, on his feet, ugly, heavy-looking boots” (123). In contrast to their fantasy of an enemy airman—a white man in a handsome flying outfit—what the children observe here is the reality of one individual participant in the war. They watch the “silent procession” in which the soldier is “led through the dusk to the village like captured prey” (131) and placed in an underground cellar.

The scene that Napier reads as an image of “ritual sacrifice” (Escape, 29) continues in front of the children's eyes: “Still surrounding the black soldier [kokujin hei], the adults descended into the hole solemnly, as if a ceremony were beginning” (125). Despite the children's anxiety as they wait, there is “no gunshot,” and Frog later discovers that the village men, reluctant to be decisive about the soldier's fate, intend to keep him like “an animal” they would rear until they “know what the town thinks” (126). What we see in this important event is not only the unexpected physical appearance of the stranger, the children's fascination, and the villagers' power over their captive, but also the dispersion of power among the villagers themselves to the extent that each and all of them fear to make a decision. No one individual holds political power in the village, nor do the (male) adults as a whole find themselves capable of self-determination.

In contrast to the adults' ambivalence about having the prisoner in the village, the children soon find that they greatly enjoy his presence. Especially for Frog, whose competitive position among the other children becomes enhanced, to rear the new catch means not only to expand the scope of activities that can brighten the confined summer days, but also to give this child privilege, responsibility, and even an emotional state resembling sexual excitement or ecstasy. Frog exults: “The luxurious, hazardous, entirely unbelievable fact was that we were sitting on a sleeping platform above the cellar to which the black soldier had been taken. My teeth were chattering with fear and joy. … And the skin all over our bodies was twitching and jumping like the genitals of a bitch in heat” (125-27).²⁰

After a village woman refuses to bring food to the prisoner, Frog is assigned that prestigious role, which he performs once in the morning and once at night, thereby becoming all the children's envy. Frog's rival, the child called Harelip (Mitsukuchi), also cunningly acquires privileges, such as helping to carry out the barrel the soldier uses for a toilet and demanding that the younger children give him small bribes for being allowed to peep at the prisoner from the skylight above his cell. Groups of children, neglected not only by their parents but also by their teachers because the local school is closed, enjoy playing with the beautiful catch—“a gentle animal, and an obedient animal” (142).

As the adults gradually relax their supervision, Frog exercises his newly acquired power by “breaking a rule” (144); aided by his brother and Harelip, he releases the boar trap that encloses the prisoner's inflamed ankles, and soon they allow him to walk freely around the village and even to bathe in the spring. Frog observes that no adults, not even his father, admonish him for having contravened their earlier restrictions on the prisoner. Now that he is in full charge of the soldier, and has become the person closest to him, Frog begins to feel kinship with him. The child comes to realize that the soldier, like himself, not only smiles and sings, but also, like Frog's father, is skillful—he repairs the broken boar trap, for example, and mends the artificial leg of a visiting townsman called Clerk (Shoki). In turn, the soldier's frank admiration of the villagers' skill at their labor seems to make even the adults feel proud. The soldier enjoys watching Frog's father skin a weasel: “How proud we were of my father's ‘technique.’ There were times when even my father … turned to the black soldier with friendly eyes. At such times my brother and the black soldier and my father and I were united, as if in a single family … (150-51). This almost touching scene is in fact grimly ironic, since the deftness of Frog's father as he mercilessly dismembers the small-animal catch (emono) anticipates the fate of another emono, the black soldier, at the end of the story.

Within the narrator's family, as a subset of the adult/child dichotomy, relationships of power obtain. Frog's mother, whether dead or alive, is never mentioned. His father, who as the head of the household exercises unquestioned power over Frog and his little brother, barely communicates with them and often rejects them in silence. Frog knows how to read his father's temper not only in the latter's words but also in his gestures, postures, and other nonverbal signals. The morning after capturing the soldier, the father shakes Frog awake “without a word.” Frog explains: “I saw my father's strong lower jaw covered in coarse beard moving incessantly as if he were chewing grain and I knew he was nervous and irritated from lack of sleep. Asking about the black soldier was impossible” (127). In a replication of that power relationship, the father's habit of unspoken dismissal or rejection is imitated at one generation's remove by Frog himself, who sometimes takes care of his little brother tenderly, yet at other times exercises an elder's claim to silent authority. In a mood in which he wants to ignore his brother, Frog describes his gesture: “I bent over to wipe my dirty feet with a rag, a demonstration for my brother's sake that I had no desire to accept further questions” (138). Moreover, Ōe's deliberate silencing of women, who in this story are almost always invisible, silent, or dead—one woman's expression is “full of sadness” (114) even in death—emphasizes the extent to which this is a man's world, a male battlefield of power struggles where women have no voice.

Children at least have voices and can speak, although, as seen in the relationship between Frog and his brother or between Frog and the town children, within their world too the exercise of repressive power, including differential power according to gender, is constantly visible. As mentioned earlier, Frog acquires the special privilege of taking care of the airman, and so does his rival Harelip. In a seemingly innocent and playful scene of “archaic bathing in the spring” (153; this scene is absent in Bester's translation), Harelip asserts over the young girls a conventional male power that is expressed in explicitly sexual terms, for he makes the girls fondle his penis, slaps their buttocks, and causes them to cry. Even the soldier has an opportunity to participate in a display of male sexual dominance, though not with a human girl or woman, but instead with a female goat. Discovering that the soldier possesses “a magnificent, heroic, unbelievably beautiful penis” (152), Harelip fetches a goat to make the soldier copulate with it: “Harelip strained to keep the goat's head down, and the black soldier labored mightily … but it simply would not work the way it did with a billy-goat. [The children] laughed until [they] could no longer support [themselves] on [their] legs” (153). They are enraptured with their power over the soldier, whom they have defined as “a rare and wonderful domestic animal, an animal of genius” (153).

VILLAGE, TOWN, AND PREFECTURE.

The presence of the prisoner brings a new focus to the multiple socioeconomic relations of forces among village, town, and prefecture. As even the child narrator understands, the town, located nearby but now nearly inaccessible because of the landslide and flood, has great power over the “old but underdeveloped homesteaders' village” (140). This is because the village's economy, based on hunting, depends on the town as the sole market for animal skins. Officials from the town have built upon this economic power to control the villagers in every aspect of social matters as well, and the villagers accept their subservience. Just as the captured soldier is treated by the villagers as a dirty, smelly animal, so the townspeople regard the villagers as subhuman—“dirty and smelly” (131)—and treat them too “like dirty animals” (114).

Even the one-legged townsman Clerk, who works at the town office, uses his role as a petty official to demonstrate power over the villagers. It is also clear that Clerk himself is mistreated by his own people due to his physical handicap, since the town gives him the cruel assignment of serving as messenger to the remote village, which he can reach only by dangerously “walking the narrow, crumbly path” (114). But to the villagers he is nevertheless a figure of authority. If the village headman objects to a message that Clerk brings, Clerk assumes “a peremptory tone, the arrogant tone of a minor bureaucrat,” and the village adults at once submit “weakly” (140).

A counterpart to Clerk in his role as liaison and messenger is Frog's father, who serves as the village's spokesman to the town; but unlike Clerk, in this function he has no power. On the contrary, he must be totally submissive, since the town is the sole buyer of his animal skins, yet he is filled with resentment. After reporting the capture of the black soldier to the town office, his father angrily replies to Frog, who has ventured to ask him what the town has decided: “‘You think they're going to take any responsibility!’ My father spat out the words as if he were scolding me” (132). The father's hatred and distrust of the town, which here overflow into a tone of harshness toward his child, represent the entire village's reaction. Mirroring the adult power differential between town and village, Frog, having accompanied his father to town, experiences hostility on the part of the town children, with their “treacherous eyes”: “If my father hadn't been there the children would have jeered at me and thrown stones” (130). Frog's intimidation and alienation in this unfriendly territory are projected in his description of the artificial leg of Clerk, his “only acquaintance” in the town: “I liked to watch him hopping along the mountain road with … the artificial leg … but here the artificial leg was weird and treacherous, like the children of the town” (131). The town's scorn causes the village boy to have a sense of inferiority, which entails his acceptance of the negative judgments being made about him. Ignored by a young town girl “with a neck as refreshing as a bird's” (132), Frog remarks, “I was a miserable and meager creature” (133; this scene is absent in Bester's translation). The child's feelings of antagonism toward the town are mixed with an internalized sense of shame and misery produced by his powerlessness.

This apparent socioeconomic dichotomy between town and village, however, is under the sway of a more influential power: the prefecture. For the prisoner's treatment, the invisible and godlike existence of the distant prefecture holds both town and village in a state of suspension while they await its Word. A day after Frog's father reports the prisoner to the town, Clerk brings a message that “until a report had been made to the prefectural office and a reply received, the village must keep the black soldier” (140). The town too has no political power, nor is anyone in the town office willing to make a decision. It is the mediate force of the prefecture that governs both the village and the town. Clerk later revisits the village to explain that no “instructions from the prefecture” have arrived yet (148). When the order from the prefecture finally arrives, requiring the prisoner's being “turned over to the prefecture” (155), it triggers the villagers' brutal massacre of him. After the black soldier's death, Clerk again brings an order from the prefecture, this time “forbidding the cremation” of the soldier in the village, as if the enemy had no right to customary humane treatment even after death. Hence, the villagers carry his “corpse into the abandoned mine in the valley” and build “a fence to keep mountain dogs away” (162) while they again await a decision from the prefectural office, now about the disposition of the airman's body rather than his life.

Within Japan, the prefecture/town/village status differential implies the historical situation of the burakumin—the “descendants of the ‘untouchables’ of the pre-Meiji era [before 1868],” who were “by and large excluded from the mainstream of Japanese life and discriminated against” (Passin, 124). The members of this group were regarded as unclean, since they dealt with despised but necessary processes such as preparing animal skins (like Frog's father), disposing of waste, and burying the dead. In Imperial Japan's patriarchal Ie (literally, house) system, the head of the household—in particular, the emperor as the head of Japan's household—was the dominant factor in controlling the nation, and the burakumin, like the villagers in “Shiiku,” were confined at the bottom of the hierarchy. In the story, the constant reminder of prefectural power—unseen but absolute—is reflected through the more direct authority of the town with the image of the divine emperor whose Words or Imperial Edicts (chokugo) ultimately determined the fate of his own people as well as that of captured enemies.

Beyond Japan, the prefecture/town/village relationship parallels that between Japan and the U.S. after the Japanese surrender of 1945, as well as the more “universal” relationship between colonized counties and colonizers or the so-called Third World and the industrialized nations. The control of Japan by Occupation forces constituted a situation in which people lived with constant feelings of shame and the humiliating need to defer to others to make decisions or authorize actions. In the story, Ōe inserts the following lines to underscore that sense of abjection: after fearfully offering the enemy soldier his food for the first time, Frog, happening to see himself in a mirror in the stairway, describes himself as “a totally insignificant Japanese boy with twitching cheeks and pale, bloodless lips” (137).

It is clear that upon the capture of the black airman, all the villagers, both adults and children, themselves usually intimidated and conscious of their subservience at the bottom of this hierarchy, enjoy their unexpected opportunity to exert control over someone who has suddenly become even more powerless than they. Ōe demonstrates the soldier's loss of power through his descent from the open sky into the underground cage—he now literally occupies the lowest position in the combined hierarchy of town/village. Like an animal in a zoo, he becomes the object of the constant gaze of children as they inspect him from above, peeping through the skylight.

Against these structured power relationships, the developing bond between the child Frog, the nameless captive, and, at one point, the townsman Clerk seems temporarily to offer a possibility of resistance, as they partially overcome the barriers between them. Nonverbal communication, usually used dismissively by the father, becomes a means of understanding between the black soldier and Frog. After “looking deep into one another's eyes for a long time” (145), Frog, his brother, and Harelip decide to remove the boar trap from the soldier's ankles. Released, the soldier “suddenly rose with a groan and stamped his feet” (145). The soldier then tries to communicate with Frog “just as [his] livestock communicated” (146) and succeeds in making himself understood: when the soldier examines the broken boar trap and then gestures to Frog, indicating “with motions what he wanted” (146), Frog understands what is meant, fetches the village headman's tool box, and gives it to the soldier, who after many hours' effort manages to repair the trap. “He's like a person!” (146) comments Harelip. On another occasion, the captive also repairs Clerk's artificial leg, broken in a fall from a low cliff. Frog brings the leg to the soldier, whose success in repairing it gives him an opportunity to be brought up out of the cellar, and then to gain a little freedom, as he is permitted to walk freely around the village. It seems as if a new set of relationships is beginning, as the children rapidly accept the captive's improved status. Before their happy eyes, a reciprocal exchange of small gifts even takes place between the captive and Clerk. As a token of gratitude for the restored leg, Clerk offers a cigarette to the soldier, who “inhaled it and doubled over coughing violently and clutching his throat” (149). The soldier, in return, presents “a dark, shiny pipe” (149) to Clerk. Frog describes the exciting moment: “We shouted until our throats began to hurt and milled around them, laughing as though touched by madness” (149). Perhaps part of the exhilarating “madness” of this scene consists in the unprecedented alliance among the prisoner, the children, and the maimed townsman—all of them in their different ways marginalized and usually lacking in power, but all having something positive to exchange now, even if the children's contribution is only their joyous fellowship.

POWER DIFFERENTIALS IN COMBINATION.

This brief, mad alliance is soon destroyed by the Word from the prefecture. The expected hierarchical power relationship between the prefectural office, the townspeople, the villagers, and the black soldier is then tested, reversed, and finally reaffirmed. The evening after the memorable bathing at the spring, as the children and the soldier are sitting in relaxation outside the cellar entrance, Clerk appears to deliver the order from the prefecture that has long been awaited by the adults. After listening to Clerk's command, spoken “in dialect,” that the villagers must escort the black soldier to the town to be transferred “to the prefecture” (155), Frog fears losing his friend and tries to warn him: shaking the soldier's shoulder, Frog shouts at him “in dialect” (155).²¹ Frog's action in attempting to communicate in intimate human words (the local dialect) ironically causes the soldier to “humanize” his own actions by no longer accepting a passive role like that of a domestic animal: “Suddenly the black soldier rose, soaring in front of [Frog] like a tree, and seized [his] upper arm and pulled [him] tight up against himself and raced down the cellar steps” (156). In his desperate action, the soldier transforms himself once again from “a gentle animal” into the human enemy the children had assumed him to be when he first appeared in the village. Having captured Frog as “a prisoner, and a hostage” (157), the soldier locks himself and the boy in the cellar, using the boar trap—which embodies both the violence and the transitoriness of power—to secure the cellar's trap door from inside. The child Frog, now a catch for the catch, becomes powerless and himself suffers all the pains of captivity: “Anger, and humiliation, and the irritating sadness of betrayal raced through my body like flames, scorching me. And most of all, fear, swelling and eddying in me” (157).

The soldier's blackness no longer marks him as different; like anyone else, he seeks to defend himself, and his fundamental “humanness” in this respect makes Frog realize his own error in having treated the man as a gentle pet that he could control. In a reversal of the earlier relationship, Frog must now humiliate himself physically in front of the soldier: suffering from diarrhea, he must walk over to “the barrel we had laughed and hooted to see the black soldier straddle” (158). The following morning, under the gaze of the adults, who peer into the cellar from above as the children had formerly done, Frog is further humiliated, finding himself frightened enough to utter a cry “like the scream of a small animal” (160) when the soldier tightens his fingers around the boy's throat to demonstrate his power over his small hostage. This desperate act of self-defense only causes the soldier to become the victim of a violent killing, as the men ultimately break down the door, swarm into the cellar, and surround him.

The scene of confused violence in the cellar reestablishes the brutality of unmediated power relations. The child's misguided attempt to resist the expected social demarcations and to create a friendship across traditional boundaries has failed, and in a deadly way. In retrospect, an episode at the beginning of the story has foreshadowed the captive soldier's betrayal of Frog. Harelip, having taken a mountain dog's puppy from its lair, holds it in his arms, proudly telling Frog and his brother, “He's used to me now. … He won't go back to his friends” (116). He then releases it on the ground. Significantly, it is at that moment that the children see an “unbelievably large [enemy] airplane” (116) overhead in the sky. When they look down again, the little dog has run “yowling down the gravel path away from [them]” (116), and the illusion of any affiliation between it and Harelip is broken. In the same manner, the soldier shatters Frog's friendship in trying to preserve his own life. Frog describes the furious moments of struggle that ensue:

From the midst of the bunched adults my father stepped forward dangling a hatchet from his hand. I saw that his eyes were blazing with rage and feverish as a dog's. The black soldier's nails bit into my neck and I moaned. My father bore down on us, and seeing the hatchet being raised I closed my eyes. The black soldier seized my left wrist and lifted it to protect his head. The entire cellar erupted in a scream and I heard the smashing of my left hand and the black soldier's skull.

(161)

The roars and screams of all the people involved—the villagers, Frog, and the soldier—are intermingled when Frog's father attacks the soldier with the hatchet despite the danger to his son. The destruction of Frog's left hand, mutilated when the black soldier's skull is pierced by his father's blow, embodies the child's loss of innocence in the world that adults control. Using images of confinement that recall the story's opening, Frog expresses his sensation of being stifled by the adult practice of violence: “The war … was never in the world supposed to have reached our village. But it had come, to mash my fingers and hand to a pulp, my father swinging a hatchet, his body drunk on the blood of war. And suddenly our village was enveloped in the war, and in the tumult I could not breathe” (166).

Frog's coming of age is attained through the death of his childhood. In the village that is now permeated by the “unpleasant odor” and the “inaudible scream” that issue from the soldier's corpse, Frog awakens from a coma to find his brother anxiously watching him, thinking he is dead (162). Frog's realization—“I was no longer a child” (165)—is clearly shown in the change of his perception of milk, which he formerly saw as a beautiful liquid but now finds nauseating. The day after the black airman's capture, Frog watches the airman drinking goat milk. Frog says, “I saw milk flowing back into a fat, pink, glistening mouth. … I discovered, my own lips drying with excitement, that goat's milk was a beautiful liquid” (136). After the airman's death and Frog's injury, however, “when my father's hand placed a pitcher of goat's milk to my lips nausea shook me and I clamped my mouth shout, yelling, and dribbled the milk on my throat and chest” (162). Milk, the traditional substance that sustains life, has become transformed into something disgusting, just as adults, including his father, are metamorphosed into something unbearable and beyond his understanding—“entirely inhuman monsters” (163).

Throughout the story, Ōe's characters are identified either by nicknames (Frog, Harelip) or by their social status or occupation (clerk, headman, blacksmith), if they are given any individuation at all. The rest of the villagers, including Frog's father and younger brother, lack names. So does the American soldier. The village too, and the town and the prefecture that dominate it, are unnamed. Such an avoidance of the particularization that proper nouns would have brought to characters and locations, along with the use of figurative expressions, tends to create a “mythological” space.²² However, as I have argued, Ōe's social concerns are realistic, because the polysemic world of his story depicts power in its many manifestations. The depiction of the soldier in the child's narration is harsh, indeed objectionable, yet all the elements of behavior attributed to the captive are found among the townspeople and the villagers as well. The villagers' treatment of the soldier is not much different from the townspeople's treatment of the villagers. If the townspeople and villagers speak of the soldier in the vocabulary of contempt, they express contempt for one another as well: the town perceives as “dirty and smelly” (131) the village children, and the village perceives as “ugly and dirty” (132) the teachers from the town. If the soldier finally resorts to violence against someone weaker than himself as he struggles for his life, the villagers do so every day, when they trap and kill animals for their living.

In this manner, there is indeed a “multiplicity of force relations,” in Foucault's terms, and throughout the story Ōe suggests that this “circulation of power” could continue indefinitely. The boar trap, for instance, emblemizes such motions of circulation. The trap becomes the instrument of the villagers' power over the soldier (it is used to chain his ankles), the instrument of the children's exercise of power (they choose to unchain his ankles), the instrument of the soldier's preparation for resistance (he repairs the broken trap), the instrument of his act of claiming and reversing power (he locks the cellar door with it), and finally, the site of the villagers' reassertion of power (they overcome the trap-as-lock and break into the cellar that has become the prisoner's domain). The scene of the brief moments of merry alliance among three subordinated individuals—Frog (the child), the soldier (the prisoner), and the townsman Clerk (the one-legged man)—contrasts with the dreadful situation at the end, when the series of confrontations and struggles culminates in their even greater—or total—loss of power. The soldier is hacked to death, the child is maimed, and Clerk dies in an accident.

Moreover, Ōe's implication of the eternal circulation of power is underlined by the circular structure of the story. At the conclusion, we learn that Clerk's body will “be cremated with the firewood gathered to cremate the black soldier” (168) because of the prefecture's banning the prisoner's cremation in the village. One corpse for the fire replaces another, just as one maimed limb (Frog's hand) recalls the other (Clerk's leg). Surrounded by a “fence to keep mountain dogs away” (162), the body of the soldier is now kept in the same valley where, at the beginning of the story, Frog and his brother sought bones from other bodies. The mention of the mountain dogs, who would eat the soldier's body if they could, also reminds us of Harelip's brief abduction of a mountain-dog puppy at the beginning, with a reversal of the power relationship (the invader now is not Harelip but the dogs). We assume that a new messenger will eventually bring the villagers another order from the prefecture telling them what to do with the soldier's corpse, for it seems inevitable that the prefecture and town will again assert their power. Village life will return to “normal,” except for the alienated Frog, with his now powerless hand.

The confrontation with power structures in Ōe's story is surely his own—or, more generally, that of his generation of children, who were brought up with death and violence during the war and then later caught between diametrically opposed nationalist and democratic ideologies. A distrust of adults and authority figures echoes in many of Ōe's depictions of his overwhelming experiences in wartime and Occupation Japan. The falling of the enemy soldier from the sky in “Shiiku” can be viewed as a parody of a historical event, the divine emperor's surrender “in a human voice” on 15 August 1945, which to Ōe was the most devastating expression of Japan's defeat. In his 1995 essay “The Day the Emperor Spoke in a Human Voice” (reprinted in WLT 76:1 [Winter 2002], pp. 19-23), Ōe states that during the war, he, like other children, had thought of Japan's rulers as “filling the sky, their Imperial Majesties the Emperor and Empress, mounted on a cloud” (103), with a belief in a glorious and honorable death for the emperor, and that at the end of the war, “the Emperor speaking to us in a human voice was beyond imagining in any reverie” (103).²³ To Ōe's further surprise, the emperor soon transformed “completely” from a god into a human being through his human proclamation (ningen sengen) of 1 January 1946. In the story, Ōe creates the veiled and godlike image of the prefecture whose Word triggers the ghastly scene in the cellar that culminates in the violent death of the enemy soldier along with the loss of Frog's hand. The mystic vision of the divine emperor (who seldom appeared in public) swiftly riding a (pure) white horse that had been promulgated during the war finds a shocking substitute in that of the enemy soldier—the black horse—who descends from the sky and is promptly confined underground, as if already dead. The coming of age of Ōe's generation is, like that of Frog, filled with negative experiences of misery, shame, despair, betrayal, distrust, and humiliation.

As shown in this story, war may exacerbate power relations, but such hierarchies long predate war. Race and gender differences may intensify them, but power inequalities also exist between groups or individuals of the same gender and race—and, in “Shiiku,” as has been seen, between two young brothers of the same family. Even in the seemingly innocent world of children, Ōe perceives ubiquitous struggles for dominance and superiority. His first major story thus underscores his belief that a dispersed web of power struggles—a “multiplicity of force relations”—exists in every place and every time. Power is “exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations. … Power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective … there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives. … Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (Foucault, History, 94-95). In “Shiiku,” Ōe's use of the black soldier focalizes these power relations by differentiating and defamiliarizing them. The power relations exhibited in this story interrogate the moral and political acceptability of a homogeneous society in Japan, or indeed anywhere, that is characterized by internal hierarchies and hostility against outsiders. “Shiiku” asks readers to confront the consequences of the concept that the weak are to be oppressed and an outsider is to be treated as a madman, an aliéné. By presenting the villagers' inhuman treatment of the black captive, and by showing that those who are victimized will victimize others in turn, Ōe's early semi-autobiographical narrative demands the rejection of such uses and abuses of power and suggests instead that we seek ways to achieve “cure and reconciliation” if we can (Ōe, Japan, 128).

Notes

1. The Japanese title “Shiiku” refers to the act of rearing (animals). The titles of the two English translations, “The Catch” (tr. John Bester) and “Prize Stock” (tr. John Nathan), emphasize the concept of a living creature or a captive kept by force. English translations cited here are from Nathan (as published in Kenzaburō Ōe, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness: Four Short Novels, New York, Grove, 1977), whose version is more complete.

2. The annual Akutagawa Prize recognizes the talent of a promising new writer. The critic Hirano Ken discovered Ōe's unusual talent through the story “Kimyō na shigoto” (Eng. “A Strange Job”), which was published in the Tokyo University newspaper in 1957. Another of Ōe's early stories, “Shisha no ogori” (Eng. “Lavish are the Dead”), was one of two finalists for the 1957 Akutagawa Prize, but did not receive it. The 1958 prize committee argued not over whether “Shiiku” would qualify in terms of its quality, but over whether Ōe should be called a new writer, since by then he had already published more than five stories in the university newspaper and in several literary journals. As committee members, Kawabata Yasunari, Inoue Yasushi, and Funabashi Seiichi strongly supported Ōe for the prize in both 1957 and 1958.

3. “Shiiku” is the first of three major narratives that share semiautobiographical choices of setting and character. The other works in this trio are Memushiri kouchi (1958), which appeared five months after “Shiiku” and was translated as Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids in 1995, and Man'en gannen no futtobōru (1967), translated as The Silent Cry in 1974.

4. In a 1977 lecture related to the film version of “Shiiku” (1961), Ōe discussed the notion of sogai (alienation) as one of the themes of the story, using Alfred Kurella's interpretation of Marx's concept of Entfremdung (aliénation in French, “alienation” in English). According to Ōe's summary of Kurella, the German word Entfremdung has no hostile or negative connotation, whereas the French word aliéné, in contrast, means “geistesgestört” (mentally ill) and aliénation implies “unangenehme, feindliche” (unpleasant, hostile) meanings (Ōe, the essay “Shiiku” 220-21). Ōe thus uses the contrasting images of the alien (a negative term) and the simple outsider (a neutral term) to demonstrate different aspects of the Japanese attitude toward outsiders.

5. It is worth mentioning the political implications of Bester's translation of “Shiiku,” which omits the majority of potentially offensive or sexual scenes, including the attempted soldier-goat copulation (125), Harelip's ritual of making the young girls fondle his penis (90-91, 124), and Frog's pissing from a window (103). Bester also skips other significant scenes: the superior attitude of the townspeople, including the children, toward the villagers (99, 101, 102); Frog's growing hatred toward adults (136); and the famous lines, “My brother and I were small seeds deeply embedded in thick flesh and tough, outer skin, green seeds soft and fresh and encased in membrane that would shiver and slough away at the first exposure to light. And outside the tough, outer skin, near the sea that was visible from the roof as a thin ribbon glittering in the distance” (85; Nathan's translation, 118). Perhaps because of concerns about racial sensibility and Ōe's reception among readers in the U.S., Bester's translation becomes a less shocking version of “Shiiku.” Nathan's translation is, in general, more faithful as well as more complete. Cf. note 16.

6. As a member of the Akutagawa Prize committee, Inoue Yasushi, however, negatively commented on the scenes of the soldier and the goat and the death of Clerk, which he found “unnecessary” and “unfit” in the story (Suppl. 2, June 1966, 16).

7. According to Iguchi Tokio, the reason that Ōe, in his early twenties, so clearly grasped the importance of power relationships was due to his own experience of two deep gaps (rakusa): first, that between his remote village life as a child in Shikoku and the elite life he encountered when he became a student in the French Department at Tokyo University (Gunzō, 1995, 111); and second, the linguistic gaps between the Shikoku dialect and the Tokyo standard and between Japanese and French.

8. Wilson (ch. 3) discusses power relations in Ōe's other 1958 stories, including “Ningen no hitsuji” (Eng. “Human”) and Mirumae ni tobe (Eng. “Leap before You Look”). According to Ōe himself, his repeated theme in these stories 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, a third party [Y] (sometimes a prostitute who caters only to foreigners or an interpreter)” (Ōe Kenzaburō Zensakuhin, vol. 2, 380). Analyzing the “XYZ” relationship, Wilson concludes that Ōe “has chosen only to portray the apathy, the stagnation, and the cul-de-sac of the postwar generation” through this relationship, rather than fully developing the theme (32).

9. The postwar depiction of African Americans in various generations of Japanese writing is not my focus here, but it is worthwhile to mention a few examples. Appearing six years after the publication of Ōe's “Shiiku,” Ariyoshi Sawako's Hishoku (1964; Eng. Not Because of Color) describes the struggles of the Japanese wife of a black soldier; living first in Occupied Japan and then in the U.S., she is discriminated against both by her compatriots and by (white) Americans, because of her husband's skin color. Among younger authors, Murakami Ryū (b. 1952) and Yamada Eimi (b. 1959) frequently present African Americans. Yamada in particular made her debut with the sensational novel Bedtime Eyes (1985), in which “sexually graphic fictions consistently take as their theme torrid love affairs between Japanese women and black GIs” (Russell, 36; Russell criticizes Yamada's “preoccupation with black sexuality,” 36). In his “Nihongo no shori,” analyzing Bedtime Eyes, Hideo Levy states that Yamada's black GI is presented merely as “a toy for sex” and agrees with the burakumin writer Nakagami Kenji's comment that Yamada's works constitute examples of prejudice and racial discrimination (318-21). Russell also comments on other stories, including Ōe's “Shiiku,” Itsuki Hiroyuki's Johnny Who Saw the Sea (Umi o mite ita Johnny), and Endō Shusakū's Nigger (Kuronbō): like Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Faulkner's late novel The Reivers, he indicates, these narratives “would seem to borrow the American literary convention of using the Black Other as a means of introducing an adolescent non-black protagonist to an unjust world of adults, marking their loss of innocence and naïveté” (23). See also the (stereotyped and discriminatory) images of black people in Japanese society described in Russell's “Race and Reflexivity” (17-40).

10. The all-black fighter squadron called the Tuskegee Airmen—consisting of the 99th Fighter Squadron, the 332nd Fighter Group, and the 477th Bombardment and Composite Groups—was established in March 1942, and five African American men earned their silver wings at Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama. Their squadron was experimentally created as a result of pressure put on the War Department by African American leaders and the press. These first flyers (and their successors) were trained on a restricted, segregated basis. Tuskegee Airmen fought in the European sphere of the war for two years, starting with the 99th Squadron's departure for North Africa in April 1943. A few days after the Allied Forces landed in Anzio in January 1944, the 332nd Fighter Group arrived in Italy. The squadron flew its final mission on 30 April 1945, a week before the end of the war in Europe. Although they expected to fight in the Pacific as well, Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945, before the Airmen were assigned to action in Asia. See McKissack, and also Drotning, 185-88.

11. Ōe has combined the two survivors his teacher mentioned, so that it is a black man who becomes a POW and is later killed. When he wrote this story, Ōe evidently believed that the incident of the black airman was based on historical fact. He apparently learned later that there were no black U.S. flyers in the Pacific War, and acknowledged his (or his teacher's) “incorrect” memory (personal interview, 14 February 1997).

12. Black newspapers, including the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American, and the Norfolk Journal and Guide, sent journalists to the Pacific Theater, where many black soldiers (though not airmen) were in action. See Stevens, especially 40-48.

13. In Atarashii bungaku no tameni, quoting this definition, Ōe explains the Russian Formalists' technique of defamiliarization (which he calls ika) and discusses his own use of this technique (25-65). See also Ōe's Watashi to iu shōsetsuka no tsukurikata, pp. 92-99.

14. During the European phase of World War II, prior to December 1941, the majority of the black press in the U.S. believed that it was a “white man's war”; after Pearl Harbor, however, they came to consider it the “People's War” (Finkle, 205-13).

15. In an attempt to forge a commonality of interests among people of color, Japanese radio repeatedly broadcast messages over Asia, such as the claim that “the colored peoples … have no hope of justice and equality from the white peoples because of their unalterable race prejudice against us” (White, 151). As part of the news of Germany's surrender, the 23 May 1945 article in Tokyo's Yomiuri newspaper, titled “Cruelty of the American and English Forces,” also stressed racial discrimination against blacks in the “white” forces: “Black soldiers are used as shields [for white soldiers] on the battlefield. [White] officers regard black soldiers as consumption goods like bullets. This is the reality of the beasts [kichiku] in the American and English forces who fight [against us] under the [false] banner of humanity and freedom” (Irie, 201). The atrocities of the Imperial Army in Asia, however, violate any concept of commonality among people of color, and, according to Emiko Ohnuki-Tieney, in Japanese writings the black Other “occupies the same symbolic space and function as do burakumin and the Koreans, two categories of Other with which blacks are often equated” (quoted from Russell, 27).

16. Where the text uses the pejorative term kuronbō, John Nathan translates sometimes as “nigger,” sometimes as “black soldier/man,” according to his judgment; John Bester translates the term only as “nigger.”

17. Some of the Tuskegee Airmen became POWs in Germany. Against their expectations, and in contrast to the Nazis' typical treatment of minority groups, these captives were treated like officers. One of the former POWs stated: “I was amazed at how much [the Nazis] knew [about the Tuskegee Airmen]. They repeatedly asked me why [black airmen] would risk their lives for a country that didn't respect them as men” (McKissack, 98).

18. According to the boy, the one-legged townsman calls all the village children “Frog,” as the villagers in turn call him “Clerk” (131). Within the story, however, the narrator is the only child whom Clerk actually addresses that way, so in this paper I refer (only) to the main character/narrator as Frog.

19. Ōe recalls “fear and hatred as well as a feeling of awe” (ikei no nen) when, after the war at the age of ten, he first saw black soldiers walking around his village (Ōe Kenzaburō dōjidai ronshu 1, 16).

20. In this and other stories, Ōe employs repulsive or grotesque sexual elements to create defamiliarization. In an interview in 1986, Ōe stated: “I have simply utilized sexual elements as the most concrete means to defamiliarize the mundane lives of human beings. I did this especially when I was in my twenties and thirties” (Yoshida, 373). Morikawa Tatsuya also points out the significance of sexuality in Ōe's works, arguing that he uses sexual elements as a literary method rather than as theme and motif (30).

21. In the story, Ōe mentions his characters' use of dialect three times: Harelip on page 116, and Clerk and Frog here. Clerk's use of “dialect” implies that he may be originally from the village, but due to his disability (incapable of surviving in the hunting community), he moves to the town to work for the town office. Frog's disability at the end foreshadows his (limited) career, like Clerk's.

22. According to Shibata Shoji, Ōe's use of metaphorical expressions, especially those associated with nature (animals, plants, and insects), reinforces the sense of a mythological space. Shibata offers the following examples from “Shiiku”: “My brother and I were small seeds deeply embedded in thick flesh and tough, outer skin” (118); “the storehouse crouching in the dusk like a giant beast” (116); “the enemy planes … [like] a rare species of bird (118); and “the chilly, sweating stones jutting from the inside wall like the swollen belly of a pupa” (121).

23. The shocking image of the emperor god “descending” to speak in a merely mortal voice is repeatedly seen in Ōe's works, such as “Mizukara waga namida o nugui tamauhi” (1971; Eng. “The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away”). In contrast to Ōe's disillusion with the emperor, the writer Mishima Yukio preferred the “old” Japan, in which a divine emperor was the center of both culture and people. In Mishima's short story “Eirei no koe” (1966; Eng. “The Voice of the Heroic Dead”), for instance, the spirits of kamikaze pilots who claim that they were betrayed by the wartime emperor repeat the refrain, “Nadote sumeragi wa hito to naritamaishi” (“Why did the emperor become a human being?”; F104, 40).

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