SOURCE: Yoshida, Sanroku. “The Burning Tree: The Spatialized World of Kenzaburō Ōe.” World Literature Today 69, no. 1 (winter 1995): 10-16.

[In the following essay, Yoshida traces Ōe's literary development and asserts that the author's major thematic concerns “are closely related to his own personal problems and emotions, but he successfully distills them into a more universal context to produce a significant literary representation that is firmly grounded in human existence.”]

Late on the night of 13 October 1994, in front of his residence in a usually quiet Tokyo suburb, Kenzaburō Ōe entertained questions from a horde of newspaper and television reporters who had gathered there to interview the winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature. “I wonder what kind of life I would be leading now,” he reminisced, “if I had not met professor Kazuo Watanabe at Tokyo University and learned from him about Rabelais forty years ago.” Born in 1935 in a small village on the island of Shikoku, Ōe was a precocious boy; he had wished to study under Professor Watanabe even before enrolling at the university. Thus, for most of his writing career he has been attuned to Rabelaisian grotesque realism as the most effective literary technique with which to tackle the problems of the modern world.

As a student in the French Department of Tokyo University, Ōe avidly read Rabelais, Camus, Sartre, Mailer, Faulkner, and Bellow and became especially enthralled by Sartrean existentialism. He began his career as a fiction writer while still a student by winning the coveted Akutagawa Prize for his short story “Shiiku” (1957; Eng. “Prize Stock,” 1977). He was only twenty-two.

From the very beginning Ōe astonished the reading public by his vivid imagination and uncompromising examination of human nature. These qualities, in combination with an extremely serene poetics, often produced a redeeming effect in his works. Another unprecedented feature was his style: a Japanese completely free from the conventions of the language. He was most likely following the Russian formalists' definition of literature: “[They] saw literary language as a set of deviations from a norm, a kind of linguistic violence.”¹ In an interview published in World Literature Today, Ōe himself later explained: “My intention was to destroy the Japanese language by using a kind of syntax that cannot fit into Japanese. I was ambitious. I was writing novels with an extremely destructive intention.”² Readers accustomed to established authors such as Kawabata, Tanizaki, and Mishima, all of them writing in perfect harmony with Japanese linguistic traditions, found Ōe's style bizarre, to say the least.

The young Ōe was revolutionary in another aspect: he publicly declared in his Akutagawa Prize acceptance speech that he was fully committed to, and ready to participate in, politics through writing. This was an outright breach of the intellectual tradition established by Shōyō Tsubouchi (1859-1935) in his Shōsetsu Shinzui (Essence of the Novel; 1885), generally considered the first written formulation of modern literary theory in Japan based on Western—mainly English—critical theories. Tsubouchi emphasized the importance of the independence of literature and propagated the ideal of literature for literature's sake.

Ōe's positive stance seems to have derived from his realization that the world of the twentieth century, especially the postwar world, is much more precarious than the world of Tsubouchi's day, with its scientific and technological orientation and the possibility of the annihilation of humanity by nuclear disaster. In his essay “Why Do Human Beings Create Literature?” Ōe defines literature as follows:

Literature is a verbal endeavor made in order to recognize the meaning of one's being human at one's very root, with an overall understanding of one's relation to society, the world, and the cosmos. Therefore, when a giant corporation, disrupting the natural cycle of life and death, exercises its large-scale violence over human beings—so large that it destroys the fundamental harmony between human beings and their society, the world, and the cosmos—literature, standing on human ground, will continue to protest against such violence.³

The experiences of Japanese students in the 1960 protest rallies and street demonstrations against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty (known as “Ampo”), the largest mass movement in modern Japanese history, are reflected in such novels as Kozui wa waga tamashii ni oyobi (A Flood Unto My Soul; 1973) and Man'en gan'nen no futtoboru (1967; Eng. The Silent Cry, 1974). Ōe himself participated in the activities of the Nuclear-Bomb Victims Organization and was the main force in establishing the committees and councils in support of that organization. He made public speeches and contributed essays to magazines to further its cause. He also published a book entitled Hiroshima nōto (1965; Eng. Hiroshima Notes, 1981), in which he expounds upon the atrocities of the bomb and the deplorable situation in which the victims had been left. In spite of all this, his book suggests the advent of a new hope for humanity in its portrayal of a group of courageous physicians, themselves injured by the bomb, who do not stop attending to the ever-increasing number of A-bomb sufferers.

In his early fiction Ōe treated disturbing themes such as disorientation, madness resulting from confinement, escape from confinement, conflicts between children and adults and between the individual and society, and so on. The examination of human beings caught in existential situations seems to be his favorite subject matter. Since he began writing at such an early age and continued as a professional novelist after graduating from university, his novels and stories were not based on his own experiences but were products distilled from his imagination, literary theories, and contemporary social conditions.

The turning point came in 1963, when Ōe's first son Hikari was born with a defective cranial bone structure: an existential situation had appeared in real life. Ōe's novel Kojinteki na taiken (1964; Eng. A Personal Matter, 1969) is a gripping account of how a young father gropes his way out of this existential situation and, of his own will, espouses what seems to be an overwhelming responsibility. The novel has been translated into eight foreign languages (Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Norwegian, Polish, and Spanish) and was the work which established Ōe worldwide as an author who writes not about Eastern exoticism but about very real human problems.

Although A Personal Matter is based on Ōe's own experiences, the work is altogether different from the so-called shi-shōsetsu, the Japanese I-novel or confessional first-person narrative once popular at the beginning of the twentieth century. The author makes the work representational rather than presentational; that is to say, he tries to provide a model, not just a narrative of his ordeal, by creating an anti-hero named Bird. The use of animal imagery is so convincing that the distorted portrayal of the society in which Bird lives seems absolutely real. Ōe explores the birth's psychological ramifications for Bird, who fathers a misshapen child (the baby looks like a two-headed monster), and describes Bird's struggle to escape his “parental responsibility.” The implication that the baby's deformity might be linked to the delayed reaction of nuclear fallout expands the scope of the incident into a much larger context.

The fear of possible human deracination by nuclear holocaust is further developed in the two novels Kōzui wa waga tamashii ni oyobi (A Flood Unto My Soul; 1973) and Pinchi ra'na chōsho (1976; Eng. The Pinch Runner Memorandum, 1994). The former is a story about a father and his mentally handicapped son who live in a nuclear shelter and is filled with hyperbolic Rabelaisian grotesquerie, metaphorically deformed characters, and images of whales and trees. The central incident is the father's involvement in a group called the “Free Navigators,” who collect guns and build a ship in preparation for the final deluge. The novel is based on the biblical episodes of Jonah and Noah's ark. The following passage clearly indicates Ōe's wish for cosmic harmony and reflects his abiding interest in Sartrean existentialism:

Suppose in an hour the world's last war broke out, he [the father, whose name is Isana or “Whale”] must walk back to his shelter with his son Jin before the heat and the shock waves of nuclear explosions hit this city, threading their way through the panicked crowd with the aplomb and persistence of those who had lived only to prepare themselves for such a day. Until he could officially return the right to use the globe to the trees and the whales, he and his infant son must wait in the shelter calm and relaxed as if they themselves chose to be annihilated. The concrete wall of the shelter would glow with the intense heat and then the shock waves would reach the infant child's ears.⁴

The Pinch Runner Memorandum is the first novel in which Ōe experiments with multiple narrative viewpoints, and his interest in narratology is closely related to the notion of the ambivalence of reality. Ōe achieves this multiplicity by inventing a narrative structure that has more than one layer. The first narrator here is Hikari/father, the father of “Hikari” (again, Hikari is the name of Ōe's own son), and the second is Mori/father (“Mori” is a double entendre meaning “forest” in Japanese and “death” in Latin), who writes down what Hikari/father tells him while making all sorts of comments on what he is writing. The purpose of this technique is to present an intentionally blurred image in an attempt to avoid a single authoritative interpretation that would reject any other. This of course has something to do with Ōe's argument that peripheral cultures should be valued just as much as a central one, and that literature should fight for them so they are not devoured by that central culture. Ōe's sustained interest in this idea has kept him experimenting with other narrative methods even in more recent works.

Unlike most Japanese writers, who usually publish their novels in installments in magazines while the works are still in progress, Ōe works on each piece for a year or more until he finishes it. He has never written so-called potboilers; each publication always contains some new development, either philosophically or technically. So far, Ōe has written at least twenty full-length novels, six collections of stories, and eight volumes of essays. In addition to the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature, he has won seven major literary prizes in Japan. In 1986 and 1992 he was a candidate for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and in 1989 the Europelia Arts Festival conferred its literary prize upon him.

One of the most salient characteristics of Ōe's major works is their interrelated nature: his themes continually recur, his characters reappear in several works under the same names, and episodes in works previously treated are referred to without explanation. The world of Ōe's imagination is entirely holistic, which makes it impossible to discuss one particular work without touching upon another.

It all began with The Silent Cry. In that novel Ōe tells of two incidents similar to each other, separated in time by about one hundred years but occurring at the same place, the author's native village in Shikoku. The overall narrative is diachronic, but when the older episode is superimposed on the one in the narrative present, it becomes synchronic. The use of this technique, known as “simultaneity,” helps create a kind of universality that is usually conveyed by myth. The narrator Mitsusaburo and his wife, both guilt-stricken since having institutionalized their retarded son, return to the village with the husband's mad brother Takashi. Takashi tries to organize a group of young villagers, referring to them as a soccer team when in fact they are violent hoodlums, in order to stop the ever-increasing influence of a supermarket and its owner, nicknamed “the Emperor.” The peasant riot which overlaps Takashi's would-be uprising occurred shortly before the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Takashi's plan for an uprising disintegrates in the end, just as the actual historical peasant riot was suppressed by the authorities. Takashi commits suicide, not because his social cause fails to materialize, but because his younger sister kills herself as a result of his forcing her into incestuous relations with him. At the close of the novel, Takashi, together with other characters who died violent deaths, is deified at the village Bon Festival (the Buddhist “Festival of the Dead”) as one of the patron gods who will protect the village. Thus the myth of the village in the forests of Shikoku is complete.

The eternal cycle of life and death is one of the major themes of Dōjidai gēmu (Contemporary Games; 1979). The basis here is the creation myth of Japan, as it is told in the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters), compiled in the eighth century. The narrative structure, similar to that used in The Pinch Runner Memorandum, effectively makes images hazy: it is impossible to pin down exactly what happens and in what order. However, the following at least is clear: the book consists of six chapters, each one a long letter by a brother to his sister. In reincarnating the primordial brother and sister who commit incest in order to found a nation in the Kojiki, Ōe suggests that the brother and sister in his novel sometimes lead a single androgynous existence.

The village-as-microcosm-of-the-nation evoked in myth and history is located deep in the mountains of Shikoku Island. The topology of valley and village there duplicates that of The Silent Cry. The village was founded by a group of samurai expelled from a nearby fiefdom, but in myth they grew into a gigantic composite figure called “the Destroyer,” even though one of his attributes is creation. Also suggested in Ōe's novel is the episode of the leech child in the Kojiki, the tale of a terribly deformed baby born from the primordial siblings and cast away in a reed boat. In Ōe's version the baby is believed by the world to be dead but has survived and somehow arrives in the mountains of Shikoku to found his own nation. The deformed child is most likely a literary representation of Ōe's own retarded son.

Another interpretation of the myth and history of the village-as-microcosm-of-the-nation is that the world is actually the underground country of the dead. In the Kojiki the primordial sister dies while giving birth to fire, and her body decomposes in the country of the dead. One of the many names for the valley is “Kame,” meaning a large earthen vessel, and in this case it is a coffin in which a corpse sits with arms clasping the knees. This fetal position suggests a juxtaposition of death and rebirth. Thus the village-as-national-microcosm is a metaphor of the cycle of death and regeneration.

The fifty-day war between this village-microcosm and Imperial Japan is probably a condensed history of warfare from ancient times to the present, as well as in part a satire on the irresponsible way in which Imperial Japan fought World War II. The village, as the stronghold of the peripheral culture, will not merge with any central authority in Japan and refuses to pay taxes. In the beginning the villagers fight with a primitive natural weapon, a huge pond of human bodily waste; but when the Imperial Army's field artillery threatens to set fire to the forest, the village surrenders. For the villagers, forests are more important than their independence, since their psyche is directed toward the earth: they worship trees as life reborn from the earth, as part of the cycle of death and regeneration, a world view very close to that of the Druids.

Ōe's Rabelaisian grotesque realism generates many interesting characters. One of them, called “Shiri-me” (shiri means “buttocks” and me means “eye”), has no facial eyes, only a single eye between the buttocks: with a sight level lower than that of ordinary people, he represents the downward psyche of grotesque realism. Another character, antithetical to “Shiri-me,” is “Ki kara orin hito,” which means “the person who would not come down from the trees.” He lives in the trees, does not set foot on the ground, and is killed accidentally by the Japanese Army.⁵

The tree of life is the central image in Ōe's next book, a collection of two short stories and three novellas entitled, “Ame no ki” o kiku on'natachi (The Women Listening to “Rain Tree”; 1982). The stories and novellas here are linked together, and although each is an autonomous entity, characters from earlier stories appear in later ones and old episodes are often referred to. What links them all together is the image of the tree: “It has been named the ‘rain tree,’ for its abundant foliage continues to let fall rain drops collected from last night's shower until well after the following midday. Its hundreds of thousands of tiny leaves—fingerlike—store up moisture while other trees dry up at once. What an ingenious tree, isn't it?”⁶

The image of the “Rain Tree” begins in a positive context. The first story opens, “‘You probably want to see trees more than people, don't you?’ So saying, an American lady of German origin took me out of the parlor filled with people who had come to the party, crossed the spacious corridor and the porch, and led me to the huge expanse of darkness outside.”⁷ The huge expanse of darkness remains mysterious and the tree in it does not take shape until later, when the narrator discovers that the house in which the party is being held is actually an insane asylum and the partygoers inmates. The tree functions as a benevolent protector in response to the prayers of those people who wish somehow to overcome their madness.

In the later novellas, however, the tree begins to assume darker and more pessimistic overtones. Thus Ōe presents in this book the theme of ambivalence as embodied in the tree of life in its embryonic form. He develops and expands this image in a cosmic context in the more recent novels Sukuinushi ga nagurareru made (Until the Savior Gets Beaten; 1993) and Yureugoku (Vacillation; 1994), the first two parts of a projected trilogy whose general title is Moeagaru midori no ki (The Burning Green Tree). The final novel, Ōi naru hi ni (For the Day of Grandeur), will be published in the spring of 1995.

The title The Burning Green Tree suggests a clear sense of ambivalence concerning the fate of the universe and humanity. The trilogy is set in a valley and village of Ōe's native Shikoku mountains and deals with the typical Ōe topos, the episodes taking place in the same space as those of Contemporary Games, M/T to mori no fushigi (The M/T and the Wonder of the Forest; 1986), and Natsukashii toshi e no tegami (Letters to the Years of Fond Memories; 1987). At the beginning of the first novel, Until the Savior Gets Beaten, Ōe presents an archetypal folkloric belief: “When a soul leaves the body, it circles in the valley up to the top of the forest and sinks itself at the foot of a tree there” (33). This of course points to the cycle of death and rebirth through the tree and the ground in which the tree is rooted, a schematic presentation of the tree of life.

The notion of the ground connecting life and death and therefore providing the continuity between generations is quintessential to Ōe's “spatialized novels.”⁸ The great bamboo forest from which the peasant rioters had cut their spears in The Silent Cry reappears in Until the Savior Gets Beaten. Also, right next to the bamboo forest is the herb garden of the Destroyer from Contemporary Games. The cause of the conflict over which the main character gets beaten is the dam that he has built in the hollow of the village. Close ties with nature are reflected in the peasants' choice of weapon, in the healer/killer (medicine/poison) ambivalence of the Destroyer's herb garden, and in the life-giving water that eventually generates enmity between people. All these ambivalent elements are necessary to the modern myth that Ōe creates in his successive works, beginning with The Silent Cry.

Yet another example in this vein to illustrate that the village-as-national-microcosm in Contemporary Games is none other than the village in the trilogy is offered by a local historian in the novel: the name of the village used to be “Kame,” not because the shape of the valley is like that of a vessel, but because the villagers had a custom of burying the dead in vessels. This echoes perfectly the episode from Contemporary Games.

The folkloric healing power of the village/valley in Until the Savior Gets Beaten is embodied in the character of Ōbā (Granny), who dies of cancer soon after the story begins. She is also found in the 1986 novel The M/T and the Wonder of the Forest as the embodiment of “the Matriarch” (the M in M/T …) and was the narrator recounting in a diachronic narrative the episodes of Contemporary Games (T for “Trickster”). In the present volume Ōbā represents healing power as the reincarnation of the Destroyer from The Silent Cry. When she dies, the villagers bury her remains in the fetal position in the soil of the forest. Knowing that they are violating the law which mandates that all corpses be cremated, the conspirators burn an empty coffin in the village crematorium in order to deceive the other villagers. All this is to preserve the secret healing power of Ōbā, for they believe it can be protected even after she dies if they bury her uncremated. She had a magic touch that cured even the most desperately ill, reminiscent of Christ the Savior's touch that miraculously cured leprous Christians.

The character called Brother Gii becomes the successor to Ōbā's healing power quite by accident. When the empty coffin is burned, a hawk plunges through the smoke that wafts from the crematorium chimney while the villagers watch and lands momentarily on the chest of Brother Gii, who is standing on the plateau of the mountain. The onlookers, upon hearing a rumor that Brother Gii, injured by the claws of the hawk, happened to touch a young boy afflicted by heart disease, who soon thereafter recovered from his affliction, concoct a theory: the hawk had grabbed Ōbā's healing power from the smoke and had transmitted it to Brother Gii. Brother Gii, one of the conspirators involved in Ōbā's burial, does not believe any of this and is often bewildered. However, he has no choice but to go on playing the role of the healer, as the number of clients continually increases.

Gii first appears in The Silent Cry as a draft dodger who lives in the forest as a hermit. He remains in the forest long after the war ends and has now become one of the regular “village madmen.” Later on, Gii the hermit burns himself to death in the forest (in Letters to the Years of Fond Memories, 16), and his name is given by the villagers, in his memory, to a new character in the book. The Brother Gii of Letters to the Years of Fond Memories is known as a tree specialist who moved into the village to build a dam. He also plays an indispensable part in the formation of Ōe's cosmos in the eternal dream time, a kind of spatialized time of his native village in the mountains of Shikoku.

The image of Brother Gii in The Burning Green Tree not only overlaps that of his predecessor but also evokes one of Ōe's archetypal metaphors: the image of the swollen or crushed head. Of course, what generates this preoccupation for Ōe is his own son's head, which was about twice as big as a normal skull due to a brain hernia, as described in A Personal Matter. Thus the grotesque suicide who paints his head red at the beginning of The Silent Cry represents the violent nature of the student demonstrations against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty in the late 1960s. It also echoes the violent death of the hero Takashi at the end of the novel: he blows his head off with a shotgun.

Toward the end of part 1 of The Burning Green Tree, Brother Gii, the reluctant savior/healer, gets beaten by the enraged opposing villagers when Ōbā's remains are found floating on the waters of the dam he has built. Even though his injuries are not severe, his head swells to twice its size. Ōe subtly suggests in part 2 that the fate of Brother Gii resembles that of the hero Geoffrey Firmin in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (Vacillation, 38), whose name is an acronym of infirm. The character named Consul General in the trilogy is another echo of Under the Volcano: Lowry's Firmin, the Consul General in Mexico, is an alcoholic cuckold who is beaten to death at the end of the novel. Ōe's Consul, unlike Firmin, is a successful career diplomat who visits the village occasionally as the father of Brother Gii. The latter was brought up mainly in California by his parents, but he has chosen to remain in the village at the suggestion of Uncle K, who is easily identifiable as Ōe himself. The Consul General dies of heart failure in the village toward the end of part 2. His death is not mourned, however; instead, his life is celebrated.

The use of Under the Volcano as a major literary metaphor is also found in the stories from The Women Listening to “Rain Tree.” Ōe has consciously tried to “defamiliarize” his language, especially from The Silent Cry (1967) up to Contemporary Games (1979). From the “Rain Tree” stories on, however, his writing style changes drastically. The narrative structure is much less complex, the narrator is identifiable very closely with the author himself, and his lexicon is more an everyday one. All this helps to produce a clear re-creation of actuality. The author/narrator talks about his daily life with his retarded son Hikari as if he were writing a diary. At one point the father feels he has lost his raison d'être when his son makes a gesture of refusal toward him. Another time, during the author's stay in Mexico City, the son suffers an epileptic seizure so severe that it almost costs him his eyesight. All these family crises cause the father great anguish and lead him to pray for his son's healing. The mood in these stories is “grief” (aware in romanized Japanese). The rain tree is a symbol that provides compassion and protection for those people who suffer from physical afflictions, as does his son. Ōe creates a character named Kacchan Takayasu, the narrator's old classmate, in order to present this concept of aware. Takayasu is an alcoholic and drug addict who is also a self-pitying, obnoxious creature.

Mexico City is Ōe's metaphor of violent death. It is there that Carlos Nervo, a Peruvian scholar of Japanese literature, is dying of cancer, extremely afraid of the bodily pain he must experience before he dies. Therefore he wishes to hang himself. The rain tree here symbolizes salvation by death. Ōe thus turns personal experience into literary representation, framing his own actual experience in a more universal context. This context is Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. Ōe's other characters constantly refer to the book, to Lowry, or to the fate of the main character Firmin. A group of young musicians in Ōe's novel is named “Maquina Infernal,” and their new album, with a picture of an inverted rain tree on its jacket, is titled “Inverted Qliphoth.” These terms are taken directly from Lowry's cosmology and are based on the Jewish Cabala, in which the “Qliphoth,” for example, is the occult Tree of Life, an emblem of the Cabala, and in which the “Sephiroth” (or cosmic structure), when inverted, forms a tree of death. (Ōe cites Pearle Epstein's study The Private Labyrinth of Malcolm Lowry as his source.)⁹

Brother Gii builds his church in the village and tries to write a gospel for it. The emblem of the church is the burning tree, an image taken from Yeats and one that has some similarity to the Qliphoth in that the Tree of Life is green on one side and aflame on the other. The green side promises life, healing, and regeneration; the burning side prophesies the end of the world. This sense of uncertainty concerning the continuation of the world is reflected in Brother Gii's first sermon.

Time so long that it can be called “eternity” is not really what matters. What matters is probably this instant. Maybe for us the most important thing is to cherish time that lasts a little longer than an instant. … Yes, that is exactly what I want to do now. Time that lasts a little longer than an instant—I came across this phrase when I got off the school bus in front of our high school and was waiting for a green light in order to go across the street. I noticed a big sugar maple tree near the bus stop. It was that season in Berkeley when the leaves of many different sugar maples change their colors. Among different kinds of sugar maples there are about three groups of leaves that become red in turn. I was watching the leaves flutter in sea breezes, some deep red, some yellow, and others still pale green. Then the traffic light turned green, but I, as a high-school student, clearly said to myself, in Japanese, “I will wait for another green light. It is important to watch these maple leaves for a little bit longer than just an instant.”

(The Burning Green Tree, 1:148)

Kacchan Takayasu in the “Rain Tree” stories suffers from a fear of being forgotten. He suffers because he tries to live in the temporal framework of eternity. His son, Zachary Kacchan Takayasu, after his father has died, organizes a musical group called “Maquina Infernal” and recognizes the possibility of an apocalyptic end to the world, symbolized by the inverted rain tree on the group's album cover. In The Burning Green Tree Zachary comes to see Uncle K in Tokyo. He is interested in his uncle's novels, particularly in their treatment of village folklore. Uncle K sends him to his native village in the mountains of Shikoku, where he meets Sacchan, the narrator of this voluminous work. This narrator is a boy at the beginning but later turns into an androgynous being: Zachary arouses Sacchan's still-dormant female sexuality when he makes love to him/her. This is an incredible feat of the imagination in which Ōe symbolically embodies primordial sexual unity, an integral topos of his mythical cosmos ever since Contemporary Games.

Moreover, Sacchan expresses a wish to have a baby, and Ōe's model of primordial sexual unity is supposed to be able to reproduce itself without splitting into two sexes. At the end of Vacillation Sacchan refuses to go into Brother Gii's church, “because I did not want to have my pain lessened by anything that had anything to do with the church.” This declaration suggests an oncoming conflict in the last part of the trilogy with the seemingly harmonious world of Brother Gii's church, where a choir sings joyous songs celebrating the life of the Consul General.

Although the final outcome of the trilogy will not be known until the last installment, For the Day of Grandeur, is published, Ōe is very close to completing the mythic elaboration of his native village in Shikoku, a myth that now encompasses the cosmos. His novels The Silent Cry, Contemporary Games, The M/T and the Wonder of the Forest, Letters to the Years of Fond Memories, and The Burning Green Tree are all set in the same place, episodes are repeated with only minor variations, and characters from earlier works reappear or are referred to freely in later ones, as in the stories from The Women Listening to “Rain Tree.” Since these novels are organized primarily through the element of space, they may be called “spatialized novels,” works wherein the natural flow of time is rearranged so that a huge expanse of time can be viewed synchronically. Ōe also alludes to literary archetypes of established authors from world literature such as Blake, Dante, Lowry, and Yeats. His works are filled with quotations from such writers, and his episodes and characters are frequently molded on their topoi.

Thematically, one of Ōe's major preoccupations is healing and the pursuit of salvation from pain, the kind of pain that inevitably comes with life. His themes are closely related to his own personal problems and emotions, but he successfully distills them into a more universal context to produce a significant literary representation that is firmly grounded in human existence.

For serious students of literature, Kenzaburō Ōe's works are an inexhaustible treasure trove. However, for many Japanese literary critics who have very little interest in Western literary theory, Ōe remains an enigma. His writings, especially his recent ones, defy understanding even by Japanese intellectuals in general; this is probably due to the cobweblike intertextual relations between many of the works, some of which have been examined here. The evening edition of the leading Japanese national newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun, for 14 October 1994 published an essay by Shigehiko Hasumi, a literary critic and professor at Tokyo University, in which he argues convincingly:

Certainly Mr. Ōe's name is established in Japan as an international author, but, in spite of that, or because of that, rather, Japanese society has confined all of his activities in the image of the intellectual representing Japan, and has not paid serious attention to his works, to what he has to say. … In fact, for the past ten years, no comment has ever been made by anyone from the Japanese literati in order to convince the Japanese reading public how valuable Ōe's literature is.

When Yasunari Kawabata was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1968, his Snow Country became a household name. But how many Japanese have actually read the novel and appreciated it as it deserves? Kawabata's haunting evocation of the beauty of the East had to be first experienced by Westerners through translation. In a similar fashion, Ōe's highly sophisticated world of the imagination had to be recognized first by Westerners as part of world literature, as a body of work that deals unflinchingly with real human problems of modern times.

A few days after the announcement from Stockholm, the Japanese government offered Kenzaburō Ōe its Order of Culture, an award annually conferred upon four or five individuals who have made significant contributions to the advancement of Japanese society. Ōe declined the honor. His first comment was, “The Order of Culture does not become me.” He went on to say that he did not think the (publicly funded) government should issue such insignia so as to discriminate among people; he still believes in the kind of democracy that was the goal of the postwar reconstruction efforts.

Ōe has announced more than once, on television and in the newspapers, that the trilogy The Burning Green Tree will be his last work of fiction. He has added, however, that he will continue his activities as a man of letters in the hope of finding a new medium of expression other than fiction. Though the nature of that new medium remains a mystery, given Ōe's imaginative creativity, one can look forward to something highly original indeed.

Notes

1. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1983, p. 4.

2. Sanroku Yoshida, “An Interview with Kenzaburō Ōe,” WLT 62:3 (Summer 1988), pp. 369-74.

3. Ōe Kenzaburō, “Naze ningen wa bungaku o tsukuridasuka” [“Why Do Human Beings Create Literature?”], in Ōe Kenzaburō dōjidai rōnshu [Essays on Contemporary Issues], vol. 1, Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten, 1981, pp. 140-51. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

4. Ōe Kenzaburō, Kōzui wa waga tamashii ni oyobi [A Flood Unto My Soul], Tokyo, Shinchōsha, vol. 1, 1973, pp. 25-26.

5. For further discussion of Dōjidai gēmu [Contemporary Games] and other earlier works, please see my “Kenzaburō Ōe: A New World of Imagination,” in Comparative Literature Studies, 22:1 (Spring 1985), pp. 80-96.

6. Ōe Kenzaburō, “Ame no ki” o ki ku on'natachi [The Women Listening to “Rain Tree”], Tokyo, Shinchōsha, 1982, p. 34. This English passage is inserted in the Japanese text by the author.

7. Ibid., p. 9.

8. See Sharon Spencer, Space, Time, and Structure in the Modern Novel, New York, New York University Press, 1971, pp. 155-59.

9. Geoffrey Firmin (“infirm”), the main character in Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the Volcano, falls into an inferno represented by the Cabala's upturned Tree of Life. See David Markson, Malcolm Lowry's Volcano, New York, New York Times Book Co., 1978, pp. 23, 69.