SOURCE: Napier, Susan J. “The Lost Garden: Beginnings of a Mythic Alternative.” In Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the Fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo, pp. 17-42. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.

[In the following essay, Napier examines how the early works of Ōe and Mishima Yukio—particularly Ōe's “Prize Stock” and Pluck the Buds, Shoot the Kids and Yukio's Sound of Waves—represent a rejection of traditional Japanese narratives by focusing heavily on pastoral and dream-like themes.]

Memushiri was a dream world, emphatically separated from the wretched smell of reality that filled so many Japanese novels, reeking as they did with wormy Naturalism.

—Matsubara Shinichi¹

Among the writings of Oe and Mishima are three works that consciously separate themselves from the reality of postwar Japan. These narratives offer some of the most all-encompassing and appealing alternatives to the wasteland of modern Japanese society that either writer has ever presented, a set of explicitly pastoral dream worlds that surprised and captivated the Japanese reading public, enervated by the dreariness of the 1950s. The works in question, Oe's “Prize Stock” (“Shiiku”) and Pluck the Buds, Shoot the Kids (Memushiri kouchi), both written in 1958, and Mishima's Sound of Waves (Shiosai), written in 1954, not only were written around the same period but also share a quality of almost hyperpastoralism, in significant contrast to the reindustrializing economy that was emerging at that time.

Far from being celebrations of the changing economic environment, the three works are almost deliberately anti-modern, even anticapitalist. The Sound of Waves celebrates a traditional seafaring community full of hardy types who would be acutely uncomfortable in the complicated world of 1950s modernity. Oe's two narratives are more complex: Although both are set in idealized mountain villages, reality in the form of war frames the two stories and also ultimately forces its way into the narratives, undermining the idyllic ambiance that is carefully created in each work. The very intrusion of the technological machine of war, however, makes Oe's pastoral “dream worlds” an all the more attractive contrast, as Matsubara's comment suggests. Mishima's Sound of Waves was a particular surprise to readers familiar with his fondness for the grotesque and the sexual, while Oe's works, which were published just as he was beginning his career, charmed the critics with their very freshness.

Although Mishima and Oe are among the Japanese writers most aware of contemporary events, these three works are notable for being either virtual refutations of the contemporary (Mishima's Sound of Waves), or else attempts to transcend or escape the contemporary through a complicated and compensatory form of mythmaking (Oe's two works). Most Japanese writers in the mid 1950s were either still grappling with the war, as evidenced by Kawabata Yasunari's Sound of the Mountain (Yama no oto) of 1952, or else developing an avant-garde but often deeply pessimistic form of narrative, such as the writing of Ishikawa Jun or Abe Kobo. Mishima and Oe, on the other hand, present almost fairy-tale worlds of extraordinary charm, immune, at least in the short term, from the “influence of time.” In fact, the worlds in Oe's early work are virtually Edenic, as one Japanese critic suggests,² and Mishima's Sound of Waves has an innocent, almost prelapsarian quality.

The term pastoral is perhaps a more appropriate description than Edenic; for these works are, among other things, celebrations of primitive nature and innocence that are surprisingly close to the Greek pastoral tradition.³ Indeed, Mishima's novel is explicitly based on the Greek pastoral romance Daphnis and Chloe, while Oe himself has referred to his 1950s stories with the Japanese term bokkateki, which means “pastoral.” Besides their ties with Greek myths, the narratives also take part in the traditions of Japanese and Western fairy tales, and even children's adventure stories in the classic Swiss Family Robinson mode. In their uninhibited celebration of nature and sexuality, the works also draw on Shinto, the earliest of Japanese religious traditions. In terms of theme and imagery, then, the three works are fascinating hybrids of ancient and contemporary modes and Western and Japanese tradition; and, in their fundamental role of providing romantic alternatives to contemporary reality, the hybrids succeed remarkably well.

This success may partly result from another important element common to these works, a quality of youthfulness, which is applicable for three reasons: First, each work was written at a relatively early point in the author's career and thus represents a truly young writer's novel; second, each work contains a kind of exuberance and lightness not found in either writer's more mature fictions; and third, and most importantly, their narrative focalization is through either the eyes of a child or those of a young adolescent.

This youthful focalization is one of the most crucial elements behind the effective depictions of the pastoral theme in the three works. After all, the pastoral is inherently a child's world of innocence. An adult focus would only tarnish the fairy-tale like appeal of the texts, as indeed does occur in Oe's works when the focus shifts briefly to the adult world. Although lacking adult sophistication or complexity, the narratives provide a fresh vision of a lost youthful paradise, a vision notable for its absence in much of modern Japanese literature.

To create these worlds, both writers consciously apply fantasy and myth in combination with a fictional environment which, although still credible, is carefully set outside of contemporary urban society, the normal venue of most Naturalist novels. Their protagonists also differ in marked degree from the typical characters populating an I novel. Thus, Mishima's protagonists are notable for their “flatness”; they are stock fairy-tale creations who help to anchor The Sound of Waves firmly inside the world of romance. Oe's protagonists are usually drawn from a more realistic mode but, in the case of the black soldier in Oe's “Prize Stock,” the man's characterization is so removed from quotidian reality as to be a deliberate icon of the Other, a surreal being whom the protagonist both admires and fears. Oe's work never drifts into the total fantasy world of the fairy tale, however. In both of his texts, realism and romance contest each other throughout the narrative to produce a strangely disturbing, but extremely memorable, effect.

All three of the works are based on an outwardly directed, action-filled narrative structure, which also differentiates them from naturalist novels where much of what happens occurs inside the characters' minds. Indeed, the three stories correspond closely to Jerome Bruner's paradigm of myth as an externalization of the human psyche. As opposed to an internalization, that is, the inward mental journeys of numerous heroes in modern novels, the myth actually develops around external events: a war, a journey, a death.⁴ It is not surprising that in these three externally oriented works, passive intellectual heroes are absent. This is a world where intellect is not yet a necessity, where successful, spontaneous action is still possible. This is also a fictional world in which the narrative structure closely resembles what Joseph Campbell has called the “monomyth,” the archetypal story of the hero's adventure.

In the paradigm of the monomyth there are three basic elements: separation, initiation and return. As Campbell explains, “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won. The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”⁵ Other elements of the monomyth include the hero's crossing of a threshold (separation in psychological terms), supernatural aid, the orphaning of the hero, and a “road of trials” by which the hero is initiated into manhood or achieves glory. But at its most basic level, the monomyth is the story of the regeneration of the Wasteland as set forth with a definitive explication in Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough.

Classical Japanese literature is notable for its relative lack of mythic quests, in comparison to both the West and to such Chinese classics as Journey to the West, perhaps because goal attainment has been traditionally less important in Japan than the maintenance of the collectivity through continued endurance. Nor does modern Japanese literature focus much on action-filled quests. This absence may be due to Japanese literature's traditional lack of emphasis on Western-style linear narrative with a clear-cut beginning, middle, and end, and due also, of course, to the predominance of the I-novel confessional mode. In contrast to the I novel's privileging of intellectual ruminations, Mishima's novel is an action-filled romantic quest, while Oe's stories are striking examples of a young boy's initiation into manhood through a series of trials. In addition, since all three stories deal in such obviously fairy-tale discourse, they exemplify a sampling of the most comprehensive features of each author's alternative to the wasteland.

FESTIVAL DAYS: THE SOUND OF WAVES

Because Mishima's Sound of Waves is the simplest and purest in form of the three works, it can serve as a useful foil to the more complex and perverse visions that characterize Oe's stories. The Sound of Waves is an alternative to reality in its purest form; it is virtually a fairy tale that ends on a highly optimistic note. This upbeat aspect is not the only unusual characteristic of the novel. It is, as John Nathan comments, “the only love story that Mishima ever wrote that was not perverse.”⁶ Another unusual aspect of the novel is its explicit base in the fourth-century Greek myth of the shepherd boy Daphnis and the nymph Chloe. Interestingly, Mishima has ignored the fact that most versions of the myth end tragically and given his own work an unambiguously happy ending.

Literary influences aside, the setting of The Sound of Waves, although technically in Japan, differs greatly from the resurgent urbanizing and industrializing Japan of 1954. The story takes place on a beautiful island called Utajima (Song Island), far from the urban world in terms of culture and setting. The text opens with a long description of the physical environment, enumerating first the island's geographical position vis-à-vis the Japanese mainland and then highlighting its spiritual isolation with descriptions of such landmarks as “Yashiro Shrine” at which the island's inhabitants are “devout worshippers,” a religious characteristic seldom found among modern Japanese.

More than manmade artifacts, however, the novel emphasizes the natural world and the mutually fruitful relationship maintained between the island and its human inhabitants, most of whom are fishermen attuned to the rhythms of nature and the traditions of the past. In particular, Shinji, the novel's protagonist, exemplifies these characteristics, plus a number of others that are appropriate to a hero of myth or fairy tale: diligence, semi-orphanhood (his father is dead), and kindness to his elders, most notably in his filial piety to his mother. Unlike Oe's young heroes who are forced to create their own community of outsiders, Shinji is already happily ensconced within an outside community—a literal island isolated from the mainland/wasteland of Japan. Indeed, the only description of the mainland in the novel occurs when Shinji's younger brother travels over on a school excursion and returns raving about such material delights as pinball parlors. This brief contrast, however, only serves to underscore the island's idyllic isolation from reality.

The actual narrative itself is also largely separated from reality. The basic plot conforms to the structure of the monomyth in which the hero must prove himself through a series of trials before returning to reinvigorate the community. In The Sound of Waves, the physical trials revolve around Shinji's strength and endurance while the emotional tests gauge his courage and purity of heart, a set of trials very similar to those suffered by a hero of a medieval European romance.⁷ The plot is simple: Shinji falls in love with a beautiful village girl named Hatsue, who returns his love but dares not question her socially prominent father, who insists that she marry a man of similar social status to her.

Shinji and Hatsue endure a number of trials before their love wins out, including such climactic moments as Shinji's fight with the wealthy village bully, who also covets Hatsue; an attempt by the bully to rape Hatsue, which is foiled by the near miraculous intervention of an angry hornet; and a difficult moment when Shinji is afforded the opportunity to take advantage of Hatsue but manages at the last minute to overcome his baser urges. In the end, Hatsue's father devises one last test: he assigns Shinji and the bully to work on one of his boats and has the captain report on their behavior. Shinji triumphs easily, not only because of his obviously superior character, but from his sheer physical endurance when he successfully performs the task of swimming through stormy seas to secure the ship to a buoy.

The Sound of Waves is untainted by even a hint of realism. Shinji both fights his battles and receives his rewards within the romantic framework, finally achieving the “rights of manhood” in the eyes of Hatsue's father, who represents Utajima's fixed patriarchal structure. Mishima develops explicitly fantastic creations such as Hatsue's miraculous rescue by the hornet, or her dream in which she sees that Shinji is the reincarnation of Prince Deki, the former ruler of the island, without even attempting to ground them in a realistic framework. The romantic quality extends even to his description of the unconsummated sexual encounter between Shinji and Hatsue, a scene which is both charming and rather unlikely, since the two protagonists display a virtuousness that seems more natural to the pure-hearted young adolescents in Christian fables than the youth in traditional Japanese folk tales. In the following passage, for example, Mishima builds up a state of pleasurable erotic anticipation only to crush the reader's expectations by having his young lovers behave in a remarkably disciplined way:

The white chemise in the girl's hands had been half covering her body from breast to thigh. Now she flung it away behind her. The boy saw her and, standing just as he was, like some piece of heroic sculpture never taking his eyes from the girl's, untied his loincloth.

“Jump across the fire to me. Come on, if you'll jump across the fire to me” … They were in each others arms. The girl was the first to sink limply to the floor, pulling the boy after her.

“Pine needles, they hurt,” the girl said.

The boy reached for the white chemise and tried to pull it under the girl's body.

She stopped him. Her arms were no longer embracing him. She drew her knees up, crushed the chemise into a ball in her hands, thrust it down below her waist and, exactly like a child who had just thrown cupped hands over an insect in the bushes, doggedly protected herself with it.

The words that Hatsue spoke were full of virtue.

“It's bad. It's bad … it's bad for a girl to do that before she's married.”⁸

To readers familiar with Mishima's normally highly perverse view of sexuality, this passage must seem ironic in the extreme, especially the words “full of virtue.” Mishima quite obviously is not trying to paint a realistic portrait of adolescent sexuality; rather he is trying to present a beautiful picture of two aesthetically perfect creatures. Shinji, in particular is described in artificial terms, such as “heroic sculpture”; he is an icon of young male beauty, rather than a three-dimensional character. In the context of aesthetic eroticism, then, unconsummated passion is perhaps more satisfying than explicit sexuality. In the context of the pastoral form, this almost exaggerated emphasis on innocence simply underlines the implicit difference between the pastoral alternative and the fallen real world.

The Sound of Waves was a tremendous popular success; and although in later years Mishima referred to it as his “joke on the public,”⁹ the slightest hint of irony is absent from the text itself. Perhaps the entire work, with its celebration of youth and optimism, stood as an ironic gesture to the world by Mishima (always a possibility in Mishima, as will be seen in the discussion of “Patriotism”), but, at least in terms of the readers' enthusiastic response to the novel, it can be taken and appreciated on an unironic level as well.

Besides adolescent virtue, other key features play roles in this early alternative world. Not surprisingly, beauty in all forms—manmade, natural, and human—is a major element. For example, the novel introduces Shinji with an aesthetically pleasing passage:

After the sun had completely set, a young fisherman came hurrying up the mountain path leading from the village past the lighthouse … Mounting the flight of stone steps, he went on beyond Yashiro Shrine. Peach blossoms were blooming in the shrine garden, dim and wrapped in twilight.¹⁰

The image of peach blossoms recalls classical Japanese poetry as well as the “peach blossom village” of Taoist writings, a primitive utopia which exists only in the poet's imagination. The depiction of nature, traditional architecture, the shrine, and the traditional occupation of fisherman combine to make this a stock scene from virtually any classical East Asian painting. The opening thus serves as an invitation to an aesthetic, romantic, and finally historical escape; for this is a world where capitalism, modernization, and westernization play no part.

Another aspect of the alternative world is intensity, of both nature and emotion, which is in stark contrast to the brooding haze of apathetic despair that often surrounds the protagonist in the I novel. In a later passage, for instance, Mishima describes Shinji anticipating his next encounter with Hatsue:

Shinji looked up at the pouring rain, beating upon the eaves and spreading wetly against the windowpanes. Before, he had hated days when there was no fishing, days that robbed him both of the pleasure of working and of income, but now the prospect of such a day seemed the most wonderful of festival days to him. It was a festival made glorious, not with blue skies and flags waving from poles topped with golden balls, but with a storm, raging seas and a wind that shrieked as it came tearing through the prostrate treetops.¹¹

The language of this passage underlines the emotional excitement within Shinji, the feeling of intense anticipation metaphorically expressed in the raging storm and the sea. This excitement is not confined to natural objects, however, but is related to another aspect of Mishima's alternative world, sexual intensity. The passage precedes the previously quoted amorous encounter between Hatsue and Shinji, which despite (or perhaps because of) its rejection of the sexual act is one of Mishima's most erotic. Indeed, in contrast to Mishima's bleak portrayals of empty, manipulative sexuality in his more realistic works, such as Forbidden Colors, the erotic subtext of The Sound of Waves, with all its anticipation, naiveté and fundamental innocence, is a highly charged one.

The stereotypically beautiful imagery, the flat characterization, and the heightened tone of emotional intensity are all effective elements by which to compose a romantic vision, but even more important is the characterization of the overall setting. The term characterization is used advisedly here, because the island of Utajima and its community are as much a character as any of the actual protagonists. In discussing Frye's privileging of the hero in romance, Jameson makes the point that, rather than the hero himself, it is usually the “world” of the romantic hero that leaves the most permanent effect on the reader.¹² In Oe's “Prize Stock” and Pluck the Buds, Shoot the Kids, as well as in The Sound of Waves, the setting matches the importance of the action; and in Mishima's work, the setting overwhelms virtually all other elements.

The text begins with a two-page description of the island before focusing on Shinji, the nominal protagonist who, in his very flatness, is an obvious precursor of later Mishima heroes of action, the stalwart alternates to the realistic, complex and usually miserable protagonists who serve as his human symbols of the postwar wasteland. Far more important than Shinji is the community in which he lives, a nostalgic evocation of a simple, wholesome society. Obviously, such a society could never actually exist, but the nostalgia of the modern writer for that otherworldly pre-industrial community is not limited to the Japanese.

In this regard, it is especially significant that Mishima makes this community a sea-based village; for, even today, seafaring work is one of the few tasks in postindustrial society that still maintains ties to the Gesellschaft, the community existing before the alienation of human beings from their products. The sea is also of course the ultimate romantic icon, the place of mystery and potentiality in a world with little of either. Throughout his oeuvre, Mishima consistently highlights the sea, both in terms of its otherworldly quality but also, perhaps surprisingly, as a place of work; for one part of Mishima's alternative vision is the primitive collectivity exemplified by the fishermen. This is featured unironically in The Sound of Waves and thoroughly ironically in the later The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (Gogo no eikō), and finally, problematically, in the final volume of Mishima's tetralogy, where Toru “falls” from the relatively wholesome life of lighthouse keeper into the depraved world of upper-class Japanese society.

In a discussion of Conrad's Lord Jim, Jameson underscores the importance of the author's depiction of his hero as a sailor and his placing him at the vast reaches of empire and on the surface of “the place that is a non place,” the sea, “the space of the degraded language of romance and daydream, of narrative commodity and the sheer distraction of ‘light literature.’”¹³ Of course, Mishima's setting of The Sound of Waves on an island can be seen as having a realistic base, since a peripheral island community is more likely traditional than an urban area; but the other textual elements noted previously tend to subvert any possible thread of realism. In any case, this primitive community, where all know their place and are united through their work and in their fellowship (Hatsue herself is a pearl diver, and the best in the village, but her skill never engenders jealousy or rivalry), is an almost textbook example of an idealized precapitalist society. In its idealization of simple physical labor, it is also, of course, an implicit contrast to the empty work that so many of Mishima's intellectuals produce.

The notion of a “non-place” such as the sea, is vital to both Mishima's and Oe's imaginary realms, but The Sound of Waves is one of the few occurrences of the “non-place” being presented at face value, with no disturbing overtones. Although there are ironies in the fact that this atypical story was the first of Mishima's works to be translated in the United States, its very success there as well as in Japan suggests that its celebration of youth, innocence, and beauty generates universal appeal.

REPLETION AND RHYTHM: “PRIZE STOCK”

In contrast to Mishima's unalloyed vision of a fairy-tale world, Oe's two texts subvert their essentially romantic and mythic qualities by introducing a realistic focus at climactic points in the narratives, thus making their initial pastoral visions even more enticing. However, more so than in the atypical Sound of Waves, these alternative pastoral communities, isolated in the mountains from the rest of Japan, became the staple environment of many of Oe's fictional products. They are consistent, spiritual reference points, yearned-for “non-places,” where his characters retreat in times of crisis in order to escape the alienation of modern Japan, by drowning themselves in the all-encompassing sense of kyōdōtai (communality), a word and a feeling that are usually associated in Oe's works with primitivism, violence, and nature.

“Shiiku,” which was translated into two English versions—“Prize Stock” and “The Catch,” won Oe his second Akutagawa prize in 1958. The critics were enchanted by it. In both subject matter and narrative style, it is an original and affecting story. Its basic outlines are realistic, comprising the development of a friendship between a young village boy and a captured black American soldier during the Second World War. But this is not the sentimental story of a cross-cultural friendship such a summary would lead one to expect: The boy is a country child living in a remote part of Japan; to him and his friends, the soldier becomes something between a god and a pet animal. Furthermore, far from having a sentimentally upbeat conclusion, the story has the soldier turn on the boy and take him hostage when villagers come to deliver him to the authorities. The townsfolk manage to kill the soldier and save the child, but the cost is great—his father is forced to smash the boy's hand with a hatchet in order to free his child from the soldier's grip.

Of course, far more is lost than the boy's hand; it is his innocence which is sacrificed. “I was no longer a child,”¹⁴ the boy states at the end of the novella; but, as one Japanese critic notes, the child is not an adult either.¹⁵ Rather, he has become an outcast, and he has far more in common with the dead soldier than he does with any of the members of his previously idyllic country community.

“Prize Stock” brilliantly explores the problematic relation between innocence and primitivism throughout the story by outlining the relationship between boy and soldier, and soldier and village, only through the child's eyes. The soldier and the village children form a positive kind of primitive community, while the supposed adults, in their war-engendered violence and slyness, come across as barbarians of a particularly vicious kind. The story also plays on the archetypal pattern of the transition from innocence to experience; like The Sound of Waves, it narratively limns a boy's initiation into manhood. In chilling distinction from Mishima's story, however, where the initiation ends on a positive note, “Prize Stock” leaves its protagonist longing emptily for the pre-initiation days of childhood innocence.

The story begins in a world of death, although its young protagonists are not consciously aware of this, as is clear in the striking opening lines, “My kid brother and I were digging with pieces of wood in the loose earth that smelled of fat and ashes at the surface of the crematorium …”¹⁶ These lines serve to introduce the unnamed narrator, who initially serves a bystander function similar to the roles played in other Oe stories by the ubiquitous older, passive intellectuals. Here, the boy's first function is to observe and to mythicize his observations, transforming an unusual wartime experience into a mythic allegory through his consistent association of the black soldier with the Other. His second function is more participatory—to undergo a rite of passage from innocence to experience. Thus, “Prize Stock” functions on two levels: It uses its mythic and romantic trappings to create an alternate world and thus compensate for the ugliness of reality; and, through the narrative of the young boy's loss of innocence, it sends out an unambiguous ideological message that war is evil.

For both structural and didactic reasons, it is not surprising that the story begins in a crematorium, a pit of death. The image of the pit recurs in Oe's later writings (once in “Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness,” twice in The Silent Cry), and acts as an obvious metaphor for a mythic “threshold,” the place the hero must enter before he begins his journey. Structurally, the pit suggests a narrative movement upward and out, a kind of rebirth reinforced by the womblike aspects of the pit. As it turns out, however, the rebirth is a degraded one, an emergence into the unwanted agonies of adult perception, the realm of the Symbolic: rather than an outward movement, the story ends in yet another pit of death. The pit is also linked with war, because the innocent boys are digging for bones to use in making medals. Thus, on the very first page, “Prize Stock” sends out an insistent ideological reminder, while at the same time preparing the reader for a journey, although it is a largely psychological rather than physical excursion.

After the opening in the crematorium, the narrator's entrance into the “adventure” part of the narrative occurs through the medium of the black soldier. Upon leaving the pit, the boy sees the pilot's plane crash and rushes to the village to await the coming of the soldier, an arrival that is portrayed in highly dramatic terms. After a period of suspenseful anticipation, just when the narrator feels he will “go mad with waiting,” the soldier appears encircled by his captors. The narrator continues:

With the other children I ran out to greet them and saw a large black man surrounded by adults. Fear struck me like a fist.

Surrounding the catch solemnly as they surrounded the wild boar they hunted in winter, their lips drawn tightly against their teeth, their backs bent forward almost sadly, the adults came walking in. The catch … wore a khaki jacket and pants, and on his feet, ugly heavy-looking boots. His large, darkly glistening face was tilted up at the sky still streaked with light, and he limped as he dragged himself along. The iron chain of a boar trap was locked around both his ankles, rattling as he moved. We children fell in behind the adults as silent as they were.¹⁷

Here is the Other incarnate, in all its fearsome aspects. Not only is the man a soldier and an American, he is black, which makes him almost insuperably alien to Japanese village children in whom “fear strikes like a fist,” perhaps an omen of the boy's crushed hand. His alienness is emphasized in the opening description: “a large black man surrounded by adults.” The soldier is not an adult. Rather, the narrator immediately equates him with the untamed and dangerous animal world of the boar hunt and the catch, noting that his ankles are bound by a boar trap.

The black soldier's associations are not only with the animal world, they are with myth. For example, in the above passage the soldier's face is “tilted up to the sky,” reminding the reader and perhaps the observers that he does not come from some dark lair, like a wild boar, but from the heavens, like a god. Finally, the entire tableau itself—the following of solemn adults and silent children, the tall, isolated man in chains, and the sense of fear that surrounds the entire procession—evokes images of ritual sacrifice.

The black soldier is consistently inarticulate throughout the narrative (except when he sings what appears to be a soulful Negro spiritual), reinforcing both his nonhuman nature and his total belonging to the preverbal world of the Imaginary. It is precisely this genuine primitivism (as opposed to the degraded barbarism of the evil adults) that makes him the object of such fascination to the innocent children.

For the children do not remain permanently in fear of the soldier, and the first part of “Prize Stock” can be read as a monomythic story of a boy going through trials and learning to conquer his fear of the unknown. In fact, the fear seems to change to something close to a blend of worship and patronizing affection. The narrator's father assigns him the task of looking after the black soldier; and, after much initial hesitation, the boy finally becomes friendly with and even makes a “pet” out of the “catch.”

Deciding that the soldier is “as gentle as a domestic animal,”¹⁸ and even “like a person”¹⁹ (thus reinforcing the soldier's essential ambiguity), the narrator and his friends liberate the prisoner from the cellar keep; and it is this liberation which ushers in the high point of the story, a vision of primitive pastoral plenitude, as the description of the scene at the village swimming hole illustrates:

Wet and reflecting the strong sunlight, his nakedness shone like the body of a black horse, full and beautiful. We clustered around him, splashing and shouting … Suddenly we discovered that the black soldier possessed a magnificent, heroic, unbelievably beautiful penis. We crowded around him bumping naked hips, pointing and teasing, and the black soldier gripped his penis, planted his feet apart fiercely like a goat about to copulate and bellowed.

… How can I describe how much we loved him, or the blazing sun above our wet heavy skin, that distant splendid summer afternoon, the deep shadows on the cobblestones, the smell of the children, and the black soldier, the voices hoarse with happiness, how can I convey the rhythm and repletion of it all?

To us it seemed that the summer … would continue forever and never end.²⁰

Aside from its own intrinsic beauty, the above passage is a reminder of certain similarities between Greek and early Shinto myths. Both religions interweave gods and nature; and the gods themselves occupy a problematic space between divinity, humanity, and animal nature. The sheer ecstatic celebration of nature, however, in particular the water imagery, is distinctively Japanese, if not necessarily consciously Shinto. In addition, the imagery of bright sunlight and luxuriant water suggests an intensity of experience that can only be appreciated by children or by adults who have not been corrupted by the realities of the war and modernity in general. The children's matter-of-fact acceptance of the soldier's sexuality suggests a world of joyous primitive innocence, a pagan rite somehow transposed to the twentieth century, a point that is supported in the text's reference to the children as “woodland gods” or “Pans.”²¹

The ending of “Prize Stock” also suggests a pagan rite of dark sacrificial violence, but it is a ceremony that forces the narrator back into the realities of the twentieth century. The day following the pastoral idyll at the swimming hole, the adults come to take the soldier hostage. Transformed from the half god, half animal to the shockingly human, the panic-stricken soldier takes the narrator hostage in an attempt to save himself. Instead, both the narrator and the soldier are sacrificed. In a scene where the savage but slow-motion violence recalls a ritual killing, the boy watches paralyzed as,

[f]rom 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 bent down over 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 into a scream and I heard the smashing of my left hand and the black soldier's skull.²²

The screams that erupt through the cellar suggest the agonies of birth, but on the part of the narrator, who must leave the wordless realm of the Imaginary for the pitiless realm of the Word of the Father. Conversely, the soldier is once and forever removed from the realistic realm. Indeed, at the story's end he returns once again as the negative, fearsome Other, an angry ghost back to haunt the village through the relentless odor of his cremated body: “The odor fountaining furiously from the black soldier's heavy corpse blanketed the cobblestone road and the buildings and the valley supporting them, an inaudible scream from the corpse that encircled us and expanded limitlessly overhead as in a nightmare.”²³

In this story, language, in its simplest form, is the stuff of nightmares, expressing a world of fear and pain with no way out. The soldier's inaudible scream will ring forever in the narrator's ears.

The events in “Prize Stock” are believable, once the unlikely possibility of a black American pilot dropping from the heavens into a rural Japanese village is accepted. The overall impression left by the narrative is of a romantic pastoralism similar to that of The Sound of Waves, however. The three most important elements that create this effect are, first, the isolation and anonymity of the setting (as Shinohara Shigeru points out, since none of the characters have proper names and are identified only by nickname or family relationship, the village could occupy any country, any time, or even an alternate mythic world;²⁴ in other words, it is a “non-place”); second, the use of the child's perspective; and, third, the exalted language surrounding the black soldier. The children's excitement and awe at the soldier are effectively conveyed in such scenes as at the swimming hole. The soldier himself is conveniently mute, an icon to be interpreted, rather than a realistic human character.

The final effect of this romanticism and mythicization is not to let the reader escape from reality, but to make the final awakening to reality, the smashing of the boy's hand, all the more traumatic. Ultimately, “Prize Stock” employs romantic and mythic modes that both evoke the imaginary and serve to highlight the horrors of the real world, a place where fathers smash their own sons' hands. The story begins in one pit, the crematorium, ascends to the heavens from which the soldier comes, and ends in another pit, the cellar where the soldier dies, to underscore the fact that real escape is impossible. In fact, the narrative's actual ending, a rather curious coda in which the boy's one adult friend Clerk is killed while indulging in the overtly childish sport of sledding, seems designed merely to emphasize once again that there can be no return to the Eden of childhood.

THE SACRIFICE OF THE INNOCENT WRIT LARGE: PLUCK THE BUDS, SHOOT THE KIDS

The elements of isolation and child focalization also contribute importantly to the superbly unreal world of Oe's Pluck the Buds, Shoot the Kids and again serve to make the ideological point that war grotesquely distorts the adult and sacrifices the innocent. Again, what makes this less than startlingly original point so refreshing is the richly depicted utopian world of the children that is offered up to the sacrifice. As Oe's first long novel, Pluck the Buds offers a comprehensive vision of what Isoda has called Oe's “Garden of Eden”: a pastoral community more fully realized than the village in “Prize Stock,” and one more perfect, because initially there are no negative adults to ruin it, a condition that enables the young inhabitants to band together in a shared sense of kyōdōtai.

Oe's version of kyōdōtai is an important ingredient in his alternative to postwar reality; it suggests a simpler world of beings grouped together for a common good and is resonant of both childhood game-playing and the Gesellschaft. Unlike Mishima in The Sound of Waves, however, who creates a contemporary Gesellschaft through placing it on an isolated island, Oe in Pluck the Buds, as in “Prize Stock,” uses the artificiality of war with its deforming and destructive qualities to create a temporary community that exists in reality only under these exceptional circumstances. Also, as in “Prize Stock,” the text forces reality in at the end of the novel to destroy the carefully wrought pastoral atmosphere.

Like “Prize Stock,” Pluck the Buds is set in an isolated village in the mountains and focuses on children who have been damaged by the adult world. In further structural similarity, this novel also skirts a thin line between fantasy and reality, although once again all the depicted events slip just within the bounds of plausibility. Even more than “Prize Stock,” however, it creates a quintessential children's, or at least boys', world of adventure and liberation in a “non-place.” In this regard, Pluck the Buds bears a certain resemblance to Huckleberry Finn, especially when Huck and Jim enjoy themselves in the “non-place” of the raft on the river; this similarity is probably not fortuitous since Oe is a devoted fan of Twain's book, as evidenced by his essay, “Huckleberry Finn and the Problem of the Hero.”²⁵

Pluck the Buds, however, is more overtly “mythic,” in the sense of explicitly exalting its characters and its setting to an otherworldly level, while remaining as morally engaged as Twain's story. The heightened descriptions in the introduction are particularly romantic, evoking a world sharply estranged from normality. Thus, an early section of the novel sets the scene: “It was a time of killing people. Like an endless flood, the war had poured its collective craziness into every fold of human emotion, into every corner of the body, into the trees, the road, and the sky.”²⁶

Various clues suggest that the war mentioned in the passage is the Second World War, but this is never specifically stated in the novel. Rather, the text simply introduces the reader to “a time of killing people,” with the emphasis on the special character of the “time” signaling that the work is not primarily realistic and its events should be seen through an allegorical lens. Thus, the passage goes on to speak of the young boys who make up the little group of protagonists, who are described in romantic, generalizing terms: “During that period, when adults lost their senses and rushed around the town, it is probably sufficient to record that there was a strange passion to continue the imprisonment of youths who possessed nothing more than smooth skin and shiny hair, who had performed some trifling misdeed, and who were simply judged as possessing anti-social tendencies.”²⁷ Even more than the narrator in “Prize Stock,” these boys are characterized as anonymous victims who, because of some “trifling misdeed,” are being sacrificed by society.

Once the text establishes the rather unworldly innocence of its protagonists, much of the remaining action is described in brutally realistic terms. These boys are not mythic heroes but are in fact a group of abandoned juvenile delinquents, marginals. Indeed, they are abandoned three times: First they are renounced by their parents (in a touching early scene, the narrator is overjoyed to see his father and younger brother, whom he assumes have come to claim him from the institution where he has been incarcerated, only to discover that his father is actually handing his younger brother over to the institution since he feels incapable of caring for him). The second abandonment occurs when the officials of the institution turn them out and force them to journey through the mountains in search of a village that will accept them as laborers. Finally, the villagers in their new home abandon them. Upon discovering that plague has broken out in the village, the residents flee to the next hamlet, leaving the boys to take over the village and do as they please.

The themes of abandonment and betrayal are important ones in modern fiction; but in many modern novels the betrayal is carried out by the protagonist, often on political grounds, as is the case with the intellectual heroes of Sartre and Camus. This atmosphere of political treachery relates to the anxiety of the intellectual who feels incapable of contributing to society, but who feels guilty at his incapacity, and is a theme clearly evident in much of Oe's later fiction. But the betrayal here is on the deepest level, by what should be an all-knowing father of his own son. Of course, in Pluck the Buds it is not only the father per se but the authorities in general, those who make up the patriarchal order, who suddenly and inexplicably (from the boys' point of view) turn on their own children.

In Pluck the Buds, the “hero” is basically a collective entity, the group of abandoned youths, although the narrator remains the focalization point. The basic elements of the story, orphanhood (in this case figurative), the journey (in this case quite literal, since a good part of the text narrates the details of the boys' painful progression through the mountains), and, above all, the various trials of endurance, both physical and emotional, which the boys must endure, all compose a monomythic narrative. Furthermore, much of the novel's structure mirrors a generic adventure story, such as Swiss Family Robinson or the Enid Blyton adventure stories, in which children lost on a desert island or in the wilds learn to live off the land until rescued. In the case of Pluck the Buds, however, the “rescue” turns out to be a sham, because the adults destroy the world made by the children.

The war rumbles only on the margins of this adventure story, making it perhaps even more effective when the text occasionally throws up reminders of the battles and other elements of the real world. These reminders include a diverse group of characters, who also function as companions to the heroes on their mythic journey. One, a Korean boy named Chin, whose settlement has also been abandoned by the Japanese villagers, becomes the narrator's good friend after an initial fist fight—another obvious ritual trial on the road to growing up. At the same time, the presence of Chin, whose Korean background renders him an alien even among outsiders, also serves to remind readers of the racist aspects of Japanese society, a culture that permits the sacrifice of Koreans along with delinquents. The other companions include a deserter from the army (within Oe's antiwar ideology a “good” adult), a stray dog named Leo, whom the narrator's younger brother adopts, and a little girl who becomes the narrator's first love.

For a brief time, these outsiders band together in a surprisingly harmonious community that is complete with such pleasures as hunting and a “festival amid the snow.” The exhilaration reaches its peak after a snowfall that sends the boys temporarily mad with joy, in a sort of winter counterpart of the idyllic summer captured in “Prize Stock.” As the narrator describes it: “Outside was a totally fresh and silent dawn. The fallen snow had hidden the textures of the trees and bushes, giving them a plumpness like the rounded shoulders of animals. The snow glittered and sparkled in the limitless brilliance of the sun. ‘Snow,’ I thought, letting out a warm sigh. ‘Snow.’ In all my life I had never seen such abundant, luxurious snow.”²⁸

This vision of plenitude is the novel's most thorough alternative to the wasteland that lurks just outside the borders of the village. After the snowfall, the boys participate in their “festival of the snow and the hunt,” where they sing Japanese and Korean folk songs, feast on a pheasant they have trapped, and get drunk on the beauty of the snow and the special fortune of their situation. The childlike appeal of the adventure is underscored by its resolute masculineness; all the characters are male except for the little girl; and all, once abandoned by the villagers, engage in traditional masculine pursuits of hunting and trapping, unthreatened by female sexuality. These pursuits are also strongly group-oriented, suggesting the attraction of a collective, nondifferentiated form of bonding in this imaginary realm.

Sexuality does exist, of course; but it is a spontaneous and basically innocent sexuality, as was also the case in “Prize Stock” where the children gaze in open wonder at the black soldier's penis. In Pluck the Buds sexuality advances to the adolescent stage of The Sound of Waves when the narrator attempts to make love to the abandoned girl. In Mishima's story, actual consummation is avoided; here it is problematic, if not quite a failure, and the encounter is described in direct and simple terms, although with a most un-Mishimaesque sense of humor, as the following passage illustrates:

Excitement was stirring inside me. Suddenly it welled up, making me dizzy. I grasped the girl's arm roughly and pulled her up … I could no longer see her pale little face. Like a chicken scampering helter-skelter to escape its pursuers, I gripped the girl's body tightly in my arms and rushed into the dark storehouse. Not stopping to take off my shoes, I climbed onto the bed, which was in total darkness.

Still silent, I hurriedly pulled at my trousers and lifted up her skirt. Then I fell down on top of her. I moaned. My penis, as erect as a stalk of asparagus, was caught in my underpants and felt as if it was about to break off. And then, the contact with the panic-stricken girl's cold genitals, like dried paper. And then, after a slight trembling, the withdrawal. I let out a deep sigh. And that was all.²⁹

Judging from the boy's description, it does not appear to be a particularly enjoyable sexual encounter, especially for the girl; yet the narrator, at least, is content. In Oe's early fictional worlds, the satisfaction of the female characters is unimportant as long as the male protagonist achieves his connection with bliss.

This sense of contentment also occurs when he breaks off another encounter with the girl to see the spoils of a hunt:

[A]s I rushed towards the woods where my little brother was watching for me among the rose thickets, I felt as if I might go crazy with the feelings of pride and delight that were rising up in me. I had my very own fine and adorable love and nobody knew but me. Breathlessly, I climbed up the slope tumbling often in the snow. I heard the sound of snow falling softly behind me as I ran through the laden trees towards the manly bounty of the hunt.³⁰

This sense of post-sexual exultation and omnipotence parallels the following passage from The Sound of Waves, which occurs after the aforementioned unconsummated encounter between Shinji and Hatsue:

From time to time the dying fire crackled a little. They heard the sound and the whistling of the storm as it swept past the high windows, all mixed with the beating of their hearts. To Shinji it seemed as though the unceasing feeling of intoxication and the languid booming of the sea outside and the noise of the storm among the treetops were all beating with nature's violent rhythm. And, as part of his emotion there was the feeling forever and ever, of pure and holy happiness.³¹

In each example, the erotic meeting brings to the young man a simultaneous sense of peace and exultation that is translated into a feeling of oneness with the natural world. This diverges sharply from the ugly and manipulative encounters described in the two writers' more realistic texts.

In Oe's fiction the sexual and nature-inspired euphoria does not last. In the midst of the festival, the narrator hears that the girl is dying of the plague, having been bitten by Leo, the younger brother's dog. She dies in agony; the younger brother (who is even more innocent and even more of a sacrifice) runs away and is accidentally killed; and the villagers return in a grim scene, which signals the triumph of the wasteland: “The mist was clearing, and we could see the cloudy sky low on the horizon, filled with the damp gleam of morning and softening the newly refrozen dirty snow mixed with mud. My companions and I were led out of our temporary shelter. And all around, gradually growing in number, the villagers encircled us, grasping bamboo spears and hunting rifles, their faces stiffened into expressionless masks.”³² Once again, the Edenic world is shattered; and the boys' adventure story ends on a note more appropriate to Lord of the Flies than to Swiss Family Robinson, with the difference being that it is the adults with their spears, rifles, and “masks” who revert to barbarity, like the children in Golding's novel.

In romance the hero triumphs over physical odds and human dangers; but in realistic novels, especially the novels of the twentieth century, the hero does not even dream of such triumphs and, if he does, his awakening is painful. The fantasy kingdom of the boys' alternative world, where even violence is simple and regenerative, is destroyed by the formalized violence inherent in the adult world of war, hypocrisy and betrayal. Within the imaginary world the youths prove victorious over all trials but, with the advent of the realistic denouement, they are reduced once again to sniveling children.

The hypocrisy and reversal of values that are standard to the real world are brutally evident in a “trial” which the boys are forced to undergo as the villagers cast accusations against them for breaking into the village houses. Confused, the boys turn on each other and eventually agree to the villagers' wishes: They will not inform the authorities about their abandonment by the villagers if the villagers, in turn, agree not to press charges against them. With this twist, the rightful accusers become the accused, and the carefully built up atmosphere of kyōdōtai is totally destroyed; the boys have acquiesced to the false Words of the Fathers. Only the narrator refuses to comply with this sell-out and in the end is forced to flee the village, leaving behind his friends, his dead younger brother, his dead love, and his dead dreams. The novel's last lines illustrate the full impact of encroaching reality: “I wasn't sure if there was any strength left in me to start running again. I began to sob tears of rage and exhaustion. After all, I was only a child trembling with cold and hunger. Suddenly a wind sprang up and brought with it the sound of the villagers' pursuing footsteps from somewhere nearby. I gritted my teeth and stood up and ran in search of refuge in among the still deeper trees toward the still darker grasses.”³³

Refuge, however, is elusive in Pluck the Buds. The text makes clear that this final escape is an escape into darkness. In formal terms, both Pluck the Buds and “Prize Stock” can be seen as warped rite of passage stories, stifled Bildungsroman, in which a boy leaves behind his innocence but not necessarily in order to enter the world of experience. Rather, once their mythic worlds are shattered, these heroes are left to wander miserably, with nowhere to go except into the outer darkness of reality. In Lacanian terms they are sacrificed from the Imaginary into the world of the Symbolic but are unable to accept their new circumstances. Unlike Mishima's Shinji, who in the intact romantic world of The Sound of Waves can adjust to the Word of the Father (in his case, Hatsue's father), Oe's characters are expelled into fragmented new worlds where the Word of the Father is false. Within the mythic confines of each Oe narrative, the heroes succeed: The boy in “Prize Stock” finds courage to befriend an alien Other, while the narrator of Pluck the Buds survives abandonment in the cold to create his own mythic kingdom and win the love of a young girl. At the moment success is attained, however, the romantic genre abruptly stops, forcing the heroes and the readers out of the comfortable fantasy land that the texts' evocative descriptions make momentarily believable. The wasteland cannot be reinvigorated. All that remains are brief visions of plenitude.

Based on their generic discontinuities, Oe's novels can be interpreted as nihilistic visions of romance's inevitable subjugation to realism. The works can also be read in terms of Suleiman's concept of the ideological novel. Although very different from a typical roman à thèse in style and subject matter, both works contain a number of elements that suggest the presence of an ideological message. These indications include an essentially black-and-white value system, a structure that uses the rite-of-passage/Bildungsroman style for didactic purposes, and a reliance on redundancy.

Similar to the ideological novel with its Manichean value system, both Pluck the Buds and “Prize Stock” establish a major cleavage between “good” and “bad” characters, usually children and outcasts versus adults/fathers/authority, with very little ambiguity of interpretation possible. Imagery also serves to enhance this dichotomy—sunshine, water, spontaneous sexuality, and luxuriant snow, compare with various types of pits, muddy snow, mist, and the darkness into which the narrator runs at the end of Pluck the Buds.

Structurally, too, the subversion of the traditional happy ending of the monomyth underlines the stories' bleak message. In the monomyth the protagonist learns by trial and error to be a hero. Oe, however, plays on the reader's expectations of the monomyth or even of its nineteenth-century development in the Bildungsroman and then shatters these projections by revealing the lessons learned by the hero: War is bad and adults, or at least society, are evil. To grow up and fit into that society is an immoral, ideologically reprehensible act. Thus, the protagonist must escape at the end, rather than return to help regenerate the wasteland.

On the positive side of the message, the hero and the reader are allowed a glimpse of an alternative world, a childish realm close to nature, that completely contrasts with adult reality. The similarity between Oe's works and a true roman à thèse ends here, however. Unlike a more overtly ideological novel, Oe's work does not contrast liberal humanism to fascism in any explicit terms. The reader must make the final interpretation, which is a simple task if the reader responds to the power of the text. Furthermore, even if the boys are “sacrificed” in the story, they—or at least the narrator—retain their innocent nobility, which produces an ending that is not totally pessimistic. As Suleiman says of an apparently failed hero in the roman à thèse, “if the hero is defeated, he can nevertheless claim a spiritual or moral victory, since he is right.”³⁴ And, as far as the ideological message of Oe's narratives is concerned, these heroes are unquestionably “right.”

Mishima's Sound of Waves is even less overtly ideological than the two Oe works. No immediate links can be drawn between the simple natural beauty of Utajima and the aesthetic militarism that animates his later, more genuinely ideological novels. However, the privileging of the simple seafaring community, at ease with itself and its traditions, is an obvious swipe at the prosaic pinball parlors of modern Japan. The stalwart, beautiful, and unthinking “good” protagonists are prototypes of his later characters who are cast into a more rigid political framework.

In these early works of Oe and Mishima, the underlying philosophy which they are trying to promote is less distinguishable than in later stories; but no question arises that a “wrong” and a “right” way to behave exist and that the heroes have conducted themselves in the “right” way. The boy's willingness to warn the black soldier in “Prize Stock,” the narrator's unwillingness to go along with the morally reprehensible villagers and his turncoat comrades in Pluck the Buds, and Shinji's determination to win Hatsue in a fair competition in The Sound of Waves are all examples of a superior moral vision, while Shinji's handsomeness and strength suggest what was probably even more important to Mishima, an aesthetic image superior to common mortals.

These works also deserve to be examined in terms of redundancy, an area that covers everything from simply verbal repetitiveness and recurring themes and characters to a clear, constantly reiterated authorial interpretation. Redundancy occurs naturally in all discourse, but it is a particularly significant aspect of the ideological novel. Since a roman à thèse is a novel with a thesis, a message that must be communicated or taught, it is not surprising that one of its key stylistic elements is redundancy.

A closer examination of Oe's and Mishima's texts reveals a fairly high degree of redundancy in at least two areas—character formation and interpretive commentary. In terms of characters, one notable aspect of both Oe novels is the strong emphasis on the group. Suleiman's statement that “the members of the group merge into a single collective hero,”³⁵ is applicable here, although the narrator does have his own specific feelings and does experience his own personal suffering. But it significant that these emotions—fear and awe in “Prize Stock” and fear, exultation and the sense of abandonment in Pluck the Buds—are also experienced on a collective level as well by the other children in “Prize Stock” and by the other juvenile delinquents in Pluck the Buds. Moreover, the character of the younger brother, while distinctive to Oe's literature, as Wilson points out,³⁶ is also a “redundancy,” in that the younger brother is truly innocent, not merely symbolically, and he, too, is sacrificed.

This collectivization of the subject strengthens the ideological message by emphasizing that it is not just a single individual who suffers, but a large number; and it also serves to underscore the sense of kyōdōtai. Finally, the fact that both stories end with an expulsion/voluntary withdrawal from the group serves to emphasize how the wasteland has helped to degenerate the previous shared joy of kyōdōtai.

Redundancy of character does not exist only in the doubling or tripling of the number of heroes. It also appears in terms of the types of heroes represented. Thus, in Pluck the Buds, the reader is introduced to unfairly treated juvenile delinquents and Koreans, an oppressed army deserter, an outcast little girl (it may be significant that the one “good” villager is female), and finally, an unwanted stray dog! The fact that these undesirables are morally upright people, as opposed to the villagers who are inhuman to the point of having faces characterized as “masks,” only underscores Oe's message concerning the sacrifice of the innocent. Similarly, although less overtly ideologically, Mishima's text presents us with two protagonists who are virtually mirror images of each other. Both Hatsue and Shinji, though of different sex, have several typically mythic virtues. They are stalwart, upright, strong, and filially pious, superior to anything the real world could offer.

The second type of redundancy that frequently occurs in both novelists' writing is redundancy of interpretation or description. For example, the above-mentioned attributes that Hatsue and Shinji possess are not limited to cameo illustrations, they are returned to repeatedly.

Redundancy of action offers another means of driving the point home, as is clear in Pluck the Buds when the boys are abandoned in quick narrative succession, not once, not twice, but three times. In the coda to “Prize Stock,” the boy's only adult friend, Clerk, is killed, significantly while playing on a sled, in other words, in a moment of youthfulness, reinforcing one last time the story's point that youthful pleasures must be sacrificed to the wasteland of reality.

The boy's reaction to this episode is an example of interpretive redundancy: “To avoid being surrounded by the children I abandoned Clerk's corpse and stood up on the slope. I had rapidly become familiar with sudden death and the expression of the dead, sad at times and grinning at times, just as the adults were familiar with them.”³⁷

This passage represents an expansion of the boy's brief statement after the killing of the black soldier that “I was no longer a child” and, although certainly useful in projecting the message, is perhaps stylistically unnecessary. Neither Oe nor Mishima are usually as clumsy as the roman-à-thèse authors; but as the above passage suggests, their desire to make their points sometimes interferes with literary effect.

These works trace the beginnings of an alternate and highly attractive vision of society that, given the consistency with which it is presented throughout the two writers' works, might legitimately be labeled the beginnings of an alternative romantic ideology. In Oe's works, this alternative vision includes youth, freedom, and nature, while in Mishima's story, it is inscribed with youth, beauty and archaism. In later writings by both writers, the protagonists are exiled from their worlds of romance, which thereafter occur only in flashes—a vision of the sea, the reflection of a temple in a pond, an unusually satisfying sexual encounter, a dream of Africa, or the ultimate alternative of beautiful death. But in these early works, the two writers created entire worlds of beauty and freedom.

Notes

1. Matsubara Shinichi, Oe Kenzaburo no sekai, p. 67.

2. Isoda Koichi, “Oe, Eto ni okeru dentō to kindai,” Kokubungaku 16.1:85 (1971).

3. In a broad definition of pastoral that is particularly appropriate to the three narratives discussed in this chapter, Cuddon says that it “displays a nostalgia for the past, for some hypothetical state of love and peace which has somehow been lost. The dominating idea and theme of most pastoral is the search for the simple life away from the court and town, away from corruption, war, strife, the love of gain … In a way it reveals a yearning for a lost innocence, for a pre-Fall paradisal life in which man existed in harmony with nature. It is thus a form of primitivism … and a potent longing for things past.”

4. Jerome Bruner, “Myth and Identity,” in Henry Murray, ed., Myth and Mythmaking, p. 285.

5. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 30.

6. John Nathan, Mishima: A Biography, p. 121.

7. In modern Japanese literature nothing quite compares to this form of purity testing, although such early heroes as Yamato Takeru in the Kojiki are forced to undergo tests of strength and cunning; but is does call to mind some classic Western myths, such as the Arthurian legends. See, for example, Charles Moorman, “Myth and Medieval Literature: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in John B. Vickery, ed., Myth and Literature, pp. 177-179.

8. Mishima Yukio, The Sound of Waves, trans. Meredith Weatherby, pp. 75-76.

9. See Nathan, Mishima, p. 121.

10. Mishima, Sound of Waves, p. 6.

11. Ibid., p. 65.

12. Jameson, p. 112.

13. Ibid., p. 213.

14. Oe Kenzaburo, “Prize Stock,” in his Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, trans. John Nathan, p. 165.

15. Fukushima Akira, p. 110.

16. Oe, “Prize Stock,” p. 113.

17. Ibid., p. 123.

18. Ibid., p. 145.

19. Ibid., p. 146.

20. Ibid., p. 155.

21. Ibid., p. 165.

22. Ibid., p. 161.

23. Ibid., p. 163.

24. Shinohara Shigeru, Oe Kenzaburoron, p. 67.

25. Oe Kenzaburo, “Hakuruberi Finu to hiro no mondai,” Oe Kenzaburo dōjidaironshū, vol. 7 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1981), pp. 40-62. For discussions in English, see John Nathan, “Introduction,” to Oe Kenzaburo, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, pp. xii-xiii; and Wilson, Marginal World, pp. 33-35. Oe's basic point is that Huck is a genuine existential hero who chooses his own fate, whether it is “to go to hell” or to be willing to live outside the dictates of society. Huck is also, of course, an outsider, already rejected by society, an “embattled cultural hero,” as Wilson, following Oe's argument, terms him.

26. Oe Kenzaburo, Memushiri kouchi, in Oe Kenzaburo zensakuhin, vol. 1, p. 207. All translations mine.

27. Ibid., p. 208.

28. Ibid., p. 270.

29. Ibid., p. 269.

30. Ibid., p. 279.

31. Mishima, Sound of Waves, p. 77.

32. Oe, Memushiri, p. 298.

33. Ibid., p. 319.

34. Suleiman, p. 112.

35. Ibid., p. 107.

36. Wilson, Marginal World, p. 12.

37. Oe, “Prize Stock,” p. 168.

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Ichimura Shinichi and Eto Jun. “Tennō,” Shokun 12: 26-39, 1987.

Isoda Koichi. “Oe, Eto ni okeru dentō to kindai,” Kokubungaku 16.1: 83-89 (1971).

———. “Teroru no gūwa,” Eureka 6.3: 73-81 (1974).

Izu Toshihiko. “Man'en gannen no futoboru,” Kokubungaku 16.1: 138-143 (1971).

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.

Kataoka Keiji. Oe Kenzaburoron. Tokyo: Rippushobo, 1973.

Kawanishi Masaaki. Oe Kenzaburoron: misei no yume. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1979.

Kokubungaku 26.9 (1981). Special Edition: “Mishima Yukio to wa nan de atta ka.”

Kubota Mamoru. “Ai no kawaki,” Kokubungaku 37.15: 116-117 (1972).

Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. New York: Norton, 1977.

Matsubara Shinichi. Oe Kenzaburo no sekai. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1967.

Matsumoto Tooru. “Mishima Yukio ni okeru erochizumu,” Kokubungaku 41.2: 23-29 (1976).

Matsuzaki Haruo. Demokuratto no bungaku. Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1981.

Mishima Yukio: Works in Translation

———. After the Banquet. Trans. Donald Keene. New York: Berkley Medallion, 1975.

———. Confessions of a Mask. Trans. Meredith Weatherby. Tokyo: Tuttle Books, 1981.

———. Decay of the Angel. Trans. Edward Seidensticker. New York: Pocket Books, 1975.

———. Five Modern No Plays. Trans. Donald Keene. Tokyo: Tuttle Books, 1980.

———. Forbidden Colors. Trans. Alfred H. Marks. New York: Berkley Medallion, 1968.

———. Madame de Sade. Trans. Donald Keene, New York: Grove Press. 1977.

———. “Patriotism,” in his Death in Midsummer. Trans. Geoffrey W. Sargent. New York: New Directions, 1966.

———. Runaway Horses. Trans. Edward Gallagher. New York: Pocket Books, 1973.

———. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. Trans. John Nathan. New York: Berkley Medallion, 1975.

———. The Sound of Waves. Trans. Meredith Weatherby. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1956.

———. Spring Snow. Trans. Michael Gallagher. Tokyo: Tuttle Books, 1972.

———. The Temple of Dawn. Trans. E. Dale Saunders and Cecilia Segawa Seigle. New York: Pocket Books, 1975.

———. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Trans. Ivan Morris. Tokyo: Tuttle Books, 1981.

———. Thirst for Love. Trans. Alfred H. Marks. New York: Perigee Books, 1980.

Works in Japanese

———. “Eirei no koe,” in F 104. Tokyo: Kawade Bunko, 1981.

———. “Gendai sakka wa kaku kangaeru,” Mishima Yukio zenshu, suppl. vol. 1. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1976.

———. “Kagi no kakaru heya,” in his Kagi no kakaru heya. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1982.

———. Kyōko no ie. Tokyo: Shinchō Bunko, 1979.

———. Mishima Yukio vs. Todai zenkyōtō. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1969.

———. “Shōsetsu to wa nanika,” Mishima Yukio zenshū, vol. 33. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1976.

———. “Shūmatsukan kara no shuppatsu: Showa no nijū jigazō,” Mishima Yukio zenshū, vol. 27. Tokyo: Shinchōsa, 1976.

———. “Subarashi gijutsu, shikashi … Oe Kenzaburo Shi no kakioroshi Kojinteki na taiken,” Mishima Yukio zenshū, vol. 31. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1976.

———. “Suzakke ie no metsubo,” in F 104. Tokyo: Kawade Books, 1981.

———. “Waga tomo Hitora,” in Sado kōshaku fujin / Waga tomo Hitora. Tokyo: Shinchōbunko, 1979.

———. “Watashi no eien no josei,” Mishima Yukio zenshū, vol. 27. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1976.

Miyoshi, Masao. Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1974.

Miyoshi Yukio, Noguchi Takehiko, Matsumoto Tooru, and Tsuge Teruhiko, “Mishima Yukio no sakuhin o yomu,” Kokubungaku 26.9: 6-37 (1981).

Moorman, Charles. “Myth and Medieval Literature: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in John Vickery, ed., Myth and Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966.

Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1986.

Murray, Henry, ed. Myth and Mythmaking. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

Nakagami Kenji and Yomota Inuhiko (taidan). “Tensei, monogatari, tennō: Mishima Yukio o megutte,” Kokubungaku 31.8: 18-44 (1986).

Nakamura Mitsu. “Kinkakuji ni tsuite,” in Shirakawa Masahiko, ed., Mishima Yukio: Hihyō to kenkyū. Tokyo: Haga Shoten, 1979.

Nathan, John. “Introduction” to Oe Kenzaburo, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness. New York: Grove Press, 1977.

———. Mishima: A Biography. Tokyo: Tuttle Books, 1981.

Noguchi Takehiko, Mishima Yukio no sekai. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1968.

Ochiai Kiyohiko, “Erochizumu,” Kokubungaku. 43.10: 71-78 (1978).

Oe Kenzaburo: Works in Translation

———. “The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away,” in his Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness. Trans. John Nathan. New York: Grove Press, 1977.

———. A Personal Matter. Trans. John Nathan. Tokyo: Tuttle Books, 1979.

———. “Prize Stock,” in his Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness. Trans. John Nathan. New York: Grove Press, 1977.

———. The Silent Cry. Trans. John Bester. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1967.

Works in Japanese

———. “Boku jishin no naka no sensō,” Oe Kenzaburo dōjidaironshū vol. 1, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1981.

———. Dōjidai gēmu. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1979.

———. Kaku no taika to “ningen” no koe. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1982.

———. “Kurai kawa, omoi kai,” Oe Kenzaburo zensakuhin, vol. 2. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1978.

———. Kōzui wa wagatamashii ni oyobi, Oe Kenzaburo zensakuhin (Second Collection), vols. 4 and 5. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1978.

———. Memushiri kouchi, in Oe Kenzaburo zensakuhin, vol. 1. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1966.

———. Okurete kita seinen, in Oe Kenzaburo zensakuhin, vol. 4. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1966.

———. “Oyogu otoko,” in his Reintsuri o kiku onnatachi. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1982.

———. Reintsuri o kiku onnatachi. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1982.

———. Sakebigoe, in Oe Kenzaburo zensakuhin, vol. 5. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1981.

———. “Sebunchin,” in Oe Kenzaburo zenskuhin, vol. 3. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1966.

———. “Seiji shōnen shisu,” Bungakkai 1: 8-48 (1961).

———. Seiteki ningen, in Oe Kenzaburo zensakuhin, vol. 6. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1966.

———. “Sengō sedai no imēji,” Oe Kenzaburo dōjidaironshū, vol. 1. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1981.

———. “Shishatachi no saishuteki na buijion to warera ikinobitsuzukeru mono,” in Oe Kenzaburo dōjidaironshū, vol. 6. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1981.

———. Shōsetsu no takurami chi no tanoshimi. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1985.

———. “Tero wa utsukushiku ronriteki ka,” Oe Kenzaburo dōjidaironshū, vol. 3. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1981.

———. Warera no jidai. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1963.

Oki Hideo, “Mishima Yukio ni okeru kami no shi no kamigaku,” Eureka 8:11: 65-71 (1976).

Petersen, Gwen Boardman. The Moon in the Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima. Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press, 1979.

Plath, David. Long Engagements: Maturity in Modern Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980.

Powell, Irena. Writers and Society in Modern Japan. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1983.

Ross, Nancy Wilson. “Introduction” to Mishima Yukio, Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Tokyo: Tuttle Books, 1981.

Rubin, Jay. Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984.

Sasaki Yoshioka. “Aru hazu no nai zettai e,” Eureka 8.11: 170-174, (1976).

Sato Yoshimasa. “Umi,” Kokubungaku 43.10: 62-70 (1978).

Shinohara Shigeru. Oe Kenzaburoron. Tokyo: Toho, 1974.

Suleiman, Susan. Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

Tanaka Miyoko, ed., Nihon gendai bungaku, no. 23: Mishima Yukio. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1980.

———. “Mishima Yukio kenkyūshi,” Kokubungaku 45.3: 205-213 (1980).

———. “Mishima bungaku no josei,” in Hasegawa Izumi et al., eds., Mishima Yukio kenkyū. Tokyo: Yuubun shoin, 1970.

———. “Mishima Yukio ni okeru yuibi to shiseishin,” Kokubungaku 37.15: 33-38 (1972).

Tanner, Tony. Adultery in the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.

Titus, David A. “The Making of the ‘Symbol Emperor System’ in Postwar Japan,” Modern Asian Studies 14.4: 529-578 (1980).

Toshizawa Yukio. “Jiko kyūsai no imēji,” in Nihon bungaku kenkyūkyōzai sosho series, Abe Kobo/Oe Kenzaburo. Tokyo: Yuseido, 1974.

Wakamori Taro. Tennōsei no rekishishinri. Tokyo: Kobundo, 1973.

Watanabe Hiroshi. Hōjō no umiron. Tokyo: Banbi Bunko, 1972.

———. “Mishima Yukio ni okeru ishiki to sonzai,” Kokubungaku 37.15: 21-26 (1972).

Wilson, Michiko. The Marginal World of Oe Kenzaburo. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1986.

Wolfe, Peter. Yukio Mishima. New York: Continuum Publishing, 1989.

Yamaguchi Masao and Inose Naoki. Mikado to seikimatsu. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1987.

Yamanouchi, Hisaki. The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Yoshida Hirō. “Kamen no kokuhaku,” Kokubungaku 37.15: 114-115 (1972).

Yourcenar, Marguerite. Mishima: A Vision of the Void. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1986.