Of all the modern Japanese writers, it is hard to find one more shockingly underrated and less known in the western world than Kenzaburo Oe. I went to a bookstore in Jackson, Mississippi several months ago, and found a full fourteen books by Haruki Murakami, including multiple copies of The Wind-Up Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. Which is not to dog Murakami, who is an interesting writer in his right, but to say that he simply absorbs too much attention away from the rest of Japanese literature, perhaps because his occasionally gimmicky, very postmodern style of fiction is more in vogue with the tastes and obsessions of the American Literary Establishment, mired as it is in Academia, (says the self-hating future member of Academia).
But beyond Murakami, Oe is, in many ways, overshadowed by both Yukio Mishima and Kobo Abe, both slightly older contemporary writers than him, (I mean overshadowed in the West, at least judging by my experience with America). He is the most unknown of Japan’s Post-World War II literary titans, and it is an enormous shame. If it weren’t for the Nobel Prize in Literature, (which he won in 1994), Oe would be almost completely unknown.
This belies the fact that Kenzaburo Oe is a very important literary figure in Japan. He has been called voice of the conscience of the Japanese Left, and has been, for upwards of fifty years, one of the major cultural and social figures in Japan. The Nobel Prize, in its citation, describe his work thusly, “an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.” A good description of the essence of Oe’s career.
Born in 1935, in the now defunct village of Ose in Ehime Prefecture, deep in the mountainous interior of Shikoku, in one of Japan’s most isolated areas, Oe grew up in a family with high social position. His mother and grandmother carried on the tradition of his clan’s women and were storytellers, preserving a local history of myths and legends which are an important part of his heritage as a writer. He was the first person in his family to leave the village in several centuries, (this more than anything should give you a picture of the extent of his home’s traditionalism and isolation).
His childhood is filled with fascinating and unsettling memories and observations; some of which later served as the basis for his books, and these include his visual picture of the Emperor as a great white bird that would swoop out of the sky to punish him for his disloyalty. The teachers of his class would ask them, as an almost daily drill, if they would cut their bellies open for the Emperor, which they were expected to answer yes. These same teachers became ardent democrats following 1945.
Oe lost his father in the Pacific campaign in 1944, and following that, in a story he has told often, his mother bought him books, among which were The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Selma Lagerlof’s The Wondrous Adventures of Nils, (a wonderful children’s book I highly recommend). These had a lifelong impact, and in fact he has, on multiple occasions, stated that Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is his favorite book. In some ways, this is something that makes me question why he isn’t better known and popular in the West. As Oe also studied French Literature in college, and as such his writing takes a deep basis in Western literature and applies a, to me, fascinating veneer of his Japanese culture and heritage to it. He even declared William Butler Yeats as a writer whose footsteps he would like to follow, and is an enormous fan of William Blake.
Kenzaburo Oe became a national literary sensation while still in college, when he won the prestigious Akutagawa Award, with its one million yen cash prize, in 1958 for his short story “Prize Stock”. Later that year he published Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, (Memushiri Kouchi). From this not so humble beginning sprouted a prolific career in which he won every major Japanese literary award, the Prix Europalia, and finally, the Novel Prize. In Japan, television broadcasts were interrupted to break the news of his winning.
Oe is also no stranger to controversy. In recent years alone he has fought and won a libel suit with retired military officers over his 1970 essay “Okinawa Notes”, which claims that the Japanese military coerced civilians into mass suicide in Okinawa, and with his prominent opposition to repealing Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution (the article which forbids Japan from having an active military and from taking part in non-defensive military conflicts).
Kenzaburo Oe is among the most fascinating and important authors living today. I look forward to sharing my thoughts on Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids following my ongoing rereading of it.