I met Kenzaburo Ōe (OH-way) in 1964, at Yukio Mishima’s Christmas Eve party. I was there because I was Mishima’s translator at the time. Ōe was there because Mishima had invited everyone who mattered that year, from boxers to drag queens, and because Ōe’s vanity and maybe his country-cousin curiosity had drawn him to the lights. I spotted him right away and I watched him with awe, for I had just discovered his novel A Personal Matter and thought it the most passionate and original and funniest and saddest Japanese book I had ever read. Ōe was standing apart with his best friend in the world in those days, Kōbō Abé, drinking steadily and looking uncomfortable. His appearance surprised me. Like everything he has written, A Personal Matter was a vibrant, headlong book powered by gorgeous energy. The author was an owlish, pudgy man in a baggy dark suit and a skinny tie; parked in the corner with his round face and sloping shoulders and soft belly, he looked absolutely meek, a Japanese badger. Then something astonishing happened. Ōe drained his glass and handed it to Abé to hold, shuffled across the room to where Mishima’s wife, Yoko, was arranging dishes on her buffet table, and said clearly, in English, “Mrs. Yoko, you are a cunt!” I never knew whether Yoko understood him, but she cannot have missed the sudden fierceness in his manner, for she produced a stricken smile and moved away. Leaving me and Ōe more or less alone together. I looked over at him and he shrugged and threw up his hands, as if to say “Well she is, what can you do!” “Where did you learn English like that?” I asked in Japanese. “Ah,” he said, and now there was real excitement in his eye and he stepped closer, “the hero of Norman Mailer’s ‘The Time of Her Time’ speaks the very same line.”
Before the party was over, Ōe had asked me to teach him “English conversation.” He had been invited to an international writers’ seminar Professor Henry Kissinger was organizing at Harvard, and he was bound to go so that he could deliver a speech about the survivors of Hiroshima. Naturally, I agreed. And so for three months Ōe came to my house several mornings a week, and we spoke in English about books he chose. We began with a volume of Baldwin essays, and went on to Advertisements for Myself, The Adventures of Augie March, and Sexus.Ōe had a large vocabulary and an uncanny gift for comprehending English meaning above and below the surface. But he had never spoken the English words he understood so very well and could not pronounce them intelligibly. I don’t think I helped him much; to this day, his spoken English is no great pleasure to the native ear. But Ōe taught me a lot about how to read in my own language. He could even do poetry! His favorite poet at the time was W.H. Auden, and I swear he took me deeper into Auden’s world than any teacher I ever had at school. Sometimes I felt threatened by his superior reach and tried to confront him with things he didn’t know. Once I sprang Rabbit, Run on him, having just read the book, and he asked me if I had seen Updike’s poems about basketball in The New Yorker. I had not, so he brought them to our next session and we read them together.
When it came time for Ōe to leave for Harvard I saw him off at the airport. He was distraught. When he had passed through Customs and entered the fishbowl waiting room from which there is no turning back, he rushed to the plate glass window separating us and scribbled a line in a notebook and held it up for me to read: “John, how very happy you are not to have to go!” It wasn’t just that he was leaving home: in 1960 he had been the youngest Japanese in an official mission sent to Peking to meet with Chairman Mao and Chou En-lai; the following year he had traveled in Europe and had interviewed another of his heroes, Jean-Paul Sartre. But this time was different. Now he was leaving for AMERICA, a land of exquisite terror and irresistible pull which had burned at the center of his imagination since he was a boy.
Ōe’s first actual encounter with America was in the fall of 1945, when the Occupation jeeps drove into the mountain village where he lived. Like everyone else in the village, he expected the Americans to begin by raping the women and castrating the men. Then the jeeps arrived and what really happened was unimaginable. Instead of destruction, the GI’s rained Hershey bars and chewing gum and canned asparagus down upon the village, and the children scrambled for the sweets, Ōe with them. Relief is what he felt, and gratitude and anger and humiliation, and those potent feelings have remained entangled in him and, as he has said himself, defy his efforts to sort them out.
Ōe was ten years old at the time. His second decisive encounter with America occurred four or five years later, when he read for the first time a Japanese translation of Huckleberry Finn. It seems unlikely that a Japanese schoolboy knowing only the tiny, manageable wilderness of the Japanese countryside could be much moved by Huckleberry’s pilgrimage down the vast Mississippi: Ōe was ardently moved. It was Huck’s moral courage, literally Hell-bent, that ignited his imagination. For Ōe the single most important moment in the book was always Huck’s agonized decision not to send Miss Watson a note informing her of Jim’s whereabouts and to go instead to Hell. With that fearsome resolution to turn his back on his times, his society, and even his god, Huckleberry Finn became the model for Ōe’s existential hero. As he read on in American fiction, Ōe found inspiration in other American writers, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Kerouac and Henry Miller and, particularly, Norman Mailer. But the basis of his admiration for these writers was his perception of their heroes—of Portnoy and Holden Caulfield and Dean Moriarty and Augie March and all the transformations of the Mailer prototype from Sergius O’Shaugnessy in Deer Park and the bullfighter in “The Time of Her Time” to Mailer himself in Armies of the Night—as modern incarnations of Huckleberry Finn. The heroes in American fiction that matter to Ōe are, invariably, sickened by their experience of “civilization,” driven on a quest for salvation in the form of personal freedom beyond the borders of safety and acceptance. Brothers to Huckleberry Finn, they are men who have no choice but to “light out for the territory.”
Ōe’s own outrage, not so much at the American invaders as against his own kind, helps explain his affinity for the outraged heroes in American writing. On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito went on the radio to announce the Surrender, and deprived Ōe of his innocence. Until that day, like all Japanese schoolchildren, he had been taught to fear the Emperor as a living god. Once a day his turn had come to be called to the front of the classroom and asked, “What would you do if the Emperor commanded you to die?” and Ōe had replied, knees shaking, “I would die, Sir, I would cut open my belly and die.” In bed at night, he had suffered the secret guilt of knowing, at least suspecting, he was not truly eager to destroy himself for the Emperor. Sick with a fever, he had beheld the Emperor in a terrifying nightly dream, soaring across the sky like a giant bird with white feathers. Then Hirohito went on the air and spoke in the voice of a mortal man.
The adults sat around their radios and cried. The children gathered outside in the dusty road and whispered their bewilderment. We were most surprised and disappointed by the fact that the Emperor had spoken in a human voice. One of my friends could even imitate it cleverly. We surrounded him, a twelve-year-old in grimy shorts who spoke in the Emperor’s voice, and laughed. Our laughter echoed in the summer morning stillness and disappeared into the clear, high sky. An instant later, anxiety tumbled out of the heavens and seized us impious children. We looked at one another in silence. … How could we believe that an august presence of such awful power had become an ordinary human being on a designated summer day? (A Portrait of the Postwar Generation.)
In a single day, all the truth Ōe had ever learned was declared lies. He was angry and he was humiliated, at himself for having believed and suffered, and at the adults who had betrayed him. His anger resided; it was the source of the energy he first tapped when he became a writer.
In 1954, Ōe was admitted to Tokyo University and left the island of Shikoku for the first time to go up to the big city. He enrolled in the department of French literature, the course for serious students at Tokyo, where it was held that American writing was inferior, and became absorbed in Pascal and Camus and Sartre, who was to be the subject of his graduation thesis. He was a brilliant student but he kept to himself; he was withdrawn by nature, always a loner, and because he was ashamed of his provincial accent, he stuttered. He lived in a rooming house near the campus, and it was there at night, swallowing tranquilizers with whisky, that he began to write the stories which established him in half a year as the spokesman for an entire generation of young Japanese whose distress he identified. His first published story, “An Odd Job,” appeared in the May, 1957 issue of the University literary magazine. It was about a bewildered college student who takes a part-time job slaughtering dogs to be used in laboratory experiments.
There was almost every breed of dog, yet somehow they looked alike. I wondered what it was. All mongrels, and all skin and bones? Or was it the way they stood there leashed to stakes, their hostility quite lost? That must have been it. And who could say the same thing wouldn’t happen to us? Helplessly leashed together, looking alike, hostility lost and individuality with it—us ambiguous Japanese students. But I wasn’t much interested in politics. I wasn’t much interested in anything. I was too young and too old to be involved in anything. I was twenty; it was an odd age, and I was tired. I quickly lost interest in that pack of dogs, too.…
Ōe’s early heroes have been expelled from the certainty of childhood, into a world that bears no relation to their past. The values that regulated life when they were growing up have been blown to smithereens along with Hiroshima and Nagasaki; what confronts them now, the postwar world, is a gaping emptiness, enervation, a terrifying silence like the eternity that follows death. They are aware of the consequences of submitting to life in such a world; the riddle they must solve if they are to survive, to discover freedom for themselves, is how to sustain their hostility in the face of bewilderment and, finally, apathy. Terrorism is a luminous prospect: Ōe’s protagonists dream of throwing hand grenades into the Emperor’s limousine, fighting at Nasser’s side, joining the Foreign Legion. But enacting fantasies like these is more than they can manage. A more accessible battleground is violent sex, antisocial sex, what one of Ōe’s characters calls “a fuck rife with ignominy.” Sooner or later Ōe’s heroes discover that the only territory they can reach beyond the emptiness of everyday life is what their society deems “sexual perversion.” Consider J. in Ōe’s 1963 novel Homo Sexualis. J. is a playboy whose first wife has been driven to suicide by his flirtations with homosexuality. He becomes what the Japanese call a “subway pervert,” ejaculating against the raincoats of young girls in crowded rush hour trains. To himself he represents the peril he invites as a kind of atonement. In fact, like all of Ōe’s early heroes, it is in quest of his identity that he is driven to assert himself against the safety of his world. J. is perhaps the bravest of Ōe’s heroes, and one of very few who succeeds in the terms he proposes to himself. At the end of the novel, frightened and alone, he visits his industrialist father and asks to be restored to the family fold. His father happily consents and promises him a good job; J. leaves the office intending to move back into his father’s house. He is about to climb into his Jaguar when he finds himself moving toward the subway. He walks more quickly, races down the stairs, plunges into a subway and ejaculates against a high school girl. He comes to his senses as he is being led off the subway by a policeman, and the tears streaming down his cheeks are “tears of joy.…”
In 1964, when he was twenty-nine, Ōe’s first child was born with brain damage, and the baby boy, whom he called “Pooh,” altered his world with the force of an exploding sun. I won’t presume to describe Ōe’s relationship with the child, he has done that wondrously himself in a story included in this collection, “Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness.” Suffice it to say that over the years as Pooh grew up, a fierce, exclusive, isolating bond developed between father and son. In a fervent, painful way, Ōe and his fragile, autistic child became one another’s best, embracing one another as if they were each other’s fate. Shortly after Pooh was born, Ōe ordered two gravestones erected side by side in the cemetery in his native village. He has told me many times that he would die when Pooh died.
Ōe’s own perception of the child’s destructive force, the metaphor that first presented itself to him, was a nuclear explosion. The year Pooh was born he wrote two books at once and asked his publisher to release them on the same day. One was A Personal Matter (Grove Press, 1968), the first of a series of novels whose central character is the young father of a brain-damaged child. The other was a book of essays about the survivors of Hiroshima, Hiroshima Notes. Ōe was of course asking that the books be considered together; in one he chronicled the survival of an actual atomic bomb, in the other he sought the means of surviving a personal holocaust.
The child’s tidal pull on Ōe’s imagination is already discernible in A Personal Matter. Bird, the protagonist, a stymied intellectual with a failing marriage, dreams of flying away to Africa for a “glimpse beyond the horizon of quiescent and chronically frustrated everyday life.” There is nothing new about this fantasy; it is evidence that Bird is descended from Ōe’s prototypical hero. But Bird’s wife gives birth to a baby with a “cave for a head,” a “monster baby” who threatens to destroy his dream. He arranges with a doctor in the hospital to water the baby’s milk, and while he waits for it to perish he seeks refuge with a “sexual adventuress” who encourages him to claim his freedom. But the baby thrives on its fatal diet; it becomes clear that Bird will have to make a more direct attack on the child’s life. This he resolves to do, with the help of his mistress; together they take the infant out of the hospital and deliver it to a “shady” doctor who guarantees the child will shortly die. With the baby out of the way they plan to leave for Africa together. Then abruptly, and not very convincingly, Bird perceives that he must cease “running from responsibility.” Abandoning his hysterical mistress in a bar he goes back to the abortionist, picks up the baby, and returns it to the hospital. Several months later, in the two-page coda that ends the novel, Bird emerges from the hospital with his family reunited around him and the baby in his arms. They are on their way home, and the first thing Bird will do when he arrives is look up forbearance in a dictionary inscribed with the word hope.
Bird is the first of Ōe’s heroes to turn his back on the central fantasy of his life, the first to accept, because he has no choice, the grim substitution of forbearance for hope. Until the advent of his first-born child, the quest for self-discovery took Ōe’s heroes beyond the boundaries of society into a lawless wilderness. Beginning with Bird, they turn away from the lure of peril and adventure and seek instead, with the same urgency, the certainty and consonance they imagine they experienced before they were betrayed at the end of the War. It was as if Ōe no longer had the heart to light out for the territory, not with the defenseless child that had become a part of himself. Since A Personal Matter, he has been drawn increasingly to a myth of “Happy Days” before that August day in 1945 when Hirohito renounced his divinity and innocence was rudely ended.
To be sure, longing for a mythic homeland was always there in Ōe; very likely it was engendered in him, along with his anger, even as he listened to the Emperor speak in the voice of a mortal man. Certainly it is to be felt in one of his first and most beautiful stories, “Prize Stock.” The mountain village in which a black American soldier is being held prisoner exists nowhere in actual Japan. Instead of paddies there are “fields,” instead of hogs and cows, “wild mountain dogs.” The smell of dung and human fertilizer that hangs in the air of every rural village in Japan is replaced by the scent of old mulberry leaves, and grain, and apricot trees; the only village adult who appears is not a farmer but a hunter; the word Ōe uses for the village headman is an archaic word that means a tribal chieftain. But the surest proof that Ōe is rendering myth and not reality is the scene near the end of the story, just before the child narrator is betrayed by the black soldier, when the village children lead him by the hand to the village spring for a “primeval” bath:
To us the black soldier was a rare and wonderful domestic animal, an animal of genius. 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 repletion and rhythm of it all? To us it seemed that the summer which had bared those resplendent muscles, the summer that suddenly and unexpectedly geysered like an oil well, spewing happiness and drenching us in black, heavy oil, would continue forever and never end.
The ecstasy of this moment, its “repletion and rhythm,” is the ecstasy of ritual, and ritual is the stuff myth is made of. Here for the first and only time in his telling of the story, the narrator must step outside the time frame in which the story occurs and cast his memory back in his attempt to convey the moment. That is because myth exists only in memory, in a remote “primeval” time before history, and can never be experienced.
In recent years, this mythical mountain village surrounded by a primeval forest has loomed ever larger in Ōe’s imagination, his Yoknapatawpha county, a place to which his heroes are ineluctably drawn in search of themselves. In Ōe’s first big novel after A Personal Matter, Soccer in the Year 1860 (translated as The Silent Cry), the young father of a retarded child leaves his home in Tokyo and returns to the village of his childhood in hopes of discovering “a new life.” On his way to the village through the forest he stops for a moment at the same mountain spring that was the remote source of bliss in “Prize Stock.”
As I bent over the pool to sip at the spring water, a sensation of certainty gripped me. The pool was still lit, as if the light of the ended day resided only there, and I felt certain that I had seen, twenty years ago, each and every one of the small round stones bluish and vermillion and white on the bright bottom, and the same fine sand suspended in the water clouding it slightly, the faint rippling on the surface, everything. Even the ceaseless flow of water was the very same water that had welled into the pool at that time, the sensation was rich with paradox but absolutely convincing to me. And it produced the further sensation that the person bending over the pool now was not the child who once had crouched here on his bare knees, that there was no continuity between those two “me”s, that the self there now was alien to my real self, a perfect stranger. Here in the present, I had lost my true identity. Nothing inside me or on the outside pointed the way toward recovery.
The certainty that grips the speaker is shared by all of Ōe’s recent heroes. But none is more passionately certain that salvation is to be discovered in a mythic version of his past than the narrator of “The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away,” the longest story in this collection and Ōe’s most difficult and disturbing work to date. The narrator lies in a hospital bed eagerly waiting to die of liver cancer, probably imagined. He wears a pair of underwater goggles covered in dark cellophane which prevent him from seeing much, but that is no matter to him, for he has “ceased to exist in present time.” In these days he insists are his last, his entire consciousness is channeled into reliving a moment in his past, just before the War ended, when he accompanied his mad father on a suicide mission intended to rescue Japan from defeat. On August 15, 1945 (that most emblematic day in Ōe’s early life), his father has lead a band of Army deserters out of their mountain village to the nearbye “provincial city” which is to be the scene of their insurrection. On their way up the pass out of the valley to the “real” world, they sing, in German, the refrain from a Bach cantata they have learned from a record the night before, “And He Himself shall wipe my tears away.” When the narrator asks the meaning of the words, his father explains that “Heiland” (German for “Saviour”) refers to “His Majesty the Emperor.”
TRÄNEN means “tears,” and TOD that means “to die,” it’s German. His Majesty the Emperor wipes my tears away with his own hand, Death, you come ahead, you Brother of Sleep you come ahead, his Majesty will wipe my tears away with his own hand, we wait eagerly for his Majesty to wipe our tears away.
This first of many absurd distortions is meet, for the rebels intend to sacrifice themselves in the Emperor’s name and believe, the small boy accompanying them most fervently of all, that the Emperor who is a living god will not only accept but consecrate their sacrifice. The culmination of the episode, which lives in the narrator’s imagination as the single, exalting moment in his life when he knew precisely who he was and what he was about, occurs when his father, a certain party, is shot down, and a sign that his death has indeed been consecrated is mystically revealed:
Leaping beyond his limitations as an individual at the instant of his death, a certain party rendered manifest a gold chrysanthemum flower 675,000 kilometers square, surrounded and surmounted by, yes, a purple aurora, high enough in the sky to cover entirely the islands of Japan. Because the other, attacking army opened fire on their truck first, the soldiers nearby the boy were immediately massacred and he alone survived. A certain party had requested this of the gods on high, for it was essential that someone, someone chosen, witness the gold chrysanthemum obliterate the heavens with its luster at the instant of his death. And, in truth, the boy did behold the appearance high in the sky, not blocking the light as would a cloud but even managing to increase the glittering radiance of the sun in the blue, midsummer sky, of a shining gold chrysanthemum against a background of purple light. And when the light from that flower irradiated his Happy Days they were instantly transformed into an unbreaking, eternal construction built of light. From that instant on, for the twenty-five years that were to be the remainder of his life, he would constantly inhabit this strong edifice of light that was his Happy Days.
In part, the fulsome prose is parody. Ōe wrote this in 1972, in the shadow of Yukio Mishima’s suicide by harakiri. On one level it is an angry parody of Mishima, a remorseless grotesqueing of the mini-insurrection which made it possible for Mishima to “cut open his belly and die.” But there is more to this than anger. There is also longing, not so different in quality from Mishima’s own, for the sweet certainty of unreasoning faith in a god. As the narrator reconstructs the details of his Happy Days, he is confronted with other testimony, more objective than his own, which compells him to acknowledge finally that his own version is entirely false. But he is undaunted, because it is not history that he has been reliving but a radiant myth of belonging—of identity itself. And because he knows, in what may or may not be his madness, that cancer soon will place him out of time’s reach, eating away “the useless layers of body-and-soul which have concealed his true essence since that August day in 1945,” whispering, “in a voice that pierces all the way from the root of his body to his soul, Now then, this is you, there was no need for you to have become any other you than this, Let us sing a song of cheer again, Happy Days are here again.”
“The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away” conveys more of Ōe’s essence than anything he has ever written. The astonishing power of the work is the energy that arcs between the poles of anger and longing that are the central contradiction in his vision. Its formidable privacy—which is what makes it so very difficult to follow and prevented many Japanese readers from finishing it—reflects the fierce privacy which has isolated Ōe and his son increasingly from the outside world. Like his narrator, intent on reliving a moment in the past existing only in his imagination, Ōe has become a miner digging straight down toward the pain at the center of his private world. In a lesser writer this would be a fatal limitation. But Ōe has the power to make us feel his pain. Life as we know it may not be so bleak as he perceives it to be. But the dislocation and the anger and finally the madness ever before his eyes is there for all of us, never so far removed from our own experience that we are at a loss to recognize it.
A last word about Ōe and Grove Press. In the fall of 1965, when Ōe returned to Tokyo from his first trip to America, I was completing a translation of A Personal Matter. Since Alfred A. Knopf had published all the important Japanese novelists in English, I had suggested we take the book to Knopf, and Ōe had agreed. Suddenly, in October, I received a telegram from Barney Rosset; someone had sent Grove my translation of an early Ōe story called “Lavish Are the Dead,” and Rosset was excited. He proposed to publish the story in Evergreen Review and wanted to know if there wasn’t an Ōe novel Grove could do. I was reluctant; I had written Harold Strauss at Knopf about A Personal Matter and he was eager to publish it; besides, I knew very little about Grove Press at the time and had never heard of Barney Rosset. I was therefore amazed at Ōe’s jubilance when I told him about the telegram. If Grove Press was interested in his book, it was unthinkable that we should send it anywhere else. Ōe immediately wrote Harold Strauss a letter which I never saw, but I have the note Strauss sent me by return mail:
I have received several copies of Ōe’s KOJINTEKI NA TAIKEN [A Personal Matter] and I am well into it and like it very much. One of the copies came from Ōe himself, so he must at one time have contemplated being published by us. But today I received a most astonishing letter from him, telling me that he is going to accept Grove Press’s offer. “As an admirer of John Updike and a close friend of Kōbō Abé, I appreciate highly Alfred Knopf Inc. But I don’t hope to wedge myself into the line-up of Abé, Mishima, and Tanizaki. That is the reason of my determination.”
Does he really mean this? If so it is certainly false modesty. I have never yet encountered an author who was unwilling to be published by the publisher of other well-known authors.
But maybe there is some other reason behind this. … Since you are partly responsible for my interest in Ōe, I hope you will do me the very great favor of tactfully trying to sound out the situation….
There was, of course, “some other reason.” It was Ōe’s admiration for Barney Rosset, whom he saw even then, before he knew the man, as an incarnation of his American hero. What he knew at the time, and had written, was that “Barney Rosset has waged the most courageous and persistent battle against literary censorship in America, beginning with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and has won.” Later, in 1968, when Grove published A Personal Matter, Ōe visited New York, witnessed Rosset fighting in court, with Norman Mailer’s help, to win the release of I Am Curious (Yellow), and confirmed his original intuition. On his return to Japan he wrote a long essay about America and called it “Huckleberry Finn Goes to Hell.” It began with Barney Rosset, the night of “the darkest day of his court battle,” cursing the “desolation into which American society had fallen” as he careened his car downtown with Ōe at his side. The connection Ōe intended is unmistakable, and what is more, I know he truly meant it: no contemporary American, fictional or real stands closer in his imagination to Huckleberry Finn than Barney Rosset. Ōe’s work belongs at Grove Press.