A Story of Creative Rebellion
by LINDSLEY CAMERON
World Literature Today 76 no1 30-6 Wint 2002
The man who created the piece of music you in the audience here today have just heard in excerpt (”Nocturnal Capriccio,” track 14 from Music of Hikari Oe 2) is Hikari Oe. He is an extraordinary man — a unique man, in fact, not just in the way that every human being or even every creative artist is unique, but in an entirely literal, scientific sense. Hikari also enjoys an extraordinary relationship with his father, Kenzaburo Oe, a creative symbiosis which is unique in a less scientific sense. And while scientists cannot fully explain Hikari’s literally unprecedented achievements, it is clear that these would never have been possible if his father had dealt with the problems his son’s birth presented as a more conventional and less imaginative parent would have done in the same time and place.
Hikari was born in 1963, when Kenzaburo Oe was twenty-eight years old. The latter was already a famous writer then, chiefly because of his originality. Critics embraced his writing readily, in part because Japan was fairly seething with discontent at that time, and both his voice and his imagination crystallized a pervasively rebellious mood. But at the time of Hikari’s birth, Oe was despondent about his writing career, because his rebelliousness had been alienating former friends as well as freshly enraging longstanding enemies.
Oe has described himself as an anarchist. He has been an impassioned and selfless advocate for the many liberal causes he holds dear, but all his life he has been exasperating the politically committed by his refusal to ally himself with any set agenda. He has been accused of stubbornness, and worse; my own belief is that his refusal to compromise is not really a consciously chosen stance but a rather helpless part of his personality.
He likes to describe himself as a meek, dreamy, bookish child, but he also tells stories of his willful behavior as a boy. As an adolescent, prematurely separated from his family for the sake of his studies, he tried to cultivate a tough image. A little later, as a young writer, he not only wrote rebelliously but behaved that way too.
Oe has said that at the time of Hikari’s birth, he wished he could abandon writing and that he regretted not having pursued an academic career instead, as he had originally thought of doing. But by the time Hikari was born, Oe felt it was too late to resume a scholarly career. He and his wife had reason to hope that the birth of this child, their first, might pull him out of this crisis of depression and self-doubt.
But the child was born a monster. His brain was literally spilling out of his head — one of his brains, for he was actually born with two brains, one alive and one dead, and when he emerged from the womb, he looked as if he had two heads. The diagnosis was cranial encephalocele, or brain hernia. Doctors advised the Oes to simply let this freakish creature die. They said the infant would certainly perish if surgery were not performed. But the surgery that would correct the condition would also — if the baby survived it — leave him a “human vegetable,” incapable of even the most basic functioning. Being presented with such a decision would be cruel enough, but in fact, at the time of Hikari’s birth, this was only a looming possibility, for the doctors had to conduct tests to determine whether the operation would be worth undertaking.
While these tests were being carried out, Oe went to Hiroshima to report on an international nuclear-disarmament rally. There, he met a man who changed his life, Dr. Fumio Shigeta, the director of the Hiroshima A-Bomb Hospital. Dr. Shigeta had survived the nuclear bomb there himself and had devoted the rest of his life to caring for victims of the bombing. Oe was struck above all by the courage the man showed in devoting himself to a hopeless cause. He returned determined to make what he had become convinced would be a similarly courageous decision: to authorize surgery on his young son. And this decision implied another, for Oe determined to devote himself to caring for the child if he did survive.
That is the story of Hikari’s birth and Kenzaburo Oe’s decision. I want to emphasize an aspect of it which has been generally overlooked, which is that the father’s decision was actually a very rebellious one, and perhaps even slightly perverse. But it led swiftly to some remarkable acts of literary creation on Oe’s part — and, ultimately, to artistic creativity from Hikari too. Oe’s rebelliousness has, throughout his life, been so bound up with his creativity that it appears to be not so much a precondition for it as an aspect of it.
In the early sixties, when Hikari was born, Japanese society was about as harsh toward the handicapped as it is possible for a civilized modern society to be. Oe and his wife were aware, as any thoughtful, educated people of their age could not help being in the wake of the famines at the end of the war and the severe shortages that followed the defeat, that their country’s resources were scarce, and that squandering any of them on a wholly dependent, unproductive, scarcely human being could be seen as altogether irresponsible. When Oe announced the decision that he and his wife had reached, they were severely criticized, by doctors, relatives, and friends, for doing anything to prevent a death that would, in the generally accepted view, be so clearly desirable. And after the operation, they were criticized for devoting themselves to their helpless child’s care, and even for exposing their neighbors to the distasteful experience of having to look at an abnormal baby. As Hikari grew, people laughed and pointed at him in the street whenever his parents took him out.
Now, in deciding to save Hikari’s life and nurture him, Oe was making what would be seen in the United States today as a “family values” decision. And his opposition to any form of euthanasia, even the passive form of nonintervention, would probably be seen as conservative in this country today, where it is liberals who advocate legalizing euthanasia and who oppose blanket assumptions about the “right to life.”
In Japan, “family values” prevail unquestioned to an extent that is difficult for most Americans even to conceive of. But Japanese “family values” are not the same as this country’s. In Japan, such customs and attitudes are derived from Confucian principles of hierarchy and loyalty, and it would be easy to characterize them as having everything to do with efficiency and little to do with mercy. In fact, Japanese society is far from merciless, but its mercy is not the kind that preoccupies pluralistic societies like this one. American society is almost obsessively concerned to protect the human rights of individuals, whereas Japanese society — famously — protects the group.
Of course, all babies are parasites — temporarily. In Hikari’s case, this was an irreversible condition, according to all available medical knowledge at the time. In an abstract way, society as a whole could be said to be threatened by an entity like Hikari. More concretely, it was Hikari’s immediate family that was threatened. Oe made a courageous decision about his son, but he did not himself have to bear many of its heaviest consequences, since his wife shouldered so many of the burdens of raising their problematic child. Oe’s decision endorsed her instinctive feeling; he might instead have dismissed it as unrealistic and sentimental, if he had been another kind of man.
But was Oe himself being unrealistic and sentimental? The Oes later had two more children: a daughter, and then another son. Oe has sometimes been blamed in the Japanese press for shortchanging these two by focusing his attention on Hikari’s special needs. But Oe himself has been the author of the harshest criticism he has received along these lines. He has spent a large part of his creative life chewing obsessively over that question, and over whether the necessary selfishness of a creative artist can ultimately be justified. His rebellious, often provocative writing has exposed his family to many kinds of attacks, and to a relentless barrage of publicity, and he has never ceased to question his right to bring such things upon them; his novel A Quiet Life could be described as a long meditation on that subject, and his most recent work, “Changelings,” takes up this theme again.
The decision to care devotedly for a demanding handicapped child can be seen as the opposite of the selfish dedication of an artist to his art, certainly the opposite of the stereotype of the irresponsible artist who evades family obligations in the narcissistic pursuit of self-expression. And one of the most fascinating aspects of Oe’s relationship with Hikari is the way Hikari’s existence has been bound up with his father’s creative life.
Right after Hikari’s birth, Oe began work on the extraordinary novel A Personal Matter, which brought him international fame and definitively established his literary reputation. The novel deals with the birth of a baby with a condition exactly like Hikaris — a “monster baby,” as he is called. It is not a first-person narrative, but it is confined to one character’s point of view, that of the baby’s young father, who is struggling throughout the book with precisely the decision Oe faced about his own son. It is a stunning and powerful book, extremely entertaining, and deeply serious. It seems to me that through this work, Oe found a way to address his torment about the artist’s need for self-justification, because while he was struggling with the question of whether Hikari should be allowed to remain alive, he was also pondering whether he himself should be allowed to retain his life as a writer. This novel is the beginning of a kind of self-justification that Oe went on to use again and again, meditating on the impersonal meanings of his personal circumstances and showing the world that seemingly personal matters were public concerns.
In the novel, the young father makes the decision, after much unsparingly recorded vacillation, to save his baby. It is not clear what the baby’s condition will be, but it is entirely clear that the father’s decision will completely destroy his freedom. It is also clear that killing the baby would have destroyed everything about this young father that would have made his freedom worth having.
While working on A Personal Matter, Oe wrote a long short story, “Agwhee the Sky Monster,” also inspired by Hikari’s birth, but in a way the novel’s mirror image. It is also about the young father of a baby with a condition like Hikari’s. This father has killed his son and is haunted by a vision, in the sky, of an enormous baby; it may have an actual existence or may be a hallucination, caused by a guilt too great to bear. In the end, this apparition kills the young father.
By writing about Hikari’s seemingly hopelessly unproductive existence, Oe was justifying it — and his own problematically productive one. And while dealing with Hikari’s existence in these creative literary ways, Oe was dealing with Hikari himself in a strikingly creative way as well.
Hikari was needier than a normal baby, but almost entirely unable to communicate. Having no tear ducts, he could not even cry. His feelings were a mystery; he seemed to be unreachable. But Oe and his wife devoted themselves to stimulating their unresponsive child. Doctors told them they were wasting their time, but they went ahead. They spoke to him constantly, and they continued to do so even though he showed no signs of understanding or of learning to speak himself. He was diagnosed as autistic, and it seemed certain that he would never be capable of actual speech. On one occasion, his parents thought they saw him smile when he heard a bird singing outside the window; they got him records of birdcalls and played them over and over for him.
One of A-Oe’s most important works, his novel The Silent Cry (1967), was published when Hikari was four. It has two characters inspired by Hikari: one is a retarded baby who has been institutionalized; the other is this baby’s aunt, a retarded girl who possesses an unusual sensitivity to music. She is described as counting every note in piano pieces she hears on recordings or on the radio, and as making marks on paper for every note.
In 1968, Oe described, in the novella “Father, Where Are You Going?” how the father of a mute and physically disabled child teaches his son to run down a hill by running down the hill himself, calling his son’s name over and over again until the son imitates the action. And in 1969, in the stunning, harrowingly intense novella “Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness,” he describes another relationship of a father with his developmentally disabled son. It is a relationship of truly startling intensity; there is something almost erotic about it. This father has managed to teach the child to repeat words spoken to him, but it is never clear whether the child understands the sounds. The father identifies with his son, experiences his son’s pain physically, and believes he is the only one who can interpret or explain him to others. The father begins to suspect that he has been deceiving himself about this, though, and in the end concludes that he has persuaded himself that the child needs him when in fact it is he himself who needs his son — and needs, above all, to believe he understands.
The year this story was published, Hikari began to speak. Oe has often told how the two of them were walking in the woods when a bird sang and a voice identified the bird, and he realized that the voice was his son’s. This was not the first coherent sound Hikari ever made. He had been uttering words for a couple of years by then, but this was the first time there was a clearly recognizable connection between a word he spoke and its meaning.
After that, Hikari began, little by little, to use words to communicate. While researching my book about the Oes (The Music of Light: The Extraordinary Story of Kenzaburo and Hikari Oe, New York, Free Press, 1998), I interviewed several scientists whose specialty is the human brain. They agreed unanimously in saying that if Oe had accepted the prevailing medical wisdom of the time and resigned himself to the child’s being forever mute and vegetative, that is precisely what Hikari would have been. We now know something that no one knew then, which is that there is a window of opportunity for teaching a child with a brain like Hikari’s to speak. The window shuts after a few years, and if the Oes had not persisted during the time when Hikari seemed most hopeless, his case would in fact have been hopeless.
The past dozen years have seen an enormous, explosive growth in our understanding of the brain, chiefly because of new imaging techniques. It is now known, as it was not when Hikari was a baby, that a child’s brain goes on growing and developing after birth. We now know too that the brain is much more adaptive than had previously been thought, and capable of much more self-repair. Oe could not accept what he was told about his child. He knew nothing of brain science, and had no reason to suspect that much of what he had been told in good faith by doctors would prove to be false in light of subsequent discoveries. So, he had plenty of motivation for doubt, in terms of entirely human sentiment, but no rational grounds at all. You might say he was rebelling against reason itself, or against its limitations. And he did create something which transcended the limitations that were then understood, finally proving them false. This is very similar to what happens when an original work of art is created.
I have come to believe that Kenzaburo Oe’s refusal to resign himself to hopelessness about his son Hikari was an act of creative rebellion very similar in nature to his rebellious literary creations. The story of Kenzaburo and Hikari Oe revolves around the concept of creativity. Hikari is in fact absolutely unique in human history; the thing that makes him unique is his creativity.
Hikari did not become “normal” after learning to speak. He is autistic, he has severe limitations in cognition and communication, but his achievements have surpassed his limitations spectacularly. This means that he belongs to a rare class of people called “savants,” formerly known as “idiot savants”: people who are developmentally disabled but dramatically surpass their limitations in certain areas. Hikari belongs to a category that is even rarer. He is a “prodigious savant,” which means his particular talents would be extraordinary even in a normal person.
Hikari has a remarkable memory for music. He can recognize and recall precisely almost any piece he has ever heard, and he can transcribe accurately from memory. He can identify any work of Mozart’s after hearing a few measures of it, even giving the correct Köchel number — something even Mozart specialists cannot do. And his remarkable memory retains facts about music as well.
None of these things makes him unique. There have been, in recorded history, a handful of autistic people with low IQs who could do the same, or very similar, things. But in addition to the abilities he shares with other musical savants, there is one thing Hikari has done which no other musical savant has ever done: namely, compose. There are accounts of four other savants who have entertained audiences by improvising in the course of performing on an instrument. But Hikari’s physical limitations prevent his doing that, and he is the only musical savant who has ever conceived a purely musical idea and then notated it. Before he did this, it was assumed that savants were incapable of creativity — in fact, this incapacity to create was part of the definition of savantism.
Dr. Darrold Treffert, America’s foremost expert on savantism, told me that the case of Hikari Oe had forced him to reconsider the phenomenon — in fact, to redefine it. And it is not only in his creativity that Hikari is unique among musical savants. Savant skills are usually defined as static, not growing or developing, but Hikari’s music has been growing increasingly complex.
When I asked Dr. Treffert and other specialists about creativity, all concurred that its essential characteristic involves using old things in new ways, and so transcending what had previously been thought to be limits. Thus, Oe’s refusal to give up on Hikari can be seen as a creative act. And all creativity, because it involves a rejection of the status quo, going beyond it in order to make something new, involves rebellion, in the sense that there must be a refusal simply to accept what already exists.
Did Kenzaburo Oe create Hikari’s creativity? The question cannot be answered definitively. Creativity is elusive, and all the brain scientists I asked about Hikari told me that they did not know why he was the only savant who had ever created in this sense. They did agree that creativity is to some extent heritable. However, what is heritable is not creativity itself but potential creativity — a propensity. Why that was developed against such overwhelming odds in Hikari’s case is, finally, not an answerable question. The scientists did agree, though, that genes alone could not have produced the unique phenomenon that is Hikari Oe. And they all felt that Kenzaburo Oe’s way of bringing him up, addressing the Hikari he imagined — a child who might grow and develop — instead of the inert, unresponsive Hikari who was actually in front of his eyes, must have been crucial in enabling Hikari to surpass his limitations so astonishingly.
I have described some of the early fictional characters Hikari inspired. One is almost spookily prophetic: the retarded sister in The Silent Cry, who is some kind of musical savant. It is remarkable that Oe should have created such a character long before Hikari had shown any signs of musical ability, almost as though Hikari’s savant skills later emerged as a result of his father’s imagining their possibility. There are many later fictional characters inspired by Hikari as well, but they are not relevant to my main point here, for the early Hikari-like characters were created before the actual Hikari showed any potential whatsoever.
I believe Hikari’s birth triggered something in Oe’s rebellious imagination. Before Hikari was even conceived, Oe had written about abandoned children and about children who were rejected because they were defective. He used them consciously, as symbols, and he was not the only postwar writer in Japan to represent the country as having been abandoned by its emperor/father. Oe had been abandoned by his own father, through death, a very short time before Japan’s defeat, and I believe his determination not to abandon his own son, even mentally, was in some part based on an unwillingness — perhaps on an outright inability — to repeat what he himself had experienced as a child deserted by the main source of his security.
That is a rather old-fashioned, Freudian idea, of course, but while it is increasingly clear that more of human personality is genetically determined than has been previously thought, there is also growing evidence that experiences such as those Oe had as a child at the end of the war can have a physical effect on the brain, on the chemical responses to similar stresses a person will make for the rest of his life. Oe made brilliant creative use, in both his fiction and his nonfiction writing, of the intensity of his involvement with Hikari, and I would like to suggest that this creativity was as essentially helpless and reactive as was the intensity of his original imaginative identification with his endangered son.
Kenzaburo Oe was always aware that he himself had a need to believe Hikari needed him, and this has had some extreme manifestations. In 1994, just before learning of his Nobel award, Oe had declared that he was giving up fiction writing forever, because his main motivation had been to give Hikari a voice and now Hikari had found a voice of his own. It was clear by then that Hikari was established as a successful composer — in fact, outstandingly so. There were two CDs of his works out — the second had been released less than a week before — and their combined sales had reached 100,000, a mind-boggling figure for a living composer in the classical category. After being released in the States and in Europe, they went on to earn eight million dollars by 1998. His latest CD was released in Japan in June of that year, and will eventually be coming out here as well. His three CDs combined have now sold a total of 620,000 copies.
Oe’s various decisions about his son can be seen as works of art of some kind. Several of those decisions — the ones about what literary uses to make of the inspiration his son provided — were artistic creation in a literal sense. The human decisions about raising this child were creative acts too, and public gestures, often provocative ones, to some degree understood as such at the time they were made.
Two years after Oe declared that he was giving up fiction writing forever, he reversed his decision and began a new novel, “Somersault,” which was published in 1999, and since then he has also written “Changelings,” released in 2000. When he resumed writing, he said that he had realized Hikari’s success did not, after all, mean that he should stop writing fiction, only that he should stop writing about characters inspired by Hikari. So, father and son have gone on creating together, literally; they often work in the same room. This joint creation, furthermore, can be seen and, I hope, appreciated as a successful rebellion against what had previously been accepted as the limits of possibility. There is a hopeful lesson in the story of the Oes: anything we regard as impossible, individually or collectively, is impossible only until it happens; thus, our range of possibilities is always greater than we know.
ADDED MATERIAL
LINDSLEY CAMERON is a New York-based journalist, specializing in Japanese and Chinese culture. She lived in Japan from 1972 to 1980. Her writing has appeared in the Yale Review, Opera News, the New York Times, and the New Yorker, where she has been a contributing editor for eleven years. She is the author of The Music of Light: The Extraordinary Story of Kenzaburo and Hikari Oe (1998) and also wrote the liner notes for the American edition of the latest CD of compositions by Hikari Oe. Her most recent publications are the novella “A Dream of Far Cathay” and the introduction to Chinese author Ding Wangdao’s novel A Continuing Climb.
OE WITH LINDSLEY CAMERON, OU, APRIL 2001 Photo: Sidney DeVere Brown
Composition by Hikari Oe, front cover of his father’s novel M/T and the Marvels of the Forest (1986)
Back cover of M/T and the Marvels of the Forest (1986) with composition by Hikari Oe
Interested in more Kenzaburo Oe? Direct yourself to my mini page about Oe.
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