Statistics
Name: Bai Guang (白光) nee Shi Yong Fun (史永芬)
DOB: 1920 Beijing, China
Base of operation: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Malaysia
DOD: August 27, 1999 in Kuala Lumpur, Malayasia

Famous for her reputation as a vamp on screen and off.
First stage name was Cao Yu (日出)
Stage name means “white light;” allegedly inspired by the white light emitted from movie projectors.
Most of her work was done between the 1940s and 1950s.
Starred in over 30 films/musicals
Married an American pilot in 1953
Opened a nightclub in Tokyo in 1953
Can be found on the Shanghai Lounge Divas compilation
Died of colon cancer
Songs to listen to:
Waiting 4 U
Autumn Evening

Links
Biography
Filmography (selected)
Death announcement
Pathé 100 re-release of album Lian Zhi Huo

Images

Starring in Blood-Stained Begonia (血染海棠红) (1949)

Random image

With Linda Lin Dai (BG, left)

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.

by SANROKU YOSHIDA

Literature Today v69 p10-16 Wint ‘95

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

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

From the very beginning Oe astonished the reading public by his vivid imagination and uncompromising examination of human nature. These qualities, in combination with an extremely serene poetics, often produced a redeeming effect in his works. Another unprecedented feature was his style: a Japanese completely free from the conventions of the language. He was most likely following the Russian formalists’ definition of literature: “[They] saw literary language as a set of deviations from a norm, a kind of linguistic violence.”(FN1) In an interview published in World Literature Today, Oe himself later explained: “My intention was to destroy the Japanese language by using a kind of syntax that cannot fit into Japanese. I was ambitious. I was writing novels with an extremely destructive intention.”(FN2) Readers accustomed to established authors such as Kawabata, Tanizaki, and Mishima, all of them writing in perfect harmony with Japanese linguistic traditions, found Oe’s style bizarre, to say the least.
The young Oe was revolutionary in another aspect: he publicly declared in his Akutagawa Prize acceptance speech that he was fully committed to, and ready to participate in, politics through writing. This was an outright breach of the intellectual tradition established by Shoyo Tsubouchi (1859-1935) in his Shosetsu Shinzui (Essence of the Novel; 1885), generally considered the first written formulation of modern literary theory in Japan based on Western–mainly English–critical theories. Tsubouchi emphasized the importance of the independence of literature and propagated the ideal of literature for literature’s sake.

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

Literature is a verbal endeavor made in order to recog-
nize the meaning of one’s being human at one’s very
root, with an overall understanding of one’s relation to
society, the world, and the cosmos. Therefore, when a
giant corporation, disrupting the natural cycle of life
and death, exercises its large-scale violence over human
beings–so large that it destroys the fundamental har-
mony between human beings and their society, the
world, and the cosmos–literature, standing on human
ground, will continue to protest against such violence.(FN3)

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

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

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

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

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

Suppose in an hour the world’s last war broke out,
he [the father, whose name is Isana or “Whale”] must
walk back to his shelter with his son Jin before the heat
and the shock waves of nuclear explosions hit this city,
threading their way through the panicked crowd with
the aplomb and persistence of those who had lived only
to prepare themselves for such a day. Until he could of-
ficially return the right to use the globe to the trees and
the whales, he and his infant son must wait in the shel-
ter calm and relaxed as if they themselves chose to be
annihilated. The concrete wall of the shelter would
glow with the intense heat and then the shock waves
would reach the infant child’s ears.(FN4)

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

Unlike most Japanese writers, who usually publish their novels in installments in magazines while the works are still in progress, Oe works on each piece for a year or more until he finishes it. He has never written so-called potboilers; each publication always contains some new development, either philosophically or technically. So far, Oe has written at least twenty full-length novels, six collections of stories, and eight volumes of essays. In addition to the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature, he has won seven major literary prizes in Japan. In 1986 and 1992 he was a candidate for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and in 1989 the Europelia Arts Festival conferred its literary prize upon him.
One of the most salient characteristics of Oe’s major works is their interrelated nature: his themes continually recur, his characters reappear in several works under the same names, and episodes in works previously treated are referred to without explanation. The world of Oe’s imagination is entirely holistic, which makes it impossible to discuss one particular work without touching upon another.

It all began with The Silent Cry. In that novel Oe tells of two incidents similar to each other, separated in time by about one hundred years but occurring at the same place, the author’s native village in Shikoku. The overall narrative is diachronic, but when the older episode is superimposed on the one in the narrative present, it becomes synchronic. The use of this technique, known as “simultaneity,” helps create a kind of universality that is usually conveyed by myth. The narrator Mitsusaburo and his wife, both guilt-stricken since having institutionalized their retarded son, return to the village with the husband’s mad brother Takashi. Takashi tries to organize a group of young villagers, referring to them as a soccer team when in fact they are violent hoodlums, in order to stop the ever-increasing influence of a supermarket and its owner, nicknamed “the Emperor.” The peasant riot which overlaps Takashi’s would-be uprising occurred shortly before the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Takashi’s plan for an uprising disintegrates in the end, just as the actual historical peasant riot was suppressed by the authorities. Takashi commits suicide, not because his social cause fails to materialize, but because his younger sister kills herself as a result of his forcing her into incestuous relations with him. At the close of the novel, Takashi, together with other characters who died violent deaths, is deified at the village Bon Festival (the Buddhist “Festival of the Dead”) as one of the patron gods who will protect the village. Thus the myth of the village in the forests of Shikoku is complete.
The eternal cycle of life and death is one of the major themes of Dojidai gemu (Contemporary Games; 1979). The basis here is the creation myth of Japan, as it is told in the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters), compiled in the eighth century. The narrative structure, similar to that used in The Pinch Runner Memorandum, effectively makes images hazy: it is impossible to pin down exactly what happens and in what order. However, the following at least is clear: the book consists of six chapters, each one a long letter by a brother to his sister. In reincarnating the primordial brother and sister who commit incest in order to found a nation in the Kojiki, Oe suggests that the brother and sister in his novel sometimes lead a single androgynous existence.

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

Another interpretation of the myth and history of the village-as-microcosm-of-the-nation is that the world is actually the underground country of the dead. In the Kojiki the primordial sister dies while giving birth to fire, and her body decomposes in the country of the dead. One of the many names for the valley is “Kame,” meaning a large earthen vessel, and in this case it is a coffin in which a corpse sits with arms clasping the knees. This fetal position suggests a juxtaposition of death and rebirth. Thus the village-as-national-microcosm is a metaphor of the cycle of death and regeneration.
The fifty-day war between this village-microcosm and Imperial Japan is probably a condensed history of warfare from ancient times to the present, as well as in part a satire on the irresponsible way in which Imperial Japan fought World War II. The village, as the stronghold of the peripheral culture, will not merge with any central authority in Japan and refuses to pay taxes. In the beginning the villagers fight with a primitive natural weapon, a huge pond of human bodily waste; but when the Imperial Army’s field artillery threatens to set fire to the forest, the village surrenders. For the villagers, forests are more important than their independence, since their psyche is directed toward the earth: they worship trees as life reborn from the earth, as part of the cycle of death and regeneration, a world view very close to that of the Druids.

Oe’s Rabelaisian grotesque realism generates many interesting characters. One of them, called “Shiri-me” (shiri means “buttocks” and me means “eye”), has no facial eyes, only a single eye between the buttocks: with a sight level lower than that of ordinary people, he represents the downward psyche of grotesque realism. Another character, antithetical to “Shiri-me,” is “Ki kara orin hito,” which means “the person who would not come down from the trees.” He lives in the trees, does not set foot on the ground, and is killed accidentally by the Japanese Army.(FN5)

The tree of life is the central image in Oe’s next book, a collection of two short stories and three novellas entitled, “Ame no ki” o kiku on’natachi (The Women Listening to “Rain Tree”; 1982). The stories and novellas here are linked together, and although each is an autonomous entity, characters from earlier stories appear in later ones and old episodes are often referred to. What links them all together is the image of the tree: “It has been named the ‘rain tree,’ for its abundant foliage continues to let fall rain drops collected from last night’s shower until well after the following midday. Its hundreds of thousands of tiny leaves–finger-like–store up moisture while other trees dry up at once. What an ingenious tree, isn’t it?”(FN6)

The image of the “Rain Tree” begins in a positive context. The first story opens, “‘You probably want to see trees more than people, don’t you?’ So saying, an American lady of German origin took me out of the parlor filled with people who had come to the party, crossed the spacious corridor and the proch, and led me to the huge expanse of darkness outside.”(FN7) The huge expanse of darkness remains mysterious and the tree in it does not take shape until later, when the narrator discovers that the house in which the party is being held is actually an insane asylum and the partygoers inmates. The tree functions as a benevolent protector in response to the prayers of those people who wish somehow to overcome their madness.

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

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

The notion of the ground connecting life and death and therefore providing the continuity between generations is quintessential to Oe’s “spatialized novels.”(FN8) The great bamboo forest from which the peasant rioters had cut their spears in The Silent Cry reappears in “Until the Savior Gets Beaten.” Also, right next to the bamboo forest is the herb garden of the Destroyer from “Contemporary Games.” The cause of the conflict over which the main character gets beaten is the dam that he has built in the hollow of the village. Close ties with nature are reflected in the peasants’ choice of weapon, in the healer/killer (medicine/poison) ambivalence of the Destroyer’s herb garden, and in the life-giving water that eventually generates enmity between people. All these ambivalent elements are necessary to the modern myth that Oe creates in his successive works, beginning with The Silent Cry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mexico City is Oe’s metaphor of violent death. It is there that Carlos Nervo, a Peruvian scholar of Japanese literature, is dying of cancer, extremely afraid of the bodily pain he must experience before he dies. Therefore he wishes to hang himself. The rain tree here symbolizes salvation by death. Oe thus turns personal experience into literary representation, framing his own actual experience in a more universal context. This context is Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. Oe’s other characters constantly refer to the book, to Lowry, or to the fate of the main character Firmin. A group of young musicians in Oe’s novel is named “Maquina Infernal,” and their new album, with a picture of an inverted rain tree on its jacket, is titled “Inverted Qliphoth.” These terms are taken directly from Lowry’s cosmology and are based on the Jewish Cabala, in which the “Qliphoth,” for example, is the occult Tree of Life, an emblem of the Cabala, and in which the “Sephiroth” (or cosmic structure), when inverted, forms a tree of death. (Oe cites Pearle Epstein’s study The Private Labyrinth of Malcolm Lowry as his source.)(FN9)
Brother Gii builds his church in the village and tries to write a gospel for it. The emblem of the church is the burning tree, an image taken from Yeats and one that has some similarity to the Qliphoth in that the Tree of Life is green on one side and aflame on the other. The green side promises life, healing, and regeneration; the burning side prophesies the end of the world. This sense of uncertainty concerning the continuation of the world is reflected in Brother Gii’s first sermon.

Time so long that it can be called “eternity” is not real-
ly what matters. What matters is probably this instant.
Maybe for us the most important thing is to cherish
time that lasts a little longer than an instant…. Yes,
that is exactly what I want to do now. Time that lasts a
little longer than an instant–I came across this phrase
when I got off the school bus in front of our high
school and was waiting for a green light in order to go
across the street. I noticed a big sugar maple tree near
the bus stop. It was that season in Berkeley when the
leaves of many different sugar maples change their col-
ors. Among different kinds of sugar maples there are
about three groups of leaves that become red in turn. I
was watching the leaves flutter in sea breezes, some
deep red, some yellow, and others still pale green.
Then the traffic light turned green, but I, as a high-
school student, clearly said to myself, in Japanese, “I
will wait for another green light. It is important to
watch these maple leaves for a little bit longer than just
an instant.” (”The Burning Green Tree,” 1:148))

Kacchan Takayasu in the “Rain Tree” stories suffers from a fear of being forgotten. He suffers because he tries to live in the temporal framework of eternity. His son, Zachary Kacchan Takayasu, after his father has died, organizes a musical group called “Maquina Infernal” and recognizes the possibility of an apocalyptic end to the world, symbolized by the inverted rain tree on the group’s album cover. In “The Burning Green Tree” Zachary comes to see Uncle K in Tokyo. He is interested in his uncle’s novels, particularly in their treatment of village folklore. Uncle K sends him to his native village in the mountains of Shikoku, where he meets Sacchan, the narrator of this voluminous work. This narrator is a boy at the beginning but later turns into an androgynous being: Zachary arouses Sacchan’s still-dormant female sexuality when he makes love to him/her. This is an incredible feat of the imagination in which Oe symbolically embodies primordial sexual unity, an integral topos of his mythical cosmos ever since “Contemporary Games.”
Moreover, Sacchan expresses a wish to have a baby, and Oe’s model of primordial sexual unity is supposed to be able to reproduce itself without splitting into two sexes. At the end of “Vacillation” Sacchan refuses to go into Brother Gii’s church, “because I did not want to have my pain lessened by anything that had anything to do with the church.” This declaration suggests an oncoming conflict in the last part of the trilogy with the seemingly harmonious world of Brother Gii’s church, where a choir sings joyous songs celebrating the life of the Consul General.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SANROKU YOSHIDA, retired from the faculty at Miami University of Ohio, is Professor of Japanese Literature at Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka, Japan. He has published extensively on Kenzaburo Oe in literary journals, reference works, and such critical anthologies as Oe Kenzaburo bungaku (1987). Other publications include articles on such modern authors as Yukio Mishima and Shohei Ooka, a study of The Tale of Genji, and articlelength entries in such volumes as Japanese Women Writers (1989). He regularly reviews new works by Japanese fiction writers for WLT.

FOOTNOTES
1 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1983, p. 4.
2 Sanroku Yoshida, “An Interview with Kenzaburo Oe,” WLT 62:3 (Summer 1988), pp. 369-74.
3 Oe Kenzaburo, “Naze ningen wa bungaku o tsukuridasuka” [Why Do Human Beings Create Literature?], in Oe Kenzaburo dojidai ronshu [Essays on Contemporary Issues], vol. 1, Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten, 1981, pp. 140-51. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
4 Oe Kenzaburo, Kozui wa waga tamashii ni oyobi [A Flood Unto My Soul], Tokyo, Shinchosha, vol. 1, 1973, pp. 25-26.
5 For further discussion of Dojidai gemu [Contemporary Games] and other earlier works, please see my “Kenzaburo Oe: A New World of Imagination,” in Comparative Literature Studies, 22:1 (Spring 1985), pp. 80-96.
6 Oe Kenzaburo, “Ame no ki” o ki ku on’natachi [The Women Listening to “Rain Tree”], Tokyo, Shinchosha, 1982, p. 34. This English passage is inserted in the Japanese text by the author.
7 Ibid., p. 9.
8 See Sharon Spencer, Space, Time, and Structure in the Modern Novel, New York, New York University Press, 1971, pp. 155-59.
9 Geoffrey Firmin (”infirm”), the main character in Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano, falls into an inferno represented by the Cabala’s upturned Tree of Life. See David Markson, Malcolm Lowry’s Volcano, New York, New York Times Book Co., 1978, pp. 23, 69.
WBN: 9501500066002

Interested in more Kenzaburo Oe? Direct yourself to my mini page about Oe.

by Marleigh Grayer Ryan

World Literature Today, Spring 2002 v76 i2 p49(9)
(c) 2002 University of Oklahoma

OE KENZABURO WAS TEN and a half years old when he heard tell of the emperor’s fateful message ending World War II. He has written–and continues to write–of the impact that message had upon his life and the lives of his compatriots. The time immediately before and after that day has resonated in his fiction With an intensity unequaled in that of his contemporaries. The closing year of that terrible war, those months when countless thousands of Japanese died in an already lost cause–that time of killing, as he names it–appears as a powerful force in his writing, engraving an indelible image in the minds of his readers and teaching us over and over that we must not forget. He sets forth without compromise the tragedy suffered by his country as a result of the terrible hypocrisies and deceptions visited by the elders upon the young at every level of Japanese society.

Beyond this, Oe has used his fiction to portray the breakdown within Japanese society precipitated by these deceptions stretching far beyond the war and its immediate aftermath. He was in his formative years and was just beginning to experience Tokyo life as a university student when the corruption of the Occupation years (1945-52) and its decadent aftermath were uncovered, casting a blight upon every aspect of his country’s life.

We must recognize then that Oe’s early fiction, referring powerfully as it often does to war and its effects, is speaking not only of the terrible mistakes that came to a crashing end in the summer of 1945, with inestimable losses of human life and livelihood. It speaks as well of the monstrous behavior of his countrymen in subsequent decades, not only in their refusal to admit culpability for the conduct of the entire Pacific War but also in their stealing each from the other, both materially and spiritually, in ways that tore at the very fabric of Japanese society. The deceptions so powerfully allegorized in Oe’s fiction did not end in 1945. His writing argues that the effects of those lies permanently altered Japanese society in profound ways.

In one of his earliest novellas, Memushiri kouchi (1958), translated in 1995 as Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, (1) Oe places the wisdom to see this hypocrisy in the hands of the youngest, a child of perhaps four. With what we now recognize as startling prescience, the twenty-three year-old author gave the smallest of the humans in the tale the gift of insight, the talent to find life and beauty in the crassest surroundings. Ultimately the child’s voice is lost amid the violence of his elders, and his life is sacrificed in pursuit of his search for a pure love.

The child is the younger brother of one of the oldest–and therefore one of the leaders–of a group of fifteen delinquents pulled from their Tokyo prison and “evacuated” to a primitive rural village deep in a virtually inaccessible valley. “Evacuation” was the rallying call for city persons–first children, then whole families–in response to the blanket fire-bombing visited by American air forces on the cities of Japan in the final months of the war. The evacuation of the delinquents is a parody of the evacuation of other “normal” Japanese children. Far from being protected, they are delivered to a place where only death can await them.

The child at the center of the story had been brought by his father to the prison where the boy’s older brother was incarcerated so that he (the father) might be relieved of the responsibility for evacuating him. The child was left with the committed offenders, to be treated as one of them. Delighted to be with the older brother he had always defended, the child snuggled into the lives of the delinquents much like a puppy, moving from one to another, engaging attention as he went.

The story is told in the voice of a narrator, this older brother, and it is through his eyes that we learn of the events of the delinquent boys’ journey to the valley under the care of a warden, and their naive pleasures and paralyzing fears when they finally reach the primitive village where they are to be confined. This is an allegory peopled by an imagined group of essentially outcast children and early adolescents. It takes place largely in a village located in an invented spot so remote and isolated that its allegorical function becomes immediately clear. The villagers are appallingly ignorant of illness and disease. The valley is inhabited by men, women, and children whose unreasoned cruelty, even in the most educated among them, a doctor, gives credence to the attributions of Japan’s wartime enemies.

And this is what Oe intends for us to see. He wants us to realize that, improbable though the events of the work may be, they are powerful reflections of the terrible corruption that pervaded Japanese society during his most impressionable years. Ten years of age in 1945, Oe had gone through his school years in a small town on Shikoku, then and still in many ways among the most isolated of Japan’s home islands. In 1954 he went up to Tokyo to attend university, majoring in French literature, in the company of the brightest young minds of his generation. It is difficult to exaggerate the volatility of Japanese society in the 1950s as the Japanese people struggled to regain a sense of who they were, where they had been, and where they were going in the years immediately following the end of the Occupation. Living with the radicalism of contemporary French thought in a capital struggling to find its place among competing ideologies, Oe began to write of his country’s wartime experience in uncompromising terms. We can perhaps say that he has never stepped down from that position.

What Oe is attempting to convey in this tragic tale is the monstrous cruelty people visit upon one another when threatened with their lives. Of those in the story, only one perhaps can be said to have maintained his integrity, although even in his case he is forced to abandon another individual he had sought to defend in order to save those closer to him. The rest, allies and enemies alike, fall away from a position of strength under duress. And ultimately the narrator himself withstands extreme pressure only because he has already relinquished the higher plane he had once embraced by sacrificing his brother. His survival guarantees that someone shall bear witness.

The tale has a mythic simplicity. Of the fifteen boys in the troop forced upon the villagers, we learn of only a handful. There is one called “Minami” (South, or Southward), after his unreasonable faith in the belief that his sanctuary lies to the south, if only he could reach it. He is a peer of the narrator and in most matters his rival. He takes particular pleasure in trying to trip up the little boy, always searching for a way to play on the child’s weakness. The child falls into Minami’s traps a number of times, until he is ultimately destroyed by his tormentor’s power over the group. His downfall comes within minutes of having successfully negotiated a rite of passage into manhood, to the great admiration of this outcast crew.

The drama of the tale lies in the word plague. We are introduced to it by implication almost immediately. The account opens with the delinquent troop looking out on a river in the course of their journey. They are drying out their rain-soaked green prison-issue slickers on some hedges, having been forced to stop while a search is on for two of their number who have attempted to escape. The river runs with the corpses of dogs and cats and rats. Disease is rampant.

The escapees are soon returned. One is Minami. He was unable to elude his captors because he was slowed by the weakness of the other boy, who is debilitated by stomach pains. The sick boy continues retching up thin pink liquid. Both boys have been beaten, and the narrator attempts to cleanse their wounds. This is but one escape attempt made by various members of the group as they have begun to realize the true nature of their situation. They had hoped for opportunities during their “evacuation.” But as delinquents, they are despised by everyone the), encounter on the road; they will be hunted down no matter when and where they try to escape. They are so hated that their warden has been turned down repeatedly by villages that had earlier committed to accepting them. He is now urgently trying to place them so that he can return for the boys remaining in the Tokyo prison also awaiting evacuation. The delinquents are on their way to their last opportunity for placement. Only the little boy gives the sick youth solace; the others resent his being the cause of the failure of this final escape attempt.

The first morning in their new “prison,” a village so isolated and remote that their passage into it puts them at great physical risk, it becomes clear why this village of all those the warden tried has finally agreed to take them in. They are led on a work detail along the river. The village blacksmith, to whom their warden had turned over the boys en route, is their chief guardian. Village children are watching in curiosity. All at once a village child is screamed at for picking up the corpse of a dead rat. Both gross and wily, the blacksmith cajoles the narrator’s little brother into carrying it to a huge pile of animal corpses lying near the river. The delinquents’ assignment is to dig a hole and bury the bloated bodies. They see fat young animals among the dead. Under questioning, the blacksmith reluctantly admits that “only one man” has died of the disease; another “evacuee, a woman” is ill with it. When asked by the narrator what the village does in time of plague, the blacksmith informs him rather matter-of-factly that the villagers had indeed abandoned the valley twenty years before when cholera had broken out, later returning when the danger had passed. But, he insists, ignoring the animal bodies, there is no proof yet that this is plague.

As they return at the end of the day to the temple building where they are staying, they find a doctor leaving a nearby store, house, shaking his head. He seeks out the narrator and tells him to come the next day to the neighboring village for medicine for the sick boy. That night the boy dies, his passing noted only in the softness of his moans. The delinquents, who have been locked in their quarters, set up a tremendous howl. The blacksmith and the village headman finally come and examine the corpse under a glaring flashlight. Soon a number of villagers are debating feverishly in the space outside the temple. As he and the narrator try to sleep, the little boy shivers with cold and admits to his brother that he had loaned his precious green rain slicker to the sick boy. Now they must take it from the corpse, touching one who had so recently been alive. The brothers weep for the loss of their friend and at their own sense of utter helplessness.

They hear the alarm bell from the village. The headman’s voice shouts out a series of orders, and eventually there is a din. The door has not been secured, and the narrator, Minami, and the little boy steal out. Here, joined in action as they rarely are, the three watch stealthily as the villagers steal out of the village in a long parade with all their portable goods in tow, down to the goats and the blacksmith’s rabbit. Fear of the plague has caused them to abandon the boys and to fall back on their ancient escape scheme.

The narrator and his little brother collapse in despair at the edge of the river. The child pathetically bemoans the odor of his coat, which reeks of death. His brother promises to wash it in the river in the morning sun, wondering to himself how he can manage to rid it of its smell.

The full horror of their situation hits all of the boys the next morning. Minami calls for them to follow after the villagers. The narrator has already realized that the people would not have left as they did, had they wanted to take the boys. He and his brother stay behind briefly as a gesture of protest. All the others follow Minami up a mountain road to the tracks across the ravine, where a wheeled lumber-carrier, the only means for leaving the village, runs to the top of the mountain on the other side. They discover, however, that the villagers have thrown up a huge barricade on the tracks, a jumble of heavy objects, making it impossible for the boys to gain access to the landing even if they were to brave a crossing over the deep ravine and its roaring river. Each of the boys now fully realizes that they have been intentionally abandoned. They cry out in fury.

To complete their horror, they see a guard armed with a powerful rifle emerge from a shed at the railhead to threaten the boys. Why, asks the little boy, why do they want to kill us? The narrator has been trying to suppress the word plague, to keep it from infecting the air and filling the group with terror. His efforts are sorely challenged by the child’s pleas, although he knows that he must keep the word from leaking out, as it will surely drive the boys to desperation. But Minami deliberately challenges him, spitting out the word, letting it beat on the heads of all the delinquents, and risking an outbreak of uncontrollable madness. He tells them they all have the plague.

The narrator counters with a challenge: can anyone offer evidence that he has the plague? The delinquents are silent. In a moment, Minami backs off and goes tearing down the road through the forest, the narrator at his heels. Challenged once more, Minami agrees not to mention the plague again. Instead, he clings to the possibility of other escape routes across the back of the mountain. But both of them know that all the villagers in the entire area are determined to catch and possibly kill any runaways. They know they are completely trapped. Minami suddenly remembers the horror of having once been made to kill a sick calf with a sledgehammer. The narrator tries to silence him, to drive away the memory, until he sees the tears in the young rebel’s eyes. Minami is weeping as he speaks of this terrible memory. The narrator too recognizes this moment of utter helplessness, of the total absence of hope. For this one moment, the two are allies.

Contributing drastically to the boys’ awareness of their helplessness and isolation is their knowledge of the cadet who had deserted his troop. The military cadets, young men of sixteen or so, were the pampered icons of youth in the war effort. On their trek through the villages in search of a place willing to accept them, the delinquents had encountered a squadron of cadets, smart in their elegant uniforms, finely disciplined, their bodies hugely attractive to the boys. Rebuffed by the cadets, however, the boys could only watch from a distance. The cadets were on a detail to recapture one of their own who had disappeared into the forests of this remote area. The boys learned that villagers from all around had joined in the search. All were ultimately frustrated by the terrain, but the boys saw very clearly how determined all the world was to bring the “deserter,” (2) as he was called, to justice.

Soon the narrator and his little brother have joined the other boys in breaking into the houses the villagers had locked behind them, searching for whatever meager food the villagers might have left in their haste. The boys bring their pathetic loot to a central place in the village. As the narrator and his brother are engaged in this task, a Korean of the narrator’s age appears, carrying a sack of rice, and, wordlessly, a violent struggle breaks out between them. They fight to exhaustion, the new fellow proving invincible until the little boy passes his brother a stone, with which he is able to defeat his adversary. The narrator decides to leave the bag of rice to his opponent and goes off, his nose bloodied, but realizing with some interest that there is another being left behind in this forsaken spot. His adversary returns to the Korean settlement on the other side of the river.

The introduction of a Korean into the text broadens the isolated world of the village. The Korean youth will add to the boys’ knowledge of the place and to the store of their experience in living outside a prison. He will also intensify their hatred of the villagers, as they learn how Korean families have been subjected for decades by the villagers to the most humiliating servitude, kept in perpetual terror and demeaned in every way. Expressed here in this early work we find a clear statement of Oe’s lifelong rage at the Japanese mistreatment of minorities and their lasting refusal to admit non-Japanese into full citizenship. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Japanese mistreatment of its Korean population and its wartime conduct toward these people.

That evening, as the boys have grown even more domestic, selecting houses for themselves and starting to gather vegetables and do a bit of cooking, yet another castaway is located. Throwing open the warehouse door, some of the boys peek in and see another terrifying sight: a girl kneeling beside the corpse of a woman. Minami determines that it is her mother, abandoned amid preparations for burial by the villagers’ abrupt departure. Minami and the narrator once again take charge, ordering the warehouse door shut to protect the girl.

These two new individuals, peers of the narrator, provide new mystery in the delinquents’ lives and begin to separate the narrator from his little brother. That night, as the boys try to rest after relishing their first cooked meal in their new home, a granary, the narrator is seized by an overwhelming terror of death, a profound physical reaction that has recurred often in his life. He is unable to put aside either the image of the girl and her dead mother in the warehouse or the sight of the dead boy in the temple building. He shivers in horror and, at his brother’s suggestion, begins to cover chinks in the door. He sees a fire burning at a house in the Korean settlement, and somehow he is warmed with a new sense of friendship.

Suddenly his brother asks to see a simple object he covets, a can opener in the shape of a camel’s head, something both boys were extremely fond of. As they snuggle under their blanket, the little boy asks if he might not borrow the opener for a while, keeping it in his own kit bag. Grudgingly, his older brother agrees. Still lying awake, he is almost jealous of the peaceful sounds of the little boy’s regular breathing.

In the morning, the narrator takes porridge left over from their breakfast to the girl keeping vigil over her dead mother in the warehouse. Sickened by the smell, he thrusts the food at her wordlessly and rushes off. Upon his return, he discovers his brother in the center of a group of the boys, cuddling a small dog in his arms. He will not tell them where he found the dog. Minami ridicules him for embracing the raunchy-looking animal, saying it should be killed and eaten instead. His older brother protectively sends the youngster off to their quarters to feed the animal.

Death and the burial of the dead dominate the remaining days of the boys’ isolation. That afternoon, seeing the Korean boy in the settlement across the river carrying a corpse wrapped in white, Minami recruits a team of boys to dig a grave for their dead comrade. The boys become delirious at finding such an outlet for their energies in these first days without supervision. Spotting the Korean youth across the river struggling to raise a huge boulder over the grave, the narrator recruits Minami and they rush to the boy’s aid. The gesture brings the Korean, Li, into the group of delinquents. He had refused to depart his settlement with the other Koreans, preferring to stay in order to bury his father; his mother had gone with the villagers. Li is thus one of the abandoned, and his superior knowledge of the ways of the village and the area establish him at once as a leader. He persuades the girl in the warehouse to let them bury her dead mother, and the girl finally emerges from the foul building, still completely silent. Soon all the youthful energy of the delinquents is diverted into finishing off the graves, lining them up with the grave of the animal corpses they had dug the first day. As evening falls they complete their efforts in a silent primitive ritual dance, binding themselves spiritually to the bodies lying dead beneath the ground.

By bringing food to the girl, the narrator begins to draw her out, establishing trust bit by bit. At the noon lunch the following day, they find her in the sun outside the building. She pets the boy’s dog as she accepts their offering of food.

That afternoon the circle of events begins to close. Li, perhaps seeking greater acceptance among the boys, tells them that he is sheltering the runaway cadet whom the villagers throughout the area have been hunting. The boys line up to peek at the cadet. The smaller boys are thrilled, but Minami and the narrator walk away bitterly disappointed. The runaway lacks the cachet of the cadets; he is clad in work clothes, his complexion is sickly and gray, and he has none of the physical attractiveness they associate with the elite corps.

That evening, after the narrator has wooed her by bringing her food at each meal, the girl finally comes to eat with the brothers in the granary. The three have an almost normal domestic dinner, with the little boy chattering over the thrill of seeing the cadet, feeding his dog from his own mouth, and chatting with the girl about a name for the dog. The older brother is unable to speak sensibly, and contents himself with stoking a fire to drive off the night chill.

Bored with so little to do, the boys build a bonfire the next morning, joined by Li and the cadet. Minami and the narrator are repelled by the cadet’s apparent weakness and his admission that he had run off because he did not wish to kill anyone. The little boy worries that the cadet will be caught. Minami argues that he would be killed instantly. In clear recognition of his affection for the cadet, the child drops the name the girl had given his dog and accepts “Leo,” the name offered by the cadet.

That night the girl and the narrator eat alone in the granary, the child having gone to Li’s to eat with the cadet. They find nothing to talk about until finally the girl admits to terror, absolute terror, at being abandoned in the village alone without its proper inhabitants. It is a primitive fear, to which she is unable to give proper voice, and she resorts instead to continued, pained weeping. The narrator is unable to draw her out of this mood; she insists that he go and tell the villagers that they must come back for her and take her with them. In response to her moans, he takes a completely unreasonable course: he decides to go for help to the doctor who had left him a crude map to his house on their first day in the village. This means that he must cross the barriers that have been set up to guard against their escape.

It is of course an utterly disastrous decision. Not only does the narrator put his life at risk in attempting to cross along the rail ties and over the barricade; he is also opening contact with the villagers. When he finds his way to the doctor’s house, the man drives him away in fury, beating him as he begs for help for the girl. Within those few minutes he has told the doctor there is no plague in the village, tearing down the real barrier that had protected their paradise from a world determined to destroy them.

Filled with rage at his own weakness and the doctor’s monstrous behavior, the narrator survives the return, and finds the girl waiting at the end of the tracks, wild with joy that he has come back. Finally, swept up by anger, despair, and relief, they have a brief moment of sexual intercourse in the dark reaches of that filthy warehouse. As he returns to the granary, love begins to warm his confused mind and body.

The next morning the brothers share the strongest expression of warmth and love that appears in the novel. Filled with joy from the feeling of love that has grown within him, the elder brother awakens to a world deep in fresh snow, silent but for the furious chirping of birds. He wakes his brother and the boys pee joyously into the deep soft snow. Leo frolics with the little boy, the two rolling about in utter delight. The little boy and his brother look into each other’s happy eyes for a very long moment.

As they set about eating, the little boy suggests that they stay forever in this place, just as they are. His brother points out they would grow into ignorant adults, but to himself he admits he wishes to live for a long time in this flesh snow, closed off from everyone.

The narrator has now found himself a home, a home from which he does not want or need to escape. For some indeterminate months or years of his life, he has been imprisoned, longing only to find some means of escape. Here, at this one moment in perfect harmony with his small brother, and loving and loved by a nearly anonymous girl with seemingly no ties to others, the young man can relax his defenses, stop the perpetually calculating mind of a prisoner, and drift with the day. The ugliness of the doctor’s violent behavior as the end result of his life-threatening effort must be set aside, put out of his consciousness, if he is to revel in this rare day of happiness.

His comrades are creating a makeshift skating rink, clearing the loose snow to fashion a space in which to swirl about gleefully. The narrator and his brother take their turn, flopping about clumsily. The girl watches from a chestnut tree nearby, and as he joins her, they laugh over her superior knowledge of heavy snowfalls. By a simple exchange of smiles, the other boys acknowledge the physical ties between the narrator and the girl, and then go back to rollicking on the ice. The girl asks about his aches and pains, and they share another laugh over her concern.

The narrator’s little brother is sitting next to the couple, excluded from the ice rink because his dog’s claws might scratch the surface. The child is holding on to the dog by its hindquarters, absorbed in the boys’ antics on the ice. The girl takes bread “hard as stone” from her jacket and silently gives the slightly larger half to the young man. She then tries to break the remainder in two. The narrator is trying to divide his share when suddenly the dog jumps up and bites the girl’s wrist while grabbing for the bread. The girl screams as the dog runs off up the slope, the bread in his jaws. The narrator is aroused by the sight of her lips licking her bruised arm. He tries to console her but she does not answer him, turning white, and looking at that moment quite ugly to her lover. His brother pales and flees up the slope, chasing his dog. The narrator leads the girl back to the warehouse. She rejects his attempts at sympathy and flees into the black interior. He is angry at this rejection but soon forgets about her and returns to sliding on the ice with his comrades for a long session.

Ready for food, he finally returns to the granary. He finds his little brother sitting disconsolately just inside the dark building, holding the dog between his knees. He is upset at seeing the boy so sad and isolated when all the others had been having such a grand time on the ice rink. The child announces that he has scolded the dog; his brother dismisses the problem, assuming the girl had exaggerated her pain. Why should the child have to suffer over such foolishness?

They rush out to rejoin the revelers. But Li arrives bearing birds he has trapped and lures the whole troop of boys into the forest to set traps. He cautions them that they must be attentive to their traps. If they are not careful, they will endanger future hunts, an idea that thrills the narrator, for it sets before him an unlimited stretch of tomorrows. The narrator, his brother, and Leo set off by themselves to stake out their space. They find signs of spring growth beneath the snow and dead leaves of the forest, just as they had found edible vegetables sprouting beneath the snow in the village. They wait for what seems to the narrator a very long time. Too drowsy and restless to wait any longer, the narrator leaves his little brother and Leo to wait for prey and returns to the village to check on the girl.

He finds her listless, lying on the matting, unable to raise herself to go to the toilet. Her face has lost its luster, her eyes are dull. He helps her briefly, at a loss to know how to respond to her abrupt offer to show him her “tummy.” He flees the warehouse quickly, confused by finding himself filled with a pride he cannot understand himself.

On returning to the forest, he discovers that his brother has captured a magnificent pheasant. It is still struggling to escape. The narrator urges the boy to kill the bird, and in a great burst he succeeds in breaking the bird’s neck. The boys share long moments of pride and joy, rolling in the snow with the dog in utter delight.

Back in the village, the child and his pheasant become the focus of wild admiration. He tells the story of its capture over and over, and wins the enthusiastic approbation of Li. His is clearly the outstanding catch of the day, and its beauty dominates the pile of trophies the boys bring back. Li suggests the need for a festival to celebrate this first hunt of the year and to ensure the success of their future hunts for the village. Minami, never accepting the idea of a possible future, challenges Li’s words, insisting the boys have been abandoned. The narrator argues that he at least has never been abandoned by anyone. The village, he claims, is their village.

With Li’s guidance, the boys prepare a fire and start the stock to cook the birds. The little boy helps out, proudly wearing around his neck the pheasant’s tail-feather, “shining like fire.” The cadet is persuaded to help stir the pot, and soon all are eating contentedly. With the rising of the moon, most of the boys jump up and begin to dance and sing wildly. Eventually Li, Minami, and the narrator join the cadet by the fire while the younger children dance off in the snow with Leo. The cadet argues that the war will soon be over and that he is just awaiting his opportunity to return to normal life. The narrator tries to defend the freedom they enjoy in the village as being adequate for their lives. The cadet hates the boys for their indifference to the war; they in turn scorn him for having run away to avoid death.

As they doze by the fire, the younger boys burst among them to report that the girl will not answer their calls; she is lying on the floor red-faced and groaning. Torn by guilt at having neglected her, the narrator finds her burning with fever, gasping for breath. The cadet, who appears to have some medical experience, takes charge, exchanging the weak, whining voice they had come to know for a voice of authority. He orders them to find a water bag and fill it with snow and water. Li remembers there is one in the village headman’s house. It is the most prominent building in the village and the only one the boys had not vandalized, without clearly realizing why. Li knows that his mother will be persecuted if he takes part in a break-in and that he may himself be killed for doing it, but seeing how distraught the narrator is, he agrees to help. The cadet cannot offer them any assurance that the girl will survive. Li and the narrator return to the other boys, walking shoulder to shoulder.

They find the troop of boys sitting around the fire, their heads sunk on their chests. The little boy is standing apart, his back turned defiantly on the group, hugging his dog. Minami stands up, steps forward, and announces that the cadet says that the girl has the plague. This word, which the narrator had struggled so long to suppress in the village, has now been unleashed, and it cannot be stopped. For the first time the delinquents will not listen to the narrator; they no longer trust him. Minami presses on, relaying the girl’s symptoms in horrifying detail, bringing terror to each of the boys.

Amid a sea of exclamations, one of them reminds them all that the dog had been digging up corpses from the animal grave, and that the little boy had reburied them and washed himself and the dog off in the river. Surely that is the source of the plague. Everyone had seen the dog bite the girl that morning, for no apparent reason. He must be mad with the plague. Minami grabs the heavy branch holding up the cooking pot and whistles for the dog, who comes unsuspectingly to him. Minami strikes the dog with all his power; within moments the dog is dead.

The little boy cries out in grief, challenging any of them for proof that the dog had the plague. He runs off, sobbing. His older brother calls after him but does not follow him. Instead he chooses to use this moment to regain control of the group and suppress the panic that had seized each of them. Recalling it as he writes the memoir, he feels it was his only opportunity to check the hysteria. He was sure his brother would forgive him.

The narrator quickly regains control of the group with threats and promises. Minami is forced to withdraw. Exhausted, the narrator returns to the granary. It is empty. Looking about he finds the boy’s kit bag is gone, and in its place the camel’s-head-shaped can opener neatly turned down on the hook. In a paroxysm of pain, he runs into the night screaming the boy’s name, running as far as the rail, where the guard fires a warning shot. There is no sign of the child. So, soon after his ascent to such height as the most successful hunter of them all, he has been destroyed by Minami’s jealousy and, more important, by the failure of his own brother to defend him adequately in his moment of greatest need.

Fear of the plague seizes the tiny community of boys the next day; only the cadet doggedly continues his horrific task, caring for the girl and ordering the others to stay indoors away from each other. In the evening, he is seen carrying the girl’s body wrapped in a rug to the burial site. The narrator joins a small procession and watches as he digs a grave and buries her body. Then the cadet returns to the warehouse, systematically prepares a fire, and burns it down. The cadet and the narrator turn to each other, both utterly abandoned and without any meaningful action to take. They experience a brief respite in each other’s bodies and fall asleep in each other’s arms.

The cadet is gone when the narrator awakens; the villagers have returned. At first the boys welcome the villagers, thinking themselves rescued from the plague which has terrorized them. Instead, they are brutally manhandled and threatened with their lives. The villagers are outraged at the damage the boys have done to their homes and property, and particularly by the burning of the warehouse. The boys are defiant until Minami mindlessly offers them a victim: he tells the villagers that the escaped cadet was responsible for the fire. The hapless fellow is soon recaptured, the victim of a bamboo spear. He is dragged back to the village, his guts spilling from his wounds.

All the delinquent boys are locked up in a tiny shed adjacent to the school, without food or water, without even a toilet. Only Li escapes the roundup. Through cracks in the boards the boys see the villagers digging up the graves–even those of the animals–they had so carefully prepared, and indifferently flinging the bodies onto a common bonfire. This represents for them the ultimate degradation of all their efforts to maintain a community in the absence of those who had abandoned them.

Abruptly, Li is thrust through the door of the shed, covered in filth. He finds a place on the floor close to the narrator, and, after some hesitation, tells him of his escape that morning along the riverbank in the valley. He found the little boy’s kit bag tangled up with the corpses of cats and shards of wood in a spot where the water level had fallen during the night. He had returned to almost certain death at the hands of the villagers to deliver this message.

Ultimately the villagers, fearing the imminent arrival of the warden with the balance of the reformatory youths, coerce the defiant boys into agreeing to suppress everything about these last five days. In return they will receive food and at least some moderation in the brutal treatment to which they have been subjected. One by one, the boys succumb to the lure of food, until even the rebellious Minami marches over to their side. Li, urged on by his fellow Koreans, now pressing at the door of the shed, reluctantly joins them as well after being warned that his mother and his settlement will be punished if he resists further. All have thus become “cadets,” even Li, who sacrificed his freedom to come back and tell of the boy’s death. The narrator stands alone against the villagers–perhaps because he now has no one for whom to make compromises, perhaps because someone must bear witness to these terrible events. The headman, furious at this continued resistance, hurls invectives at the narrator, including the lines from which the novel’s title derives: “Listen, the likes of you should be beaten while you’re still kids. We squash vermin while they’re tiny. We peasants nip the buds early.”

The narrator continues to resist, despite continued threats that he will suffer a terrible death and that no one will blame the villagers for his execution. They drag him barefoot from the shed and leave him standing in the square. Eventually the headman returns and announces that they have decided to let him go, allowing him to run off to the other side of the rail line. The blacksmith and another man drag him brutally to the lumber carrier. Once they are on the other side, the blacksmith turns on him viciously, heaving an iron bar at him. Somehow he eludes it and rushes off into the forest. Bruised and barefoot, without food or guidance, he hears the villagers calling to one another as they hunt for him.

So ends the text. Finally, Oe has deprived his world of all humanity. The bravest of the youths, Li, who sacrificed all possibility of freedom to return to tell of the little boy’s death, has been coerced by his need to protect his wretched community. The narrator, alone of them all, has survived. Once the only beings possessing some sense of humanity, the boys have been dehumanized to the same degree as the villagers, with all evidence of their efforts erased from the landscape. And the death of the little boy, a child so filled with innocence and love, signifies for us the ultimate failure of humanity to save itself by listening to the voice of the wisest of us all.

Oe later wrote a complex sequel to this simple, straightforward narrative, titled “Memushiri kouchi” saiban (The Trial of Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids; 1980), which includes an account of how the narrator had returned to the village after the war with American troops to protect him, pretending to be the younger brother who had died in the flood. He is said to have brought charges against the village for their crimes against the boys. Ultimately his case failed, however, and he went to live in America. He later fought in the Vietnam War, returning disfigured and crippled. (3)

The text I have discussed here is filled with powerful references to the hypocrisies that characterized Japanese society as Oe perceived them as a young man. The prominence of Li in the tale, his virtue and decency contrasting so strongly with the character of his Japanese counterparts, reflects Oe’s consistent defense of those stranded outside the mainstream of Japanese society, and particularly his revulsion at Japan’s mistreatment of its Korean population. The blind obedience of the boys when played upon by either Minami or the narrator reflects beyond question Oe’s contempt for such weakness among the Japanese as a whole. And of course, most striking is the image we take away from this book of the heartlessness of the villagers, their utter indifference to what they were doing when they abandoned the boys, locked (as they likely thought) in a room without food or water, and the mindless cruelty of their actions when they returned.

Also extremely powerful is the image of the narrator himself, who has abandoned the one creature who had most consistently stood by him in his life, one who depended utterly on his love. The child, so frequently associated in the novel with small animals, lives and dies among the massacred small creatures. The larger human animals continue to exist: some, like the delinquents, by yielding all principle under pressure from those in authority; others, like the villagers, who represent the remaining majority population, by ignoring what does not please them to know. Like many even today, they fail to accept responsibility for the crimes they have committed. Of those in the book, only Li, fully conscious of what he is doing in ultimately buckling to the village authority, lives on out of a sense of duty to a tradition struggling to survive.

Footnotes:
(1) Oe Kenzaburo, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kinds, trs. Paul St. John Mackintosh and Maki Sugiyama, London, Boyars, 1995. The translation contains a most useful introduction. The original text used for reference here is found in Abe Kobo Oe Kenzaburo shu, Tokyo, Gendai Nihon no Bungaku, 1970, vol. 47.

(2) In the original text and in the translation, various words are used to refer to this person: he is called “cadet,” “deserter,” “soldier,” or just otoko, the general word for “male” or “man” or “guy.” The terminology varies in both the general narrative and in the words different characters use to refer to him. I employ the word cadet most frequently to assist readers in identifying him. In my conversations with Oe at the Puterbaugh Conference symposium (University of Oklahoma, April 2001), he recalled that he meant the cadet to be about sixteen years old, as his own brother had been a cadet at that age. He thought of the narrator as twelve or thirteen, Minami perhaps slightly older, and the younger brother of the narrator as no older than four.

(3) This plot is recounted in the book by a narrator who has heard the story from his younger brother concerning another, older brother, who was in turn the narrator of the original Nip the Buds. See the introduction to the translation, pp. 10-11.

MARLEIGH GRAYER RYAN is Professor Emerita of Japanese at the State University of New York at New Paltz and Associate in Research at Harvard’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. Among her book publications are Japan’s First Modern Novel: “Ukigumo” of Futabatei Shimei (1967) and The Development of Realism in the Fiction of Tsubouchi Shoyo (1975), and she has been the recipient of grants from the Ford Foundation 0958-60) and the Japan Foundation (1972) as well as a fellowship from the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. (1988-89). She has reviewed contemporary Japanese belles lettres for WLT for over a quarter-century.

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