10 Novels by Kenzaburo Oe
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Overview: KENZABURŌ ŌE (1935 – 2023) was a Japanese writer and a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature whose works express the disillusionment and rebellion of his post-World War II generation. His novels, short stories and essays, strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory, deal with political, social and philosophical issues, including nuclear weapons, nuclear power, social non-conformism, and existentialism. Ōe was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature for creating "an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today."
Ōe’s first novel, NIP THE BUDS, SHOOT THE KIDS (1958), received widespread praise for its depiction of the tragedy of war tearing asunder the idyllic life of a rural youth. Following the traumatic birth of his first son with a cranial deformity, Ōe wrote A PERSONAL MATTER (1964), a darkly humorous account of a new father’s struggle to accept the brain-damaged child into his life, and of how he arrived at his resolve to live with him. Through the catalytic medium of humanism, he conjoined his personal trauma with a broader social perspective in HIROSHIMA NOTES (1965), a long essay describing the realities and thoughts of the A-bomb victims. In the early 1970s Ōe’s writing, particularly his essays, reflected a growing concern for power politics in the nuclear age and with questions involving the developing world.
Ōe continued to investigate the problems of characters who feel alienated from establishment conformity and the materialism of postwar Japan’s consumer-oriented society. Among his later works were the novel THE SILENT CRY (1967), a work that ties in the myths and history of the forest village with the contemporary age; a collection of short fiction entitled TEACH US TO OUTGROW OUR MADNESS (1969) which painfully portrays both the agony-laden trials and errors he experienced in his life with his unspeaking infant child, and his pursuit of his own father who he lost during the war; and the novel THE PINCH RUNNER MEMORANDUM (1976), which offers a contemporary and explosive picture of the nuclear family, which pivots on the bizarre odyssey of a Japanese father and son.
The novel RISE UP, O YOUNG MEN OF THE NEW AGE! (1983) is distinguished by a highly sophisticated literary technique and by the author’s frankness in personal confession. Ōe draws upon images from William Blake’s Prophecies and depicts his son’s development from a child to a young man. AN ECHO OF HEAVEN (1989) uses the religious ideology of the American writer Flannery O’Connor as a means to explore the suffering and possible salvation of a woman beset by a number of personal tragedies. THE CHANGELING (2000), the first volume of a projected trilogy, tells the story of a writer who relives his personal history, often in a dreamlike and surreal manner, after he receives a collection of audiotapes from an estranged friend who appears to have recorded his own suicide.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics
Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age | Writing once again with depth and passion about his relationship with his brain-damaged son, the Nobel laureate transforms his musings into a full-blown narrative that becomes a thoughtful yet provocative study of the nature of human relationships, filtered through the author’s fascination with the writings of William Blake. The story starts in familiar territory as the narrator, "K," replays the heartbreaking realization that "Eeyore" has a bizarre form of brain damage that may actually be a malformed second brain. He grapples with his son’s disturbing behavior, delving into such basic human concepts as death and suicide. K also deals with the reaction of the readers of his fiction in several passages, most notably that of a student who kidnaps Eeyore and leaves him at a Tokyo train station because he disapproves of the author’s political stances. K’s overall family life is left largely untouched until the end, with the author choosing instead to allude to his son’s experiences through references to Blake’s works, which become the subtext as Eeyore finally begins to compose and perform music and then to claim his real name and identity. This is a deceptively modest, powerful book by a master at the height of his literary powers. Whether he’s expanding on a mystical or philosophical concept or painting an achingly poignant picture of a unique father-and-son relationship, Oe contrives intensely memorable images of these two special characters and their thoughts, insights and loves that will stay with readers. Agent, Jim Auh of the Wylie Agency.
The Changeling | In 1997, Juzo Itami, one of Japan’s most successful film directors, jumped to his death in Tokyo. Nobel laureate Oe (Hiroshima Notes ) was Itami’s brother-in-law, and he transposes Itami’s suicide, under a fictional disguise, into a dazzling and elaborate maze of memories and meditations centering on the suicide of film director Goro Hanawa. Goro has made a series of tapes for Kogito, his world-famous writer brother-in-law, as groundwork for a possible film, which Kogito listens to obsessively after Goro’s suicide. To rid himself of Goro’s ghost, Kogito travels to Berlin, but even there he runs into pieces of Goro’s past. Eventually, the reader is led back to the two men’s youthful involvement with a right-wing paramilitary group founded by Kogito’s late father. What begins as a weekend spent at the group’s camp turns into something sinister from which Goro emerges fundamentally changed. Oe’s deft mix of high intellectual reflection and absurd slapstick scenarios is polished to a high gloss, giving this book a tone that may remind American readers of Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift.
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids | Oe, who won the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature, was just 23 in 1958, when he published this wrenching first novel in Japan. From the opening paragraph’s description of a river “bearing away at tremendous speed the corpses of dogs, rats, and cats,” it is clear that this is a story of innocents–or at least relative innocents–carried violently by forces beyond their control. In the waning days of WWII, a group of Japanese reform-school boys are evacuated to a remote village in a densely wooded valley. The villagers treat the teenagers horribly, making them bury a mountain of animal corpses, locking them into a shed for the night and feeding them raw potatoes. The unnamed narrator–one of the group’s leaders–discovers that a plague is ravaging the valley. When a couple of people are infected by the disease, the villagers panic. Believing the boys to be infected, the villagers remove themselves to the other side of the valley and block the only road out of town. At first, the boys can think only of escape, but then, like the boys in Lord of the Flies, they start to make the village their own: they bury the dead humans and perform a sort of sacrament; they care for an abandoned, infirm girl; they hold a hunting festival to ensure continued abundance. The narrator becomes the girl’s lover; his younger brother adopts a stray pup; an unexpected snowfall sparks a midwinter celebration. But each pleasant turn, every apparently liberating step away from unremitting brutality, serves to make the characters’ inevitable future suffering even more painful. The end arrives with the suddenness and fury of a tornado, as disease and war catch up to the boys. Oe is considered by many to be Japan’s greatest postwar novelist. It’s easy to see why. Here, his writing is crisp and lovely and gruesomely perfect. First serial to Grand Street.
Somersault | Nobelist Oe’s giant new novel is inspired by the Aum Shinrikyo cult, which released sarin gas in Tokyo’s subway system in 1995. Ten years before the novel begins, Patron and Guide, the elderly leaders of Oe’s fictional cult, discover, to their horror, that a militant faction of the organization is planning to seize a nuclear power plant. They dissolve the cult very publicly, on TV, in an act known as the Somersault. Ten years later, Patron decides to restart the fragmented movement, after the militant wing kidnaps and murders Guide, moving the headquarters of the church from Tokyo to the country town of Shikoku. Patron’s idea is that he is really a fool Christ; in the end, however, he can’t escape his followers’ more violent expectations. Oe divides the story between Patron and his inner circle, which consists of his public relations man, Ogi, who is not a believer; his secretary, Dancer, an assertive, desirable young woman; his chauffeur, Ikuo; and Ikuo’s lover, Kizu, who replaces Guide as co-leader of the cult. Kizu is a middle-aged artist, troubled by the reoccurrence of colon cancer. Like a Thomas Mann character, he discovers homoerotic passion in the throes of illness. Oe’s Dostoyevskian themes should fill his story with thunder, but the pace is slow, and Patron doesn’t have the depth of a Myshkin or a Karamazov—he seems anything but charismatic. It is Kizu and Ikuo’s story that rises above room temperature, Kizu’s sharp, painterly intelligence contrasting with Ikuo’s rather sinister ardor. Oe has attempted to create a sprawling masterpiece, but American readers might decide there’s more sprawl than masterpiece here.
An Echo of Heaven | A preponderance of symbolism weighs down Oe’s first novel to appear stateside since he won the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature. K., the author’s double, has been asked to write the story of an acquaintance of his, Marie Kuraki, a woman of great charm and intellect whose life is torn apart after her two disabled sons throw themselves into the sea. Like many of Oe’s previous protagonists, Marie goes on a quest for meaning, searching for an alternative to her grim reality. She joins a radical cult that eventually moves to California. When this group dissolves, she hesitantly takes up the offer to become a symbol of fortitude and saintliness in a small Mexican farming village. The two boys’ fatal tumble into the water seems to represent the two atomic bombs that disrupted Japan from its past, sending it reeling into a postwar period of great uncertainty with misguided leaders not unlike those who rule over Maria’s altogether fragile sects. Unfortunately, the prose (possibly due in part to the translation), which strives for restraint, is more stilted than subtle. The works of many great writers, from Balzac to Flannery O’Connor, are mentioned throughout, which, along with the weighty symbolism, gives the novel a somewhat didactic mood. Nevertheless, Oe’s imagery, from Marie’s Betty Boop appearance to the sight of the boys making their way to the edge of the cliff, is strange and engaging, the work of a writer unafraid to tackle the fundamental theme of spiritual hunger.
Death by Water | Layered and reflexive, Nobel winner Oe’s (The Changeling) novel concerns itself with an elderly writer, Kogito Choko, whose inability to write “the drowning novel,” a fictional account of his father’s death by drowning, threatens both his health and his plans to provide for his family after his death. As a child, Choko—then called Kogii—witnessed his father’s ill-fated boat trip in the Shikoku forest region of his childhood. When he revisits the forests and delves into the area’s history and folklore at his sister Asa’s invitation, he discovers not only other witnesses to his father’s voyage—including a nationalist former disciple of his dad’s—but that “the materials in the red leather trunk” required for his research were destroyed by his mother long ago. Bereft, Choko finds himself cooperating with an experimental theater troupe, who wish to adapt his body of work for the stage using the visionary Unaiko’s “throwing the dead dogs” method, whereupon meta-narrative discussion and the throwing of stuffed dogs occur on stage. Choko’s disappointment over the uselessness of the red leather trunk’s contents drives him to lash out at his adult, intellectually disabled composer son, Akari, and when his wife, Chikashi, undergoes treatment for a serious illness, she’s most concerned about this unprecedented rift between father and son. Told in echoing and overlapping accounts of conversations, telephone calls, and stage performances, Oe’s deceptively tranquil idiom scans the violent history of postwar Japan and its present-day manifestations, in the end finding redemption. Agent: Jacqueline Ko, Wylie Agency.
Pinch Runner Memorandum | This is the first English translation of the 1976 novel by Japan’s most daring and innovative novelist. Kenzaburo Oe dispenses with the unity of voice often sought in the conventional realistic novel by forcing the reader to come to grips with one of the basic questions in modern literature: What is the novel?
Seventeen & J | In Seventeen, the story of a lonely seventeen year old who turns to a right-wing group for self-esteem, and J, the story of a spoiled, young, drifter son of a Japanese executive, Ōe shows us a world where the values that had regulated life had been blown to smithereens along with Hiroshima and Nagasaki: what confronts his heroes now is a gaping emptiness.
Seventeen’s lost young man is in the throes of becoming a right wing activist and assassin. He feels his identity for the first time in the enervating rush of murderous violence. The story has enormous topicality and vibrancy for today. In J, our protagonist’s erotic excitement comes as a “chikan” who rubs himself against women on crowded trains. He refuses to otherwise participate in the drab, everyday world, which he feels would only be self-deceptive. He can only feel complete while attaining “the absolute ecstasy of total action.” Of course this action of sexual assault can bring arrest, disgrace, and imprisonment. As always, Ōe treats his subjects not with pity or disdain, but with sympathy.
The Silent Cry | Two brothers in post-war Japan experience an ideological conflict when they reunite at their family home in this philosophical novel by a Nobel laureate.
The Silent Cry follows two brothers who return to their ancestral home, a village in densely forested Western Japan. After decades of separation, the reunited men are each preoccupied by their own personal crises. One brother grapples with the recent suicide of his dearest friend, the birth of his disabled son, and his wife’s increasing alcoholism. The other brother sets out to incite an uprising among the local youth against the disintegration of the community’s culture and economy due to the imposing franchise of a Korean businessman nicknamed the “Emperor of the Supermarkets.” Both brothers live in the shadow of the mysteries surrounding the untimely deaths of their older brother and younger sister, as well as their great-grandfather’s political heroism. When long-kept family secrets are revealed, the brothers’ strained bond is pushed to its breaking-point and their lives are irrevocably changed . . .
Considered Oe’s most essential work by the Nobel Prize committee, The Silent Cry is as powerfully relevant today as it was when first published in 1967.
Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness | These four novels display Oe’s passionate and original vision. Oe was ten when American jeeps first drove into the mountain village where he lived, and his literary work reveals the tension and ambiguity forged by the collapse of values of his childhood on the one hand and the confrontation with American writers on the other. The earliest of his novels included here, Prize Stock, reveals the strange relationship between a Japanese boy and a captured black American pilot in a Japanese village. Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness tells of the close relationship between an outlandishly fat father and his mentally defective son, Eeyore. Aghwee the Sky Monster is about a young man’s first job — chaperoning a banker’s son who is haunted by the ghost of a baby in a white nightgown. The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away is the longest piece in this collection and Oe’s most disturbing work to date. The narrator lies in a hospital bed waiting to die of a liver cancer that he has probably imagined, wearing a pair of underwater goggles covered with dark cellophane.
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