Thinking About Kenzaburo Oe

 The Japanese novelist, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, recently died. Japan Today published Int'l scholars reflect on Kenzaburo Oe's legacy a month after death, which included the following:

 He is one of the most international Japanese writers ever," Bechler said. "This is something a lot of Japanese artists today could take a hint from...when thinking about how Japan can move forward in these difficult times."

Auestad says Oe's acceptance of the Nobel Prize was a game changer in recognizing a writer who did not fit the classic "Orientalist" stereotypes about Japanese literature abroad.

After receiving the accolade, he famously rejected an Order of Culture from the Japanese government, saying he would "never in my lifetime or after accept an award from any state." The decision, he said, came down to his being a "postwar democrat" -- a mindset he felt was not compatible with the national award.

"I think the Swedish Academy said he was awarded that prize among others for not forgetting the lessons of Japanese history," Auestad said. "That is considered to be one of his great contributions as a writer."

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A key example is his 1961 novella "Seventeen": a psychological portrayal of Japan's lost and frustrated youth, who were reeling from the defeat of World War II and the sudden change in societal values that entailed.

Originally serialized in two parts, "Seventeen" depicts a 17-year-old boy who joins a right-wing party due to his desire to gain confidence and strength, only to end up assassinating a socialist party leader and eventually committing suicide in jail.

The second part's parallels with the real-life assassination of socialist leader Inejiro Asanuma by a 17-year-old ultranationalist who subsequently hanged himself in jail -- just months before the novella's publication -- angered Japan's far right, causing the story to be absent from many subsequent Oe anthologies for fear of retaliation.

Bechler says Oe's upbringing amid the imperialist fervor of wartime enabled him to portray how his generation could be attracted to such danger and the deeply ingrained desire to die for a greater cause.

"Many years later, Oe admitted it was easy for him to write it because that young guy could have been him. He had to exorcize those inner demons so he would never again be able to write positively about those ideas and deeds," Bechler said.

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This can be seen in 1967's "The Silent Cry," which demonstrates how his fiction sometimes contradicts his ideological standpoint as an intellectual, according to Auestad.

One important idea Oe developed in his early career was that humans fall under two rough types: the sober "political" human, who has a strong internal moral compass, and the hotheaded "sexual" person, who depends on powers outside themselves, such as an ideological cause, to determine right from wrong, she said.

"The Silent Cry" shows two brothers seemingly representing these categories, with the older, level-headed Mitsusaburo always trying to correct the younger Takashi's romantic and narrow view of history -- demonstrated by his desire to recreate their ancestor's "heroic" deeds.

While Oe's essays suggest he would side more with the rational Mitsusaburo, Auestad says, the novel's revelation that Takashi was right about some aspects of the past suggests that, in reality, a more emotionally engaged and proactive response to history may sometimes be necessary.

"I suspect this is Oe's ironic take on himself as a leftist intellectual who thinks so much about what could possibly go wrong. And if you do that, you end up not taking action," Auestad said.

Another prominent aspect of Oe's literature is how he fictionalized elements of his own life to explore events that might have happened had he taken a different path.

Another novelist I learned of only after going to prison (thank you, Joel C), one I can heartily endorse, and which I have written about on here before.

sch 4/22