Kenzaburo Oe Died

 I never heard of Kenzaburo Oe until Joel C. gave me A Personal Matter to read. Another good thing from my prison stay.

Later on, towards the end of prison stay, I read Death by Water.

Why make a big deal about one more dead writer? Because he was a great writer. One that more Americans should know.

For more, Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, writer of poetic fiction, dies

“A Personal Matter,” published a year later, is the story of a father coming to terms through darkness and pain with the birth of a brain-damaged son. Several of his later works have a damaged or deformed child with symbolic significance, with the stories and characters evolving and maturing as Oe’s son aged.

Hikari Oe had a cranial deformity at birth that caused mental disability. He has a limited ability to speak and read but has become a musical composer whose works have been performed and recorded on albums.

And From The Guardian's Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel prize-winning Japanese writer, dies aged 88 :

Spanning fiction and essays, Oe’s work tackled a wide range of subjects from militarism and nuclear disarmament to innocence and trauma, and he became an outspoken champion for the voiceless in the face of what he regarded as his country’s failures. Regarded by some in Japan as distinctly western, Oe’s style was often likened to William Faulkner; in his own words, in his writing he would “start from my personal matters and then link it up with society, the state and the world”.

Many of his stories and essays touched on formative events in his life, including the impact of war on Japanese society in novels such as The Silent Cry – which the Nobel committee deemed his masterpiece – and the birth of his son Hikari, which led him to explore his own experience as the father of a disabled child in the novels A Personal Matter and A Quiet Life.

Oe’s death, on 3 March, was due to old age, his publisher Kodansha said.

Henry Miller once likened Oe to Dostoevsky, in his “range of hope and despair”, while Edward Said, a friend for 20 years, noted his “extraordinary power of sympathetic understanding”. Fellow laureate Kazuo Ishiguro once described him as “genuinely decent, modest, surprisingly open and honest, and very unconcerned about fame”, while his translator, John Nathan, credited him with “creating a language of his own, in the manner of Faulkner and few Japanese writers before him”.

sch 3/13 

Kenzaburo Oe Interview

Today The Paris Review opened its interview with Kenzaburo Oe, so I decided to grab what I could. This is part of their description of Oe:

Kenzaburo Oe has devoted his life to taking certain subjects seriously—victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the struggles of the people of Okinawa, the challenges of the disabled, the discipline of the scholarly life—while not appearing to take himself seriously at all. Although he is known in Japan as much for being a gadfly activist as for being one of the country’s most celebrated writers, in person Oe is more of a delightful wag. Unfailingly modest and lighthearted, he dresses in sport shirts, fidgets a great deal, and smiles easily....

Why the interest in Oe? I had never heard of him until prison. Yes, I know now he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In prison, my friend Joel had me read A Personal Matter. This was my first Japanese writer; my first Japanese novel. A different perspective on American writing started taking root.

The quote is long since I have no idea how much will be available later:

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any wisdom to impart about the craft of writing?

OE

I am the kind of writer who rewrites and rewrites. I am very eager to correct everything. If you look at one of my manuscripts, you can see I make many changes. So one of my main literary methods is “repetition with difference.” I begin a new work by first attempting a new approach toward a work that I’ve already written—I try to fight the same opponent one more time. Then I take the resulting draft and continue to elaborate upon it, and as I do so the traces of the old work disappear. I consider my literary work to be a totality of differences within repetition.

I used to say that this elaboration was the most important thing for a novelist to learn. Edward Said wrote a very good book called Musical Elaborations, in which he considered the meaning of elaboration in the music of great composers like Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Through elaboration these composers created new perspectives.

INTERVIEWER

How do you know when you have elaborated too much?

OE

That is a problem. I elaborate and elaborate and year by year my readers diminish. My style has become very difficult, very twisted, complicated. That was necessary for me to improve my work, to create a new perspective, but fifteen years ago I experienced profound doubt as to whether elaboration was the right method for a novelist.

Fundamentally a good author has his or her own sense of style. There is a natural, deep voice, and that voice is present from the first draft of a manuscript. When he or she elaborates on the initial manuscript, it continues to strengthen and simplify that natural, deep voice. While I was in the United States teaching at Princeton in 1996 and 1997, I got to see a copy of the original manuscript of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. I read a hundred pages or so and gradually I realized that from the beginning Twain had an exact style. Even when he writes broken English, it has a kind of music. It makes it clearer. That method of elaboration comes naturally to a good author. A good writer wouldn’t normally try to destroy his voice, but I was always trying to destroy mine.

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."

###

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.

###

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 

World Novels 7-25-21

Try The Modern Literary Novel site here with its emphasis on the translated novel.  The site describes itself as follows:

The purpose of this site is to give an idiosyncratic view of modern (i.e. more or less 20th/21st century) literature, as represented by the novel. It is biased towards my taste and towards the English-speaking world and Europe. You will find very little reference to short stories, drama, poetry and other literary forms, not because I do not consider them worthwhile but because I have less interest in and knowledge of them.

Most, though certainly not all, the books mentioned here have been published in English, though many are now sadly out-of-print. This site is strictly non-academic. I am not and have never been an academic and have aimed it at the intelligent reader who reads modern literature for pleasure.

And there is a blog included in the site:

Among the Japanese writers are Kenzaburo Oe, and Haruki Murakami, whom I have read. There is a very enlightening review of Murakami's Kafka on the Shore - a novel I have read and impressed by and for which my notes will probably appear in the future - and Killing Commendatore - and his view is similar to hmine (mine was negative and will also to appear here in the future). With Kenzaburo Oe's A Personal Matter there is pretty much a plot summary compared to what he does with the Murakami books.

With the Europeans here has: 

• Milan Kundera -  The Joke  gets a short summary while The Unbearable Lightness of Being   gets some serious criticism.

• László Krasznahorkai has and external links

• Magda Szabó's article has a comment on Abigail - including a plot description better than you will get from me and a positive conclusion.

• David Albahari has a bio paragraph, some links but no commentary on Gotz and Meyer, the only novel I have read by Albahari

• Mikhail Bulgakov appears with a comment on The Master and Margarita - which of course he likes (and who doesn’t?)

• Victor Pelevin gets a bio paragraph and comments on several of Pelevin’s books but not A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia

• Georgi Gospodinov  -  a paragraph for a bio, links and gets a discussion of his Natural Novel which concludes with:

...In the end… What? He sits in his battered and much repaired rocking chair. He becomes a tramp and his old friends don’t recognise him any more. In the end, nothing. This is not a realist novel so, while it can have multiple beginnings, it really does not need a conventional end. It is very well done and very well written. If this does not kill the realist novel, nothing will.

Reading About Writers I Like

 Three writers I found in prison have pieces published about them this weekend.

I admit to not reading much by Deborah Levy, a now 13-year-old short story, and reading much about her. The more I read about her, the more I think there is to learn from her. The Guardian did a podcast How Deborah Levy can change your life, which I listened to this morning. Women readers, women writers might be profit the most, but men should not ignore her. She seems to be working out what I stumbled upon – that realism that does not include our mental life of dreams and the like is not reality.

Whoever finally reads my posts on writing and books, will notice I am a Zadie Smith fan. Anyone questioning why this should be so, will do well to read The Guardian's profile, Zadie Smith: ‘I get in trouble when I talk about the state of the nation’, of which this is not even the best part

Smith was subjected to the media glare when she was barely out of university. “Most of the terrible stuff that went on when I was young was not really to do with me, it was an insane projection,” she says now. “You are dealing with what people themselves want.” Nobody could believe that a young woman wouldn’t want to be endlessly profiled, with her photo in the papers on the flimsiest excuse. “But I really didn’t want it. I don’t want to be a photograph in the newspaper because it fills some space.”

Neither did she want to present a TV show, write a column or any of the other things that were relentlessly pushed her way in her 20s. “As I made very clear, I want to write novels. Could you let me write them, please?”

Which is exactly what she did. White Teeth was followed by the often overlooked The Autograph Man, about the corrosive effects of fame. Its protagonist, the British-Jewish-Chinese Alex-Li Tandem, is “a weird, nerdy, obsessive, melancholy type of guy … he’s probably more like me than any character I ever created”, Smith admitted in a recent essay. Her next novel, On Beauty, a classy reworking of EM Forster’s Howards End transferred to a New England college town, won the Women’s prize in 2006. She was just 30.

There was a seven year gap until NW, a formally experimental but deeply personal novel about friendship and success, in 2012. Then came Swing Time in 2016, which also took in celebrity and shaming and was set partly in west Africa.

While all of Smith’s novels deal with race and class and gender – from Black girls growing up on a council estate in Swing Time to a forward-thinking 19th-century housekeeper in The Fraud – she doesn’t feel any sense of responsibility. “I take pleasure in it. That’s something I think I take from Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. It is not some tedious moral weight. It is a delight,” she says. “I’m not here to represent anybody,” she adds. “I barely represent myself. My job is to think about things and to express them in language.” She pauses. “I want people to read me because I can write. That matters to me more than anything else.”

Finally, another Guardian review (yes, its book review newsletter was full of much goodness this morning), In the forest of the soul is more a biography and overview of Kenzaburo Oë's life and work. Oë won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and I found far more amazing than even Murakami. There is life and love in Oë.

Oë's commitment to Hikari (nicknamed "Pooh" after AA Milne's bear) inspired, over 30 years, a unique cycle of fiction whose protagonists are fathers of brain-damaged sons. That experience pervades his complex vision, in fiction and essays, of militarism and nuclear disarmament, innocence and authenticity, faith and redemption. His translator John Nathan, professor of Japanese cultural studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and author of Japan Unbound (2004), says that, like Natsume Soseki, the early 20th-century modernist, Oë "created a language of his own, in the manner of Faulkner and few Japanese writers before him. He's excruciatingly self-conscious and aware, painfully looking beneath the surface of things." Although Nathan feels Oë (pronounced oh-way) has been "undertranslated - he's terribly hard to do", his work has reached more foreign readers since his Nobel prize for literature in 1994.

Henry Miller likened him to Dostoevsky in his "range of hope and despair", while the late Edward Said, a friend for 20 years, noted his "extraordinary power of sympathetic understanding", particularly across cultures. Who else, Said wrote in a public exchange of letters in 2002, would repeatedly warn of the "danger to Japan of too much imperial swagger and economic delusion?", a peril rooted, for Oë, in a failure to learn from the past. According to the British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, he has "always been fascinated by what's not been said about the Japanese role in the second world war".

Please give all three writers a chance, and also the original articles. There is much to be learned in them.

sch 8/27
 

 

American Writing, World Writing

Jumping off from LitHub's Approach to Writing Teaches Us by Ru Freeman for this post.

But is America served by such capitulation? Or are our skills of greater worth when we point out the way our languages, and what our languages describe, enfold a dynamic, evolving, and empathetic engagement with the world of which America is only, albeit a singular, part; a reality which is embodied in our very lives?

***

Its most moving testimonies come from those whose markers of ancestry and culture are singularly American, but whose imagination roams free and, by doing so, encourage readers to host a more inclusive narrative: Roger Reeves, Rebecca Solnit, John Freeman, Nuar Alsadir, and Rickey Laurentiis come to mind. James Baldwin, arguably its most quoted literarian and the current darling of all races, certainly in the literary world, lived most of his life away from America and perhaps this is why he was able to articulate the fact that the American word, “success,” has no place in the vocabulary of any artist.

I keep repeating that KH and CC got me writing again and CC gave what to write and JC kept me going and pointed me down the road. I had wanted to be a writer when younger. Writing was the one thing I always took seriously. Not writing is where I first let down the expectations of my friends and family. I felt there was nothing much to say after Faulkner and Hemingway and Vonnegut and Bellow.

JC told me to read. Prison gave me time to fill in the holes of my education. He pointed me to Milan Kundera and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kenzaburo Oe and Mishima, and Halldór Laxness. Kundera pointed me back to Cervantes. Kundera abd Carlos Fuentes pointed back to Faulkner. Mario Llosa Vargas wrote about Somerset Maugham. Paul Kleinman gave me Israeli writers. Pete Tengardy turned me onto Hungarian writers. Dalkey Archive exposed me to Central and Eastern European writers. A fantasy and science fiction anthology got me over my fear of the Russians. The Leisure Library had a copy of The Tin Drum and I finished what I had started decades ago. The same library had Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain and so I found the Germans were more than Herman Hesse (a writer I never felt a connection to for all of his novels I have read.) Then I found a Balzac novel - Balzac being another long abandoned writer. And then there was Proust - whose name makes KH giggle.

And so what?

I learned the novel was more than Faulkner and Hemingway and Bellow. That they had not captured all there was to say in fiction or how to make fiction come alive. I think now they would have laughed at the idea they had had the last word in writing but would have pointed to Tolstoy or Conrad or James Joyce.

Taking the idea from a different perspective, What is Canadian?

...Contemporary Canadian multiculturalists like to claim that writers learn only from predecessors of the same racial, gender or sexual identity, usually across national borders; aestheticist critics have maintained, since the publication of John Metcalf’s What Is a Canadian Literature? (1988), that the best Canadian writers are influenced by the Americans and the British. Both groups see the idea of an endogenous Canadian tradition as a sham. Staines refutes this contention with impressive persistence, finding essays or interviews with nearly every writer he discusses from the early twentieth century on in which they acknowledge their debt to earlier Canadian writers, revealing an inter-generational web of influences. He summarizes: “The maturity of Canadian fiction is evident when writers turn to Canadian sources while never denying influences, too, from outside the country”.

Surely, what is good for the Canadians is good enough for Americans 

And this means reading translations, so LitHub's Interview with an Indie Press: Seagull Books “Translations build:

Seagull Books’ primary interest has been what may be called “the human condition.” All the books we publish somehow reflect on this, looking at this theme from different angles. But of course in terms of style we bend towards the literary and the poetic—even when are publishing writings on, say, philosophy.

Read widely, remember the novel belongs to the world, and - unlike me - do not give up.

sch 6/24/22

Mishima

 I read Mishima in prison, finally, He was the first Japanese writer I heard of - his death made the American news when I was a kid. Also, before reading his works, I saw the movie The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea. That left me entranced and very confused.

I have written elsewhere on here about Mishima. Of the Japanese writers, my favorites are Kenzaburo Oe and Mishima. Both present a culture different from ours; both present ideas of how to use the novel's form.

Write Conscious has come up often in my YouTube feed, I have posted several of his posts here. He is quite the fan of Mishima. 

I cannot say I find his argument quite convincing, albeit the idea of spirituality appeals strongly to me. I certainly do not think that reading 2000 pages of Mishima in a week is a good idea. 

There is an intensity to Mishima that might be too much, and there is a grace that, I think, needs to be savored.

Where I agree with Write Conscious is you need to read Mishima.

sch 10/8

Kenzaburo Oe - Reading Becomes the Writer

This is how I interpret Oe's Nobel Prize lecture - that he came from a marginal area of Japan and books, novels, connected him with the wider world.

During the last catastrophic World War I was a little boy and lived in a remote, wooded valley on Shikoku Island in the Japanese Archipelago, thousands of miles away from here. At that time there were two books by which I was really fascinated: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. The whole world was then engulfed by waves of horror. By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors. The protagonist of The Adventures of Nils is transformed into a little creature, understands birds’ language and makes an adventurous journey. I derived from the story sensuous pleasures of various kinds. Firstly, living as I was in a deep wood on the Island of Shikoku just as my ancestors had done long ago, I had a revelation that this world and this way of life there were truly liberating. Secondly, I felt sympathetic and identified myself with Nils, a naughty little boy, who while traversing Sweden, collaborating with and fighting for the wild geese, transforms himself into a boy, still innocent, yet full of confidence as well as modesty....

***

In both my life and writing I have been a pupil of Professor Watanabe’s. I was influenced by him in two crucial ways. One was in my method of writing novels. I learnt concretely from his translation of Rabelais what Mikhail Bakhtin formulated as ‘the image system of grotesque realism or the culture of popular laughter’; the importance of material and physical principles; the correspondence between the cosmic, social and physical elements; the overlapping of death and passions for rebirth; and the laughter that subverts hierarchical relationships.

The image system made it possible to seek literary methods of attaining the universal for someone like me born and brought up in a peripheral, marginal, off-centre region of the peripheral, marginal, off-centre country, Japan. Starting from such a background I do not represent Asia as a new economic power but an Asia impregnated with ever-lasting poverty and a mixed-up fertility. By sharing old, familiar yet living metaphors I align myself with writers like Kim Ji-ha of Korea, Chon I and Mu Jen, both of China. For me the brotherhood of world literature consists in such relationships in concrete terms. I once took part in a hunger strike for the political freedom of a gifted Korean poet. I am now deeply worried about the destiny of those gifted Chinese novelists who have been deprived of their freedom since the Tienanmen Square incident. 

***

This belief of mine has not been fully proved. ‘Weak person’ though I am, with the aid of this unverifiable belief, I would like to ‘suffer dully all the wrongs’ accumulated throughout the twentieth century as a result of the monstrous development of technology and transport. As one with a peripheral, marginal and off-centre existence in the world I would like to seek how – with what I hope is a modest decent and humanist contribution – I can be of some use in a cure and reconciliation of mankind. 

With that kind of background, we, with so many more resources available to us should also be able to achieve great things. If not great things, then we can - at the bare minimum - leave behind a better world behind for others. This probably indicates a certain sort of narrow-mindedness on my part - that after my criminal spree and prison time,I now see too much in terms of atonement. If so, am I wrong? Depression left me viewing life as nothing but ugliness and disease and the only hope lay in self-destruction. Well,I'mtrying to get back my humanity from my self-destructive side and that means for me to do something creative. I suggest the same solution to you. I will so far as to say, living requires creativityfor any meaningfulness,