Kenzaburo
Oe Source was born in 1935, in a village hemmed in by the
forests of Shikoku, one of the four main islands of Japan. His family
had
lived in the village
tradition for several hundred years, and no one in the Oe clan had
ever left the village in the valley. Even after Japan embarked on
modernization
soon after the Meiji Restoration, and it became customary for young
people in the provinces to leave their native place for Tokyo or
the other large
cities, the Oes remained in Ose-mura. Maps no longer show the small
hamlet by name because it was annexed by a neighbouring town. The
women of the
Oe clan had long assumed the role of storytellers and had related
the historical events of the region, including the two uprisings
that occurred
there before and after the Meiji Restoration. They also told of events
closer in nature to legend than to history. These stories, of a unique
cosmology and of the human condition therein, which Oe heard told
since his infancy, left him with an indelible mark.
The Second World War broke out when Oe was six. Militaristic education
extended to every nook and cranny of the country, the Emperor as both
monarch and deity reigning over its politics and its culture. Young
Oe, therefore, experienced the nation's myth and history as well as
those of the village tradition, and these dual experiences were often
in conflict. Oe's grandmother was a critical storyteller who defended
the culture of the village, narrating to him humourously, but ever
defiantly, anti-national stories. After his father's death during the
war, his mother took over his father's role as educator. The books
she bought him - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Strange
Adventures of Nils Holgersson - have left him with an impression he
says 'he will carry to the grave'.
Japan's defeat in the war in 1945 brought enormous change, even to
the remote forest village. In schools, children were taught democratic
principles, replacing those of the absolutist Emperor system, and this
education was all the more thorough, for the nation was then under
the administration of American and other forces. Young Oe took democracy
straight to his heart. So strong was his desire for democracy that
he decided to leave for Tokyo; leave the village of his forefathers,
the life they had lived and preserved, out of sheer belief that the
city offered him an opportunity to knock on the door of democracy,
the door that would lead him to a future of freedom on paths that stretched
out to the world. Had it not been for the drastic change the nation
underwent at this time, Oe, whose love of trees is one of his innate
qualities, would have remained in his village as his forefathers had
done, and tended to the forest as one of its guardians.
At the age of eighteen, Oe made his first long train trip to Tokyo,
and in the following year enrolled in the Department of French Literature
at Tokyo University where he received instruction under the tutelage
of Professor Kazuo Watanabe, a specialist on Francois Rabelais. Rabelais'
image system of grotesque realism, to use Mikhail Bakhtin's terminology,
provided him with a methodology to positively and thoroughly reassess
the myths and history of his native village in the valley.
Watanabe's thoughts on humanism, which he arrived at from his study
of the French Renaissance, helped shape Oe's fundamental view of society
and the human condition. An avid reader of contemporary French and
American literature, Oe viewed the social condition of the metropolis
in light of the works he read. Yet, he also endeavored to reorganize,
under the light of Rabelais and humanism, his thoughts on what the
women of the village had handed down to him, those stories that constituted
his background. In this sense, he was again living another duality.
Oe started writing in 1957, while still a French literature student
at the university. His works from 1957 through 1958 - from the short
story, The Catch, which won him the Akutagawa Award, to his first novel,
Bud-Nipping, Lamb Shooting* (1958) - depict the tragedy of war tearing
asunder the idyllic life of a rural youth. In Lavish are the Dead (1957),
a short story, and in The Youth Who Came Late* (1961), a novel, Oe
portrayed student life in Tokyo, a city where the dark shadows of the
U.S. occupation still remained. Apparent in these works are strong
influences of Jean-Paul Sartre and other modern French writers.
Crisis struck Oe's life and literature with the birth of his first
son, Hikari. Hikari was born with a cranial deformity resulting in
his becoming a mentally- handicapped person. Traumatic as the experience
was for Oe, the crisis granted him a new lease on both his life and
his literature. Overcoming the agony and determined to coexist with
the child, Oe wrote A Personal Matter (1964), his penning of his pain
in accepting 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 own fate of having to accept a handicapped child into
the family with that of the stance one ought to take in contemporary
society, and wrote Hiroshima Notes (1965), a long essay which describes
the realities and thoughts of the A-bomb victims.
Following this, Oe deepened his interest in Okinawa, the southernmost
group of islands in Japan. Before the Meiji Restoration, Okinawa was
an independent country with its own culture. During World War II, the
islands became the site of the only battle Japan fought on its own
soil. After the war, the people of Okinawa were left to suffer a long
U.S. military occupation. Oe's interest in Okinawa was oriented, politically,
toward the lives of the Okinawans living on what became a U.S. military
base, and, culturally, to what Okinawa meant to him in terms of its
traditions. The latter opened out to a broadened interest in the culture
of South Koreans, enabling him to further appreciate the importance
of Japan's peripheral cultures, which differed from Tokyo-centered
culture. This pursuit provided realistic substance to his study of
Mikhail Bakhtin's theory regarding a people's culture which led him
to write The Silent Cry (1967), a work that ties in the myths and history
of the forest village with the contemporary age.
After The Silent Cry, two streams of thought, which at times flow
as one, are apparent and consistent in Oe's literary world. Starting
with A Personal Matter is one group of works that depicts his life
of coexistence with his mentally-handicapped son, Hikari. Teach Us
to Outgrow our Madness (1969), a two-volume work, painfully portrays
both the agony-laden trials and errors he experiences in his life with
his yet unspeaking infant child, and his pursuit of his father he lost
during the war. My Deluged Soul* (1973) depicts a father who relates
to his infant child who, through the medium of the songs of the wild
birds, has started to communicate with the family, and who empathizes
with youths that belong to a belligerent and radical political party.
Rouse Up, O, Young Men of the New Age!* (1983), a work in which Oe
draws upon images from William Blake's Prophecies, depicts his son
Hikari's development from a child to a young man, and thus crowns the
works he wrote about his handicapped child.
The second group are stories in which Oe relates characters who he
establishes in the theater of the myths and history of his native forest
village, but who interact closely with life in today's cities. This
world of Oe's fiction, starting with Bud- Nipping, Lamb-Shooting and
followed by The Silent Cry, came to shape the core of his entire literature.
Making full use of new ideas of cultural anthropology, these works
represent the totality of Oe's world of fiction, as evidenced in Letters
to My Sweet Bygone Years (1987), a work about a young man who, banking
on his cosmology and world-view of Dante, strives but fails to establish
a politico- cultural base in the forest. Contemporary Games is a story
that alternates between myth and history, which Oe supports with the
matriarch and trickster principles he draws from cultural anthropology.
He rewrote this work in narrative form as M/T and the Wonders of the
Forest* (1986). With the aid of W.B. Yeat's poetic metaphors, Oe embarked
on writing The Flaming Green Tree*, a trilogy comprised of Until the
'Savior' Gets Socked* (1993), Vacillating* (1994), and On The Great
Day* (1995). Oe has announced that with the completion of this trilogy,
he will enter into his life's final stage of study, in which he will
attempt a new form of literature. The implication of this project is
that Oe deems his effort at presenting his cosmology, history and folk
legend as having been brought to full circle, and that he has succeeded
in creating, through his portrayal of that place in the valley and
its people, a model for this contemporary age. It also implies that
he considers Hikari's becoming a composer, in actuality, surpasses
the importance of his own literature about him.
Oe's winning the Nobel Prize for 1994 has thus encouraged him to embark
on his pursuit of a new form of literature and a new life for himself.
*Tentative English titles.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1994, Editor
Tore Frängsmyr,
[Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1995
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award
and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures.
The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by
the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown
above.
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1994