by Kenzaburo Oe
TEACH US TO OUTGROW OUR MADNESS
Books by Kenzaburō Ōe Published by Grove Press
Somersault
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!
A Personal Matter
The Crazy Iris and Other Stories
Hiroshima Notes
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids
A Quiet Life
Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness
Teach us to Outgrow Our madness
Four Short Novels by
KENZABURO ŌE
Translated and
with an Introduction by
John Nathan
Copyright © 1977 by John Nathan
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“Happy Days Are Here Again” copyright © 1929 WARNER BROS. INC.
Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 76-54582
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9543-2
Designed by Steven A. Baron
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
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CONTENTS
Introduction
The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away
Prize Stock
Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness
Aghwee The Sky Monster
These translations are for Mayumi.
INTRODUCTION
I met Kenzaburo Ōe (OH-way) in 1964, at Yukio Mishima’s Christmas Eve party. I was there because I was Mishima’s translator at the time. Ōe was there because Mishima had invited everyone who mattered that year, from boxers to drag queens, and because Ōe’s vanity and maybe his country-cousin curiosity had drawn him to the lights. I spotted him right away and I watched him with awe, for I had just discovered his novel A Personal Matter and thought it the most passionate and original and funniest and saddest Japanese book I had ever read. Ōe was standing apart with his best friend in the world in those days, Kōbō Abé, drinking steadily and looking uncomfortable. His appearance surprised me. Like everything he has written, A Personal Matter was a vibrant, headlong book powered by gorgeous energy. The author was an owlish, pudgy man in a baggy dark suit and a skinny tie; parked in the corner with his round face and sloping shoulders and soft belly, he looked absolutely meek, a Japanese badger. Then something astonishing happened. Ōe drained his glass and handed it to Abé to hold, shuffled across the room to where Mishima’s wife, Yoko, was arranging dishes on her buffet table, and said clearly, in English, “Mrs. Yoko, you are a cunt!” I never knew whether Yoko understood him, but she cannot have missed the sudden fierceness in his manner, for she produced a stricken smile and moved away. Leaving me and Ōe more or less alone together. I looked over at him and he shrugged and threw up his hands, as if to say “Well she is, what can you do!” “Where did you learn English like that?” I asked in Japanese. “Ah,” he said, and now there was real excitement in his eye and he stepped closer, “the hero of Norman Mailer’s ‘The Time of Her Time’ speaks the very same line.”
Before the party was over, Ōe had asked me to teach him “English conversation.” He had been invited to an international writers’ seminar Professor Henry Kissinger was organizing at Harvard, and he was bound to go so that he could deliver a speech about the survivors of Hiroshima. Naturally, I agreed. And so for three months Ōe came to my house several mornings a week, and we spoke in English about books he chose. We began with a volume of Baldwin essays, and went on to Advertisements for Myself, The Adventures of Augie March, and Sexus.Ōe had a large vocabulary and an uncanny gift for comprehending English meaning above and below the surface. But he had never spoken the English words he understood so very well and could not pronounce them intelligibly. I don’t think I helped him much; to this day, his spoken English is no great pleasure to the native ear. But Ōe taught me a lot about how to read in my own language. He could even do poetry! His favorite poet at the time was W.H. Auden, and I swear he took me deeper into Auden’s world than any teacher I ever had at school. Sometimes I felt threatened by his superior reach and tried to confront him with things he didn’t know. Once I sprang Rabbit, Run on him, having just read the book, and he asked me if I had seen Updike’s poems about basketball in The New Yorker. I had not, so he brought them to our next session and we read them together.
When it came time for Ōe to leave for Harvard I saw him off at the airport. He was distraught. When he had passed through Customs and entered the fishbowl waiting room from which there is no turning back, he rushed to the plate glass window separating us and scribbled a line in a notebook and held it up for me to read: “John, how very happy you are not to have to go!” It wasn’t just that he was leaving home: in 1960 he had been the youngest Japanese in an official mission sent to Peking to meet with Chairman Mao and Chou En-lai; the following year he had traveled in Europe and had interviewed another of his heroes, Jean-Paul Sartre. But this time was different. Now he was leaving for AMERICA, a land of exquisite terror and irresistible pull which had burned at the center of his imagination since he was a boy.
Ōe’s first actual encounter with America was in the fall of 1945, when the Occupation jeeps drove into the mountain village where he lived. Like everyone else in the village, he expected the Americans to begin by raping the women and castrating the men. Then the jeeps arrived and what really happened was unimaginable. Instead of destruction, the GI’s rained Hershey bars and chewing gum and canned asparagus down upon the village, and the children scrambled for the sweets, Ōe with them. Relief is what he felt, and gratitude and anger and humiliation, and those potent feelings have remained entangled in him and, as he has said himself, defy his efforts to sort them out.
Ōe was ten years old at the time. His second decisive encounter with America occurred four or five years later, when he read for the first time a Japanese translation of Huckleberry Finn. It seems unlikely that a Japanese schoolboy knowing only the tiny, manageable wilderness of the Japanese countryside could be much moved by Huckleberry’s pilgrimage down the vast Mississippi: Ōe was ardently moved. It was Huck’s moral courage, literally Hell-bent, that ignited his imagination. For Ōe the single most important moment in the book was always Huck’s agonized decision not to send Miss Watson a note informing her of Jim’s whereabouts and to go instead to Hell. With that fearsome resolution to turn his back on his times, his society, and even his god, Huckleberry Finn became the model for Ōe’s existential hero. As he read on in American fiction, Ōe found inspiration in other American writers, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Kerouac and Henry Miller and, particularly, Norman Mailer. But the basis of his admiration for these writers was his perception of their heroes—of Portnoy and Holden Caulfield and Dean Moriarty and Augie March and all the transformations of the Mailer prototype from Sergius O’Shaugnessy in Deer Park and the bullfighter in “The Time of Her Time” to Mailer himself in Armies of the Night—as modern incarnations of Huckleberry Finn. The heroes in American fiction that matter to Ōe are
, invariably, sickened by their experience of “civilization,” driven on a quest for salvation in the form of personal freedom beyond the borders of safety and acceptance. Brothers to Huckleberry Finn, they are men who have no choice but to “light out for the territory.”
Ōe’s own outrage, not so much at the American invaders as against his own kind, helps explain his affinity for the outraged heroes in American writing. On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito went on the radio to announce the Surrender, and deprived Ōe of his innocence. Until that day, like all Japanese schoolchildren, he had been taught to fear the Emperor as a living god. Once a day his turn had come to be called to the front of the classroom and asked, “What would you do if the Emperor commanded you to die?” and Ōe had replied, knees shaking, “I would die, Sir, I would cut open my belly and die.” In bed at night, he had suffered the secret guilt of knowing, at least suspecting, he was not truly eager to destroy himself for the Emperor. Sick with a fever, he had beheld the Emperor in a terrifying nightly dream, soaring across the sky like a giant bird with white feathers. Then Hirohito went on the air and spoke in the voice of a mortal man.
The adults sat around their radios and cried. The children gathered outside in the dusty road and whispered their bewilderment. We were most surprised and disappointed by the fact that the Emperor had spoken in a human voice. One of my friends could even imitate it cleverly. We surrounded him, a twelve-year-old in grimy shorts who spoke in the Emperor’s voice, and laughed. Our laughter echoed in the summer morning stillness and disappeared into the clear, high sky. An instant later, anxiety tumbled out of the heavens and seized us impious children. We looked at one another in silence. … How could we believe that an august presence of such awful power had become an ordinary human being on a designated summer day? (A Portrait of the Postwar Generation.)
In a single day, all the truth Ōe had ever learned was declared lies. He was angry and he was humiliated, at himself for having believed and suffered, and at the adults who had betrayed him. His anger resided; it was the source of the energy he first tapped when he became a writer.
In 1954, Ōe was admitted to Tokyo University and left the island of Shikoku for the first time to go up to the big city. He enrolled in the department of French literature, the course for serious students at Tokyo, where it was held that American writing was inferior, and became absorbed in Pascal and Camus and Sartre, who was to be the subject of his graduation thesis. He was a brilliant student but he kept to himself; he was withdrawn by nature, always a loner, and because he was ashamed of his provincial accent, he stuttered. He lived in a rooming house near the campus, and it was there at night, swallowing tranquilizers with whisky, that he began to write the stories which established him in half a year as the spokesman for an entire generation of young Japanese whose distress he identified. His first published story, “An Odd Job,” appeared in the May, 1957 issue of the University literary magazine. It was about a bewildered college student who takes a part-time job slaughtering dogs to be used in laboratory experiments.
There was almost every breed of dog, yet somehow they looked alike. I wondered what it was. All mongrels, and all skin and bones? Or was it the way they stood there leashed to stakes, their hostility quite lost? That must have been it. And who could say the same thing wouldn’t happen to us? Helplessly leashed together, looking alike, hostility lost and individuality with it—us ambiguous Japanese students. But I wasn’t much interested in politics. I wasn’t much interested in anything. I was too young and too old to be involved in anything. I was twenty; it was an odd age, and I was tired. I quickly lost interest in that pack of dogs, too.…
Ōe’s early heroes have been expelled from the certainty of childhood, into a world that bears no relation to their past. The values that regulated life when they were growing up have been blown to smithereens along with Hiroshima and Nagasaki; what confronts them now, the postwar world, is a gaping emptiness, enervation, a terrifying silence like the eternity that follows death. They are aware of the consequences of submitting to life in such a world; the riddle they must solve if they are to survive, to discover freedom for themselves, is how to sustain their hostility in the face of bewilderment and, finally, apathy. Terrorism is a luminous prospect: Ōe’s protagonists dream of throwing hand grenades into the Emperor’s limousine, fighting at Nasser’s side, joining the Foreign Legion. But enacting fantasies like these is more than they can manage. A more accessible battleground is violent sex, antisocial sex, what one of Ōe’s characters calls “a fuck rife with ignominy.” Sooner or later Ōe’s heroes discover that the only territory they can reach beyond the emptiness of everyday life is what their society deems “sexual perversion.” Consider J. in Ōe’s 1963 novel Homo Sexualis. J. is a playboy whose first wife has been driven to suicide by his flirtations with homosexuality. He becomes what the Japanese call a “subway pervert,” ejaculating against the raincoats of young girls in crowded rush hour trains. To himself he represents the peril he invites as a kind of atonement. In fact, like all of Ōe’s early heroes, it is in quest of his identity that he is driven to assert himself against the safety of his world. J. is perhaps the bravest of Ōe’s heroes, and one of very few who succeeds in the terms he proposes to himself. At the end of the novel, frightened and alone, he visits his industrialist father and asks to be restored to the family fold. His father happily consents and promises him a good job; J. leaves the office intending to move back into his father’s house. He is about to climb into his Jaguar when he finds himself moving toward the subway. He walks more quickly, races down the stairs, plunges into a subway and ejaculates against a high school girl. He comes to his senses as he is being led off the subway by a policeman, and the tears streaming down his cheeks are “tears of joy.…”
In 1964, when he was twenty-nine, Ōe’s first child was born with brain damage, and the baby boy, whom he called “Pooh,” altered his world with the force of an exploding sun. I won’t presume to describe Ōe’s relationship with the child, he has done that wondrously himself in a story included in this collection, “Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness.” Suffice it to say that over the years as Pooh grew up, a fierce, exclusive, isolating bond developed between father and son. In a fervent, painful way, Ōe and his fragile, autistic child became one another’s best, embracing one another as if they were each other’s fate. Shortly after Pooh was born, Ōe ordered two gravestones erected side by side in the cemetery in his native village. He has told me many times that he would die when Pooh died.
Ōe’s own perception of the child’s destructive force, the metaphor that first presented itself to him, was a nuclear explosion. The year Pooh was born he wrote two books at once and asked his publisher to release them on the same day. One was A Personal Matter (Grove Press, 1968), the first of a series of novels whose central character is the young father of a brain-damaged child. The other was a book of essays about the survivors of Hiroshima, Hiroshima Notes. Ōe was of course asking that the books be considered together; in one he chronicled the survival of an actual atomic bomb, in the other he sought the means of surviving a personal holocaust.
The child’s tidal pull on Ōe’s imagination is already discernible in A Personal Matter. Bird, the protagonist, a stymied intellectual with a failing marriage, dreams of flying away to Africa for a “glimpse beyond the horizon of quiescent and chronically frustrated everyday life.” There is nothing new about this fantasy; it is evidence that Bird is descended from Ōe’s prototypical hero. But Bird’s wife gives birth to a baby with a “cave for a head,” a “monster baby” who threatens to destroy his dream. He arranges with a doctor in the hospital to water the baby’s milk, and while he waits for it to perish he seeks refuge with a “sexual adventuress” who encourages him to claim his freedom. But the baby thrives on its fatal diet; it becomes clear that Bird will have to make a more direct attack on the child’s life. This he resolves to do, with the help of his mistress; together they take the infant out of the hospital and deliver it to a
“shady” doctor who guarantees the child will shortly die. With the baby out of the way they plan to leave for Africa together. Then abruptly, and not very convincingly, Bird perceives that he must cease “running from responsibility.” Abandoning his hysterical mistress in a bar he goes back to the abortionist, picks up the baby, and returns it to the hospital. Several months later, in the two-page coda that ends the novel, Bird emerges from the hospital with his family reunited around him and the baby in his arms. They are on their way home, and the first thing Bird will do when he arrives is look up forbearance in a dictionary inscribed with the word hope.
Bird is the first of Ōe’s heroes to turn his back on the central fantasy of his life, the first to accept, because he has no choice, the grim substitution of forbearance for hope. Until the advent of his first-born child, the quest for self-discovery took Ōe’s heroes beyond the boundaries of society into a lawless wilderness. Beginning with Bird, they turn away from the lure of peril and adventure and seek instead, with the same urgency, the certainty and consonance they imagine they experienced before they were betrayed at the end of the War. It was as if Ōe no longer had the heart to light out for the territory, not with the defenseless child that had become a part of himself. Since A Personal Matter, he has been drawn increasingly to a myth of “Happy Days” before that August day in 1945 when Hirohito renounced his divinity and innocence was rudely ended.
To be sure, longing for a mythic homeland was always there in Ōe; very likely it was engendered in him, along with his anger, even as he listened to the Emperor speak in the voice of a mortal man. Certainly it is to be felt in one of his first and most beautiful stories, “Prize Stock.” The mountain village in which a black American soldier is being held prisoner exists nowhere in actual Japan. Instead of paddies there are “fields,” instead of hogs and cows, “wild mountain dogs.” The smell of dung and human fertilizer that hangs in the air of every rural village in Japan is replaced by the scent of old mulberry leaves, and grain, and apricot trees; the only village adult who appears is not a farmer but a hunter; the word Ōe uses for the village headman is an archaic word that means a tribal chieftain. But the surest proof that Ōe is rendering myth and not reality is the scene near the end of the story, just before the child narrator is betrayed by the black soldier, when the village children lead him by the hand to the village spring for a “primeval” bath:
