THE SCRIBE OF THE SOUL
NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR KENZABURO OE USES PAIN, HUMOR TO SPEAK TO THE
WORLD

Author: By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff

Date: Tuesday, June 6, 1995
Page: 25
Section: LIVING

Once he was aboard the train on the main island -- Oe was 18, and it was his first trip on a train -- officials made him open the package.

"It was a tree," Oe says. "I thought the package would have something special in it, like our bread. Instead it was a tree. My mother gave me a young tree to take with me so that I would feel at home in Tokyo, so I would not forget where I came from. There were many men and women on the train, and they laughed at me when they saw what was in the package. Did they think I was some kind of monkey that eats the leaves?"

When Oe tells even a simple story like this one, it is with the skill of a great writer. The story is funny, touching, unsettling, and it makes a point; pain is fully felt yet shot through with black humor.

"Always," Oe says, "I have felt isolated, marginal, peripheral. That's why I wrote my first novel, 'Nip the Buds Shoot the Kids.' I was now living in the city, but I wanted to remember what Ose, my village on Shikoku, was like, and the experience of wartime."

Oe (pronounced oh-ay) wrote "Nip the Buds Shoot the Kids" in 1958, when he was 23 years old; the novel launched a literary career that would bring Oe the Nobel Prize for literature in 1994. Several of his later books have long been available in English -- "A Personal Matter" (1964) is the most famous of them. "Nip the Buds Shoot the Kids" is the first of Oe's books to appear in English since the prize. In connection with its publication and with a lecture at Harvard University, Oe came to Cambridge this spring. The novelist is a person of immense gravity, depth and personal dignity. He has lived a full life, rich in suffering and in controversy as well as in success, all of which he has embraced because all his experiences are what define his humanity. He is also a person of impeccable courtesy, suggesting that a small, unpretentious Chinese restaurant would be more suitable for a lunch interview than a highly recommended Japanese establishment. "We are less likely to be disturbed in the Chinese restaurant," he explained.

To start off with, Oe was particularly pleased to speak about the music of his son, Hikari, which has recently found an international audience through two CD recordings. Hikari Oe was born with a herniated brain. The doctors had advised the father to let his son die; after a visit to Hiroshima, Oe realized he could not permit it. Hikari's brain was irreparably damaged because of the same surgery that permitted him to live. "A Personal Matter" is a novel about the decision in favor of life. The complex relationship that developed between father and son is a theme in many of Oe's later books.

Now 35, Hikari remains in many ways a child. Throughout his life he has been remarkably sensitive to music. After beginning piano lessons, he started to write little pieces, which his family and teachers first assumed were collages of the music by Bach, Mozart and Haydn he had practiced at the keyboard. Instead, they were his own work, his own form of self-expression. The first pieces were clear and bright, "shining," his father says, with pride, "like dew on the grass."

Later pieces, the ones collected on the second CD, caught Oe by surprise. ''I was deeply shocked," he says. "My son sat there in the recording studio, smiling, but in the music I heard something different -- I heard a mass of dark sorrow."

This Oe recognized instantly. "I appreciate the darkness, and it is important for me and my work. I feel I must always go to the next stage in me, deeper and deeper and darker, and then I must write about it. I feel I must conquer the darkness by perusing the very dark things in me, through writing about them. Always I am writing myself, always. What I did not know was that my son knows these things too. We gave him music, and music gave him the chance to find and express the darkness in himself."

Hikari Oe's music has touched listeners all over the world. It has also run into critical hostility in Japan. This development did not catch his father by surprise; his own work and stoutly liberal political positions and actions have always fired controversy in a deeply conservative country.

"Already, there is a reaction to the music of my son," Oe says with a mixture of anger and resignation. "There are people who say that no one would listen to it if anyone else were the composer. They use the term 'Hikari music' as a form of derision." Told that similar controversies arise in America, Oe writes the words "victim art" down on a napkin, and continues.

"One cannot be shocked. Critics in Japan who cannot speak or read a word of German are writing all the time that my neighbor and friend Seiji Ozawa has no understanding of German music. My family and I accept Hikari as a human being and not as a handicapped person, and we are happy to accept this music
from him."

Oe feels that his son's victory through musical expression has brought the second phase of his own literary career to a close. He has resolved to write no new novels -- indeed, he plans to write nothing at all for a period of five years while he reads and searches for new forms. A volume of Spinoza was his companion for this American journey.

"I grew up in the mountains and deeps of the northern district of Shikoku," Oe says to begin describing the shape his life and work has taken. ''The feeling about God and community in such a place sounds very medieval. The formal education was very primitive, and the main theme of it was that all children were the babies of the Emperor. I have written about how the teacher would ask us over and over again, 'If the Great God Emperor asks you to die, will you do it?' We were supposed to cry out, 'Yes, I will gladly die; I will commit ritual suicide through seppuku.' But I didn't believe this; I didn't see how the good Emperor could even know my name."

Oe explains that his real education came not through such schooling but
from his grandmother and from his mother. "My grandmother taught me the old folklore of the village. And when I was 8 or 9 years old, my mother gave me two forbidden works of American and European literature, and they determined the course of my life. One of them was 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' by Mark Twain. And the other was 'The Wonderful Adventures of Nils' by Selma Lagerlof. Both books made we want to run away from my family to sleep in the forest!"

They also created a lifelong sense of independence. Oe says he had no desire to go to the university after the war. "I wanted to be a forest gardener; no, you call it a forest ranger. But after the war there was a new system and new rules. To be a forest ranger, you had to be able to read books in one of the Latin languages. No school in my region taught Latin, but there was one that taught French, and so it was that I started to learn French and later went to Tokyo to study French literature. It was there I found my great professor Kazuo Watanabe, whose specialty was the literature and thought of the Renaissance. He translated Rabelais into Japanese."

Oe's first stories, novels and essays established him immediately as the most important writer to emerge in Japan since Yukio Mishima. Oe knew Mishima, and their relationship became difficult. "I knew him very closely, and in the beginning he encouraged me. Later he turned his life into a myth and tried to become another little emperor when he created his own private militia. I criticized him for this, and that ended our friendship." Out of the tangle of feelings following Mishima's ritual suicide, Oe wrote one of his greatest short stories, "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away" (it appears in the collection "Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness").

The first period of Oe's work set the pattern. "The fundamental style of my writing," he said in his Nobel Prize address, "has been to start from my personal matters, and then to link it up with society, the state and the world." His first works inevitably concerned the consequences of World War II and the Allied Occupation; it drew power from the contrast between Oe's upbringing on the margins of Japanese culture and his presence in the middle of the urban, sophisticated culture of Tokyo. "In presenting my ambiguous position I was very encouraged by the work of the Southern writers of the United States, William Faulkner and, especially, Flannery O'Connor, who was born the same year as Mishima. It was through Flannery O'Connor that I came to the work of Jacques Maritain, which has been so important to me."

After a time, Oe felt he had exhausted the potential of this theme, or, rather, of approaching it in the ways that he had. "It was a difficult time for me, and I was unable to write for nearly five years. I could write -- but I couldn't. At the end of the time, my son was born, at a time when I was doing research on the victims of Hiroshima. Then I had to fight for my son."

As it turned out, helping his son to live helped Oe to write again, and gave him one of the subjects that was to dominate the next three decades of his work. His experiences during the period of silence, his research at Hiroshima, his life with his son enabled Oe to restructure his work -- and
himself. "Through this very personal writing I was able to recover both my work and myself." He says his novel "The Silent Cry" was aimed at his own reconstruction.

To accomplish this work, Oe had to forge new forms and new styles, which are difficult for Japanese readers and the despair of translators. "Always I write by hand; I like to write, to create the characters with the pen. To write is itself a form of culture; it makes me feel very Japanese." While his work is irreducibly Japanese, it also extends sophisticated contemporary European formal models. Much of his work is almost unbearably painful, but the tension is sometimes relieved by hilarity; a principal influence remains Rabelais. In his Nobel Prize address, Oe quoted the Russian Rabelais scholar
Mikhail Bakhtin on the image system of Rabelais: "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."

In conversation Oe admits, "I am always very encouraged when somebody says passages in my books are funny. When a funny breeze comes into my work, sometimes I feel beautiful; I like it." Here, his face breaks into a broad and beautiful smile.

The climax of this second period of Oe's career came with the publication of his trilogy "The Flaming Green Tree," which Oe completed shortly before the announcement of the Nobel Prize. The trilogy has not yet been translated into English, but Oe described it both in conversation and in his lecture at Harvard.

"The work is one model I presented to link the experiences of these 50 years with my literature. The protagonist is a survivor of a revolutionary sect from the 1960s who bears the emotional and physical scars of a terrorist attack in which he participated. Now he has formed a religious cult founded on the legends of the forests of Shikoku. The trilogy is about atonement and salvation, and although it is a tragedy, it ends in rejoicing."

Oe's work has brought him a world audience, although he once said that he wrote only for Japanese readers of his own generation. He laughs when this remark is cited, and describes the context. "I said that when I was invited to be on television in Germany after one of my books had been translated into German. The interviewer was a very arrogant man who told me that the luck of being translated into German was my big chance. I told him no, that was nonsense, that I was writing for the Japanese, and for a small group of my own generation, hoping to express the problems of a feudal people emerging into a new culture of democracy. But my real hope was to be a mediator between my generation of Japanese writers and European postmodern culture. In this I feel encouraged by my friend Seiji Ozawa. In France two years ago, I heard him conduct Mahler's Second Symphony, the 'Resurrection' Symphony. Here was music by an Austrian composer, conducted by a Japanese conductor, with a French orchestra and chorus, and two black American singers. If my work could ever do something to help organize human beings like that, it would be beautiful."

Oe feels that much of his work was written to give his son a voice; now that his son has found his own voice, he himself must find a new direction in his work. "Naturally," he says, "I was very anxious about money. I had talked it over with my wife, and we had decided to sell our house and live in a trailer. It was the peak of the real estate boom, and she figured out that we could live for 10 years in a trailer on the profits from the sale of our house. But then the bubble burst; when the potential buyer came back, we learned that we could live only two years and six months on the proceeds, and I was very depressed. And then, at that moment, the Swedish Academy telephoned me . . ."

The Nobel Prize is substantial (Oe received 7 million kroner, or about $930,000), so the author's financial worries are probably over; the prestige of the prize will lead to translations of his work into every language. The furor in Japan over the prize was soon exceeded by another, when Oe declined the Japanese Order of Culture because it is associated with the imperial past. " 'Mr. Prime Minister,' I wrote, 'I have only two pockets, a Swedish pocket, which is now full, and the other pocket. I want to be at liberty to choose what goes into it, and your medal is too big for my pocket.' "

Oe is determined to make the most of his sabbatical from writing that his writing has won for him. "I am encouraged in this enterprise by the example of Glenn Gould, who at the end of his life returned to Bach's 'Goldberg Variations' and recorded them again; he had changed himself completely."

What Oe says he wants to do is "to create a world language -- not Esperanto! What I mean is that I want to write in Japanese but to express something universal; it is what all writers want to do, to find new ways of communicating. Music is a world language already; I want to do the same thing in my own language. I want to create a new style of writing, a new form, a structure that could contain the novel, fantasy, diary and poetry. For decades I could not write anything for children. Now I dream of writing for children, and I am dreaming of new structures now. In the end of my life, I want to totalize my work completely. To what purpose? To pray to something; that is the purpose of creating, to pray for the future of everything. I feel the same thing when I hear my son's music. To find the transcendental will be the next important theme of my literature."

DYER ;04/21 NIGRO ;06/06,06:28 OE06