Japanese Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oë died on March 3, 2023. He was eighty-eight years old.
Oë tasted literary success when he was twenty-three, with his short story, The Catch. By 1964 he had published two novels, both about youth and the long shadow cast by World War II.
In 1964, Oë published Kojinteki Na Taiken. The novel was translated into English by John Nathan as A Personal Matter and published in 1969 by Grove Press, New York. The cover has a mysterious and affecting photo of a man and a child. The original photo from Asahi Shimbun was of Oë and his three-year-old son Hikari on a bicycle. The photo was cropped, cut out and colored as if to suggest that father and son are inseparable, and place (especially a country that chose to go to war and was attacked with two atomic bombs) is immaterial to their journey.
In A Personal Matter, the protagonist, twenty-seven-year-old Bird, is about to become a father. He is anxious and grumpy at the prospect. He would be tied down to domesticity and never make his dream trip to Africa. He doesn’t seem to be particularly fond of his wife. He kills time in the evening, calling the hospital every hour till he gets into a fight and goes home and falls asleep. He is woken up by the telephone on a rainy dawn. The news is grim. The baby is “abnormal”.
The novel follows Bird over the next week. His wife remains in hospital, unaware of what exactly is wrong with the baby. Armed with a bottle of Johnnie Walker that his father-in-law gave him for reasons unknown, Bird seeks out his onetime girlfriend, Himiko. They were at university together. She lives alone. After her husband committed suicide, she spends all day in a darkened room and drives about in an MG at night. She is reputed to be a “sexual adventuress”. Himiko doesn’t turn Bird away.
In his Note, Prof Nathan wrote:
“The emblematic hero of Oë’s novels, in each book a little older and more sensible of his distress, has been deprived of his ethical inheritance. The values that regulated life in the world he knew as a child …. were blown to smithereens at the end of the war. The crater that remained is a gaping crater still, despite imported filler like Democracy. It is the emptiness and enervation of life in such a world, the frightening absence of continuity, which drove Oë’s hero beyond the frontiers of respectability into the wilderness of sex and violence and political fanaticism. Like Huckleberry Finn – Oë’s favorite book! – he is impelled again and again to “light out for the territory.”
Both Himiko and Bird are sharply intelligent. Each has a critical perspective on the other’s failings and bad behavior. However, they are unable to help themselves. She lives in a psychological bomb shelter, trying not to feel pain. Even so, Bird’s decision to nudge the baby along towards death disturbs her. As late as into the wee hours of day five of that week, she tells Bird: “But it’s not too late to call the hospital and arrange for him to get whole milk…” However, apathy and self-hate get the better of her moral judgment in the end. Himiko, “fire-sighting child” hailing from the island of Kyushu, who worked on William Blake and was a star in Bird’s class at university does "light out for the territory”, sadly, for the wrong reasons, or for no reason at all. She was, like Bird and Oë himself, about ten years old when World War II ended.
Bird doesn't run away. For him "lighting out" eventually is embarking on a journey with his newborn. There is no map to guide him on this one. Paternal feeling wells up when he acknowledges that there is nothing in his life that he needs to fearfully protect from the "monster” baby. Having no regrets for losing his cram school teaching job, Bird now decides to make a living as a tourist guide in Japan.
Cleveland Press said about this book at the time: “Oë has captured the restless spirit that seems to be universal in young people today and has exposed the self-deception of those who think they can ignore society entirely and still live within reality.”
In a way, society and background are immaterial in the relationship between parents and special needs children who do not meet generic social expectations. The children themselves process their world of sights and sounds in a mysterious way. Oë’s son, Hikari, born with a cranial deformity, hardly speaks but is an award-winning composer. Oë said about their relationship: "I can be very lonely and fearful of people. But with my son I’m very free.”
In his Nobel Lecture in 1994, Oë said:
"After I got married, the first child born to us was mentally handicapped. We named him Hikari, meaning 'light’ in Japanese. As a baby he responded only to the chirps of wild birds and never to human voices. One summer when he was six years old we were staying at our country cottage. He heard a pair of water rails (Rallus aquaticus) warbling from the lake beyond a grove, and he said with the voice of a commentator on a recording of wild birds: “They are water rails”. This was the first moment my son ever uttered human words. It was from then on that my wife and I began having verbal communication with our son.”
In his Note, fifty-five years ago, Prof Nathan also wrote about Oë’s transformational approach to the Japanese language.
"Oë consciously interferes with the tendency to vagueness which is considered inherent in the Japanese language. He violates its natural rhythms; he pushes the meanings of words to their furthest acceptable limits. In short, he is in the process of evolving a language all his own, a language which can accommodate the virulence of his imagination. There are critics in Japan who take offense. They cry that Oë’s prose "reeks of butter,” which is a way of saying that he has alloyed the purity of the Japanese with constructions from Western languages.”
The language of A Personal Matter is spectacular. It combines the communication skill of the best graphic novels with a serious literary imagination. I thought of Brian Jacques’ Redwall series and Death of A Salesman after reading the novel, which speaks to both the on-the-warpath sort of immediacy the language builds, as well as the sense of a person who is dealing with an existential crisis. Death lurks behind every page. An infant with a herniated brain is being fed sugar water instead of milk. A young man flirts with killing his own humanity. Gun Corner, UN flags, the Iron Maiden, the Professor, Delchef, the transvestite, Kikuhiko, the threatening ginkgo trees, are all in place in the novel, as is Bird’s failure to rehabilitate Himiko, or even try.
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