With his trial over, Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel laureate in literature, was free again to write. He had already completed the preface and first chapter of a new novel, and found a title, Death by Water, in T S Eliot's The Waste Land. Oe's eyes lit up behind his trademark round glasses as he spoke of striking a new approach in what he declared would be his final novel. If Oe (pronounced OH-ay), 73, kept his pace of writing two hours every morning, it would take two years to finish.
“When I turn 75-years-old, I expect I’ll have nothing left to write as a novelist,” he said, leafing through a manuscript of broad sheets filled with his squarish handwriting and with revisions that were cut and pasted, like bandages, on thin strips of paper. “In any case, I’ll write this and then I can pass away.” Perhaps Oe felt an urgency to make up for the time— two-and-a-half-years— he had lost defending himself and his writing in court. In late March, a district court rejected an attempt by plaintiffs backed by Japanese rightists to suppress a 1970 book that he had written on Japanese military atrocities in Okinawa during World War II. For Oe, it was the latest battle in a half-century struggle against the right. This time, he had won.
Victory, though, came at great cost. He had written no fiction during the trial’s two-and-half-years. And instead of spending his afternoons reading literature, he had devoted them to girding for battle by devouring hundreds of accounts on Okinawa and books written by right-wing authors, books that he "had never had any intention of ever reading”. “Nothing could have been as boring and painful as reading those books,” Oe said, though he added that they had helped him understand his enemies’ “weaknesses and strengths”.
With the trial over, he had sold all those books to a second-hand bookstore for $500. No trace of them remained in his study or living room, where the bookshelves were lined mostly with the works, in Japanese, English and French, of Western writers and poets like— Eliot, Yeats and William Blake, as well as those of his friends— Wole Soyinka (the Nigerian novelist and Nobel laureate) and the late Edward Said.
The favourites were within easy reach of a living room armchair where Oe usually writes and reads, and sat during a recent three-hour interview at his house in a quiet western suburb here.
He sat with his back to a thickly planted front yard that recalled the forests of his native Shikoku in Southwestern Japan, a leitmotif in his work that, more practically, had shielded him over the years against right-wing demonstrators outside.
From his armchair, Oe could easily see his wife, Yukari, an illustrator, and their eldest child, Hikari, coming and going. Dressed all in black like his father, Hikari— who was born with brain damage but became a composer and appeared often in his father's work— was the only one in the house to use the telephone, to speak to his sister. Because of harassing calls from rightists, the family otherwise used the phone only for faxes.
Falsifying history
The threat of violence from fanatical right-wing groups, which worship the emperor and have traditionally enjoyed strong ties to ideologically-minded politicians, has long contributed to stifling intellectual and artistic discourse in Japan. So it was no surprise that Oe— who has relentlessly criticised the imperial system for stunting postwar Japan's democratisation and its ability to come to terms with its wartime past— was singled out in the recent battle over Okinawa.
For more than a decade, politicians and academics on the right have waged a largely successful campaign to revise Japan’s wartime history, diminishing or eliminating descriptions of the Nanjing massacre and military sex slaves in government-endorsed school textbooks.
Accordingly, they seized on a nearly 40-year-old book by Oe, Okinawa Notes, which details how the military coerced civilians in Okinawa to commit mass suicide instead of surrendering to Americans.
Eventually, in 2005, a veteran mentioned in the book and another veteran’s surviving relatives filed a defamation lawsuit for $200,000 against Oe. The plaintiffs, backed by right-wing academics and journalists, also sought to block any further printing of the book.
Last year, under the government of Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister and a leader in the revisionist movement, education officials cited Oe's ongoing trial to justify stripping textbooks of all mention of ‘coercion’ by the military in the mass suicides. But that decision caused more than 110,000 people to demonstrate in Okinawa last fall, in the largest protest ever there. The government eventually backed down, though not completely, deciding that the textbooks would now include mention of the military’s “involvement” in the mass suicides. Nevertheless, Oe said the demonstration provided “a basis for hope”.
The trial served as a bookend to an incident early in Oe’s literary career. In the heady, postwar days, Oe became the first in his family to leave the ancestral village in Shikoku to go to college in Tokyo. But in Tokyo, leftist supporters of the pacifist US-imposed Constitution clashed with right-wing politicians pushing for a remilitarised Japan allied with the United States. In 1960, a 17-year-old right-wing fanatic assassinated a Socialist Party leader in the name of the emperor.
Oe, then 25, turned the incident into a novel, Seventeen. The first half was published without incident, but the second, mixing criticism of the imperial system with sexual satire, immediately drew threats from the right wing. Oe could not leave his home for nearly a year.
To this day, the second half of Seventeen has never been reprinted. “For the last 60 years of our postwar history, Japan’s nationalists, whether explicitly or not, have supported the imperial system,” he said.
Oe supports what he sees as the pillar of a new Japan, a democratic Constitution, by serving as a leader of a group opposing attempts to remove its pacifist clause. He has continued to voice his opposition to the imperial system, turning down the Imperial Order of Culture, Japan’s highest cultural honour, shortly after receiving his Nobel.
“I was the first one to turn it down and I may be the last,” he said. For his new novel, Oe said he was returning to the theme of the emperor. But he said the novel would depart from having a character based on himself; there would be no “aging intellectual confronting and tortured by the contradictions in Japanese society.”
Instead, a main character is based on his father, a staunch supporter of the imperial system who drowned in a flood during World War II. The other is a contemporary young Japanese woman who “rejects everything about Japan” and in one act tries to destroy the imperial order.
“I haven’t come up with an ending yet,” Oe said. “But if I can find a way to end it and publish it so that it won’t draw right-wing demonstrators outside my home, that would be ideal.”
The New York Times
