#Kenzaburō Ōe

[shihlun]

Juzo Itami

- A Quiet Life

1995

[justforbooks]

The Nobel prize-winning novelist and essayist Kenzaburō Ōe, who has died aged 88, made his name as a cult author for Japan’s rebellious postwar youth. His early fiction – titles such as Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (1958), Seventeen (1961) and J (1963), peopled with juvenile delinquents, political fanatics and subway perverts – gave voice to an alienated generation who witnessed the collapse of their parents’ values with the defeat of the second world war. His wartime childhood fed a lifelong pacifism, and his scourging of resurgent militarism and consumerism. Yet his decisive rebirth as a writer came through fatherhood.

When Ōe was 28, his first child, Hikari, was born with a herniated brain protruding from his skull. Surgery risked brain damage, and doctors urged Ōe and his wife, Yukari, to let the infant die – a “disgraceful” time, he later wrote, that “no powerful detergent” could expunge. Then also working as a journalist, Ōe fled to report on a peace rally in Hiroshima. His encounters with hibakusha (atomic-bomb survivors) and doctors there convinced him his son must live – a moment he saw as a “conversion”. As he told me in Tokyo just after his 70th birthday “I was trained as a writer and as a human being by the birth of my son.”

The imaginative link between his stricken son and the survivors of nuclear fallout and military aggression – the personal and the political – is Ōe’s most profound literary insight. Intolerance of the weak to the point of euthanasia has historically presaged militarism – in imperial Japan as in Nazi Germany. Ōe’s lifelong commitment to Hikari (nicknamed “Pooh” after AA Milne’s bear) inspired a unique cycle of fiction whose protagonists are fathers of brain-damaged sons – often named Eeyore – and pervades his literary vision.

His conversion was reflected in a volume of essays, Hiroshima Notes (1965), and the novel A Personal Matter (1964), whose antihero Bird takes refuge in alcohol and adultery until he resolves to rescue his newborn “two-headed monster”. Its translator John Nathan thought it the “most passionate and original and funniest and saddest Japanese book I had ever read”. Ōe’s masterpiece, The Silent Cry, in which the narrator and his violently rebellious brother (both facets of the author) clash over family history, was published in 1967. These novels, published in English translation in, respectively, 1969 and 1988, brought Ōe the international recognition that culminated in the 1989 Prix Europalia and 1994 Nobel prize for literature.

His Nobel lecture, Japan, the Ambiguous and Myself, was a rejoinder to the 1968 Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata, who had lectured on Japan, the Beautiful and Myself. Ōe spoke of a Japan, after its “cataclysmic” 19th-century modernisation drive, vacillating between Europe and Asia, western modernity and tradition, aggression and human decency – a polarisation he felt as a “deep scar” from which he wrote to free himself.

The novelist Kazuo Ishiguro told me Ōe was “fascinated by what’s not been said” about Japan’s wartime past. Believing the writer’s role to be akin to a canary in a coalmine, he assailed that reticence head on. “Did the Japanese really learn anything from the defeat of 1945?” he wrote in a 50th anniversary foreword to Hiroshima Notes. Although nuclear atrocity, and the drive to rebuild Japan as a cold-war ally, encouraged a sense of victimhood, one of the neglected lessons, for Ōe, was that his parents’ generation were not just victims but aggressors in Asia.

Ōe was born in Ose, a remote mountain village of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands. His father was killed in 1944, and his mother saw a flash in the sky when far-off Hiroshima was bombed. Ōe was 10 when Emperor Hirohito surrendered in 1945 and robbed Ōe’s generation of their innocence. All that had seemed true became a lie. Fear and relief as US jeeps rolled in with the allied occupation of 1945-52 created a lasting ambivalence. Ōe, who later campaigned against US military bases in Okinawa, said: “I admired and respected English-speaking culture, but resented the occupation.”

His family were driven out of their banknote-paper business by currency reform. At Tokyo University in 1954-59, where he studied French, his country accent made Ōe feel an outsider, but a 1957 novella (translated as Prize Stock in the collection Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness), in which a boy’s friendship with a black American PoW is destroyed by war, won him the Akutagawa prize for best debut, at 23. Inspired by Rabelais’ grotesque realism, Sartre’s existentialism and an American tradition from Huckleberry Finn to Catcher in the Rye, he created antiheroes who courted disgrace in their disgust at civilisation. His assault on traditional values extended to the Japanese language. Nathan noted a “fine line between artful rebellion and mere unruliness”.

At his home in a quiet Tokyo suburb, visitors could not fail to be struck by his humility and self-deprecating humour. As he amiably recounted meeting Chairman Mao in Beijing in 1960, with his “Giant Panda cigarettes”, Ōe mimed smoking them with relish. Just as striking was his devotion to family. He married Yukari, the daughter of the prewar film director Mansaku Itami, in 1960, and Hikari, the first of their three children, was born in 1963. Although Hikari’s condition circumscribed his father’s life, it also enlarged it. It was through their relationship that Ōe grasped the “role of the weak in helping avoid the horrors of war” (the subject of a fictitious musical) and the “wondrous healing power of art”.

Hikari’s rare talent for identifying birdsong was spotted when he was six. Despite autism, visual impairment, epilepsy and learning disabilities, he had perfect pitch and became a renowned composer – the joint subject of Lindsley Cameron’s book on father and son, The Music of Light (1998). Yet in novels by Ōe such as Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age! (1983) – the title from William Blake – it is not Eeyore’s talent that is redemptive but the innocence he incarnates. Confronting parental ambivalence about the maturing sexuality of their children, that novel reveals fear of the vulnerable to be a projection of the darkness within ourselves.

Ōe’s post-Nobel novels could be large and, for some, unwieldy. The doomsday cult in Somersault (1999) resembled Aum Shinrikyo, perpetrators of the 1995 Tokyo subway gas attack, but the trauma of an apocalyptic leader renouncing his twisted faith harked back to the war. The Changeling (2000) fictionalised Ōe’s friendship with Juzo Itami (his wife’s brother). The director of the cult comedy Tampopo (1985), and a 1995 film adaptation of Ōe’s novel A Quiet Life (1990), Juzo died after falling from the roof of his office building in 1997, five years after his face was slashed by yakuza gangsters whom he had ridiculed on screen. In Death By Water (2009), Ōe’s alter-ego Kogito (the name a wry nod to Descartes) strives to write a novel about his father’s death.

Yet it is for the “idiot son” cycle that Ōe may most vividly be remembered. “I believe in tolerance,” Ōe said, and how the innocent “can play a role in fighting against violence”. After 1945, he felt strongly, Japan should have “stood up with the weak … the weak are a value in themselves.”

He is survived by Yukari, and their children, Hikari, another son, Sakurao, and a daughter, Natsumiko.

🔔 Kenzaburō Ōe, writer, born 31 January 1935; died 3 March 2023

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[intellectures]

Han Kangs Prosa ist intensiv und poetisch

Die südkoreanische Schriftstellerin Han Kang wird mit dem Literatur-Nobelpreis ausgezeichnet, weil sie in ihrem Werk »die Zerbrechlichkeit des menschlichen Lebens aufzeigt«. Damit geht der Preis zum ersten Mal überhaupt nach Südkorea.

Die südkoreanische Schriftstellerin Han Kang wird mit dem Literatur-Nobelpreis ausgezeichnet, weil sie in ihrem Werk »die Zerbrechlichkeit des menschlichen Lebens aufzeigt«. Damit geht der Preis zum ersten Mal überhaupt nach Südkorea. Die Autorin des Weltbestsellers »Die Vegetarierin« ist die achtzehnte Frau, die den Preis erhält. Continue reading Han Kangs Prosa ist intensiv und poetisch

[litandlifequotes]

Death cuts abruptly the warp of understanding. There are things which the survivors are never told. And the survivors have a steadily deepening suspicion that it is precisely because of the things incapable of communication that the deceased has chosen death. The factors that remain ill defined may sometimes lead a survivor to the very site of the disaster, but even then the only thing clear to anyone concerned is that he has been brought up against something incomprehensible.

The Silent Cry by Kenzaburō Ōe 

[sebastianbenbenek]

Osobiste doświadczenie Kenzaburō Ōe

Osobiste doświadczenie Kenzaburō Ōe

���Osobiste doświadczenie” Kenzaburō Ōe, to powieść która ma na czytelniku wywrzeć niezatarte wrażenie. To nie jest książka, o której można zapomnieć i której nie da się przeczytać w jeden wieczór. Continue reading Untitled

[sasomienspegel]

We can remember several occasions, in the past, when the chances of living or dying were balanced. (...) Every time you find yourself at a crossroads between life and death, two universes open up before you: one loses all relationship with you because you die, the other maintains it because you survive in it.

— Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter

[las-microfisuras]

"Desde niño tengo interés en cómo nuestro limitado cuerpo encaja el sufrimiento. De pequeño, yo iba a pescar. Y me fijaba en el pez con el anzuelo clavado, que se movía mucho. Sufre horrores, pero en silencio: no grita. El niño que yo era pensaba: ¡cuánto dolor inexpresado! Ese fue el primer estímulo que me llevó a ser escritor, porque pensé que los niños tampoco podíamos hacernos entender bien. Me hice escritor para reflejar el dolor de un pez. Y hoy me siento, sobre todo, un profesional de la expresión del dolor humano, al que persigo mostrar con la mayor precisión posible”.

Kenzaburō Ōe

(31 de enero de 1935, Osehigashi, Uchiko, Prefectura de Ehime, Japón - 3 de marzo de 2023)

[blackswaneuroparedux]

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 that the emperor had spoken in a human voice.

- Kenzaburō Ōe, A Portrait of the Postwar Generation

On On 15 Aug. 1945, Hirohito announced the unconditional surrender to the United States. The future Nobel literature prize winner, Kenzaburō Ōe, was only ten years old when he heard the emperor of Japan on the radio.

Throughout Japanese history, the emperor had been viewed as a demi-god, remote from the populace. That tradition was shattered on this day (Tokyo time) in 1945 when Emperor Hirohito made a 673-word radio broadcast accepting the terms of the July 26th Potsdam Declaration. His announcement marked the first time commoners in Japan, with a few exceptions, had heard the emperor’s voice.

The declaration warned Japan that unless it accepted its terms of “unconditional surrender,” the nation would face “prompt and utter destruction.” The document was signed by President Harry S. Truman, British Prime Minister Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese Nationalist leader. It made no mention of Hirohito.


The Tokyo leadership, divided over how to proceed, dithered. One faction hoped the Soviet Union would broker a deal. (Instead, the Soviets declared war on Aug. 9, grabbing a share of the spoils.)

Truman responded by authorizing the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and a second bomb on Nagasaki three days later. They devastated the two cities, killing an estimated 246,000 people in matters of seconds.

Hirohito (1901-89) began his broadcast by saying: “To our good and loyal subjects: After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in our empire today, we have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure. We have ordered our government to communicate to the governments of the United States, Great Britain, China and the Soviet Union that our empire accepts the provisions of their joint declaration.”

The emperor went on the say, falsely, that “we declared war on America and Britain out of our sincere desire to insure Japan’s self-preservation and the stabilisation of East Asia, it being far from our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandisement.

“But now the war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone - the gallant fighting of our military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of our servants of the state and the devoted service of our 100 million people - the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.

“Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilisation.”

Hirohito’s broadcast culminated in the signing of surrender documents on the foredeck of the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Leo Tolstoy. Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Marcel Proust. Walt Whitman. Alan Wilson Watts. Czeslaw Milosz. Nadine Gordimer. Elias Canetti. Banana Yoshimoto. Kenzaburō Ōe. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Alexandre Dumas.

[kaurwreck]

Hiya, thanks for indulging me in my little hyper fixation!

（╹◡╹）♡

I have more questions if you’re interested in sharing!

Is there any connection between the real Port if Yokohama and the irl authors? Did Asagiri choose Yokohama for a specific reason or something like that?

Do the authors in a specific organisation get chosen for their irl relationships or was it randomized?

How do the literary texts have connections with manifestation of the ability in universe? (Some are obvious others not so much eg. For the Tainted Sorrow = gravity???????)

Sorry for the long ask. I hope you have a nice day! :D

I've hesitated to answer this ask because I wanted to be thorough and give each question due consideration. Further, the latter two questions rely a lot on my individual interpretation and I can't offer very much objectivity. But, I think I might be overthinking it, so below, please find attempts at answering each in turn.

The Port of Yokohama

The characters in Bungo Stray Dogs are named after and inspired by authors from modern Japanese literature. The "modern" era of Japan is generally (albeit not necessarily appropriately) measured as beginning during the Meiji Restoration, during which Japan restored centralized Imperial rule, ended a centuries-long seclusion by opening its borders to the West, and rapidly industrialized. For reference, Britain's Industrial Revolution spanned eighty years, from 1760 to 1840. By contrast, Japan industrialized within, roughly, forty years.

Japan reluctantly opened to the West under duress; Commodore Perry arrived in Japan with a squadron of armed warships, a white flag, and a letter with a list of demands from US President Fillmore. A year later, Japan signed the disadvantageous and exploitive Treaty of Amity and Commerce with the United States (日米修好通商条約, Nichibei Shūkō Tsūshō Jōyaku), which opened the ports of Kanagawa and four other Japanese cities to trade and granted extraterritoriality to foreigners, among other trading stipulations. 

However, Kanagawa was very close to a strategic highway that linked Edo to Kyoto and Osaka, and the then-government of Japan did not relish granting foreigners so much access to Japan's interior. So, instead, the sleepy fishing village of Yokohama was outfitted with all the facilities and accoutrements of a bustling port town (including state-sponsored brothels), and the Port of Yokohama opened to foreign trade on June 2, 1859.

Thus, Yokohama is representative of Japan's opening to the West, including Western literature. Short stories and novels as the mediums we know them were Western imports to Japan, and Western literature shaped, inspired, and became subject to cross-cultural examination by Japanese authors.

This included Russian literature: Kameyama Ikuo, a Japanese scholar of Russian literature, described Fyodor Dostovesky's enduring popularity in Japan as follows:

In Japan, there were two Dostoevsky booms during the Meiji period [1868-1912], and The Brothers Karamazov being translated into Japanese for the first time in 1917 triggered a third. After that, critics like Kobayashi Hideo led fourth and fifth waves of popularity before and after World War II, and then Ōe Kenzaburō led the sixth wave around 1968, right when the student protests were at their height. Today we might say we’re in the middle of a seventh, with Murakami Haruki writing about how he was influenced by The Brothers Karamazov.

I've oversimplified Yokohama's role in Japan's modern engagement with the West substantially for the sake of brevity, but in short, yes, Kafka Asagiri chose the Port of Yokohama for a reason. Yokohama was, for a time, Japan's most influential, culturally relevant international metropolis, before becoming eclipsed by Tokyo in more recent history.

The Organizations

There aren't bright-line rules to explain why each character is in each organization, although it isn't randomized either.

Attempts to delineate between the organizations based on the irl!authors' philosophies, legacies, literary genres, degrees of acceptance or rejection of Western influence, etc., are inaccurate oversimplifications at best. (At worst, they're orientalist and, in some cases, conflate fascist ideology with literary aesthetics -- or literary aesthetics with violence; I've seen both, oddly enough.)

That said, the namesakes' irl relationships and literary impacts are sources of inspiration for the relationships in bsd, including between and among the various organizations. For example, Jouno, Tetchou, and Fukuchi were all among Japan's first Western-style newspaper editors. Kouyou and Mori were in the same literary circles and collaborated on influential publications; such as the magazine in which they penned anonymous reviews of works by emerging authors that made or broke careers, and which established modern literary criticism in Japan. Akutagawa is such an enduring and intimidating titan in Japanese literature; the sharpness of his prose and his ability to gut me like a fish suit bsd!Akutagawa's theatric and violent role within the Port Mafia.

But, Mori Ogai and Yosano Akiko were dear friends, Chuuya Nakahara idolized Kenji Miyazaki, and modern Japanese authors weren't mafiosos, private detectives, military police, or surreptitious intelligence officers. I'd warn against (i) cramming bsd's characters into oversimplified archetypes or literary devices and (ii) overinflating the importance of or reading any certainty into the patterns and reflections of the irl!authors. bsd makes dynamic and creative use of its source material to tell a story that's very much its own.

The source material absolutely adds depth, commentary, and intention to Kafka Asagiri's storytelling, but only if read within the context and framework of the story being told.

For an example of why strict dichotomies and oversimplified metanalysis don't work for comparing the various organizations, I wrote a post explaining why it's inaccurate to compare the Port Mafia and the Agency using an East vs. West framework here.

The Abilities

Yes, the literary texts inspire how the corresponding abilities manifest in-universe. At least, I think so, based on my own interpretations. For example, I see the green light across the bay from The Great Gatsby in the Great Fitzgerald and a throughline between Fyodor's bloody ability and the symbolic eucharist in Crime and Punishment.

I speculate about Fyodor's ability manifesting as imagery from Crime and Punishment here.

I mention the potential relationship between irl!Akutagawa's literary voice and bsd!Akutagawa's ability here.

I also share some thoughts on Dazai and the manifestation of No Longer Human based on narration from No Longer Human here.

For the Tainted Sorrow, in particular, is a poem about grief, which characterized much of Chuuya Nakahara's brief life. I've always experienced grief in intense fluctuations of weight -- sometimes heavy and immobilizing, sometimes untethering and billowing, often compulsive and consuming. It has an immense gravity.

I've always thought that bsd!Chuuya's manipulation of gravity emblemized his intense and layered relationship with grief -- for irl!Chuuya, his brother, his parents' brutal expectations, his lover, his friends, his son; for bsd!Chuuya, the Sheep, the Flags, the yet-named seven taken by Shibusawa's fog. But where irl!Chuuya was seemingly crushed by the gravity of what he lost, bsd!Chuuya defiantly persists with a rougish levity, his grief galvanizing his ferocious love for others and his desire to live for and in service of their memories.

To roughly quote bsd!Chuuya's character song, "I will manipulate even the weight of this cut-short life."

But, that's only my interpretation; take it with a grain of salt. Or with the weight of several pounds of salt. The extent to which it compels you is yours to decide.

[obsessioncollector]

Do you happen to have any book reccomendations for books with an unreliable narrator and some kind of (sort of) anti-hero? I’ve been curious, but almost all recs are for mystery, murder mystery, or just outright following the direct villain types and I’m considering looking for ones that just look at the ethics of the main character in a limited perspective.

Hi!! Here are some books that come to mind, not sure if they're exactly what you're looking for but worth checking out :) Some of these are probably obvious suggestions but I'm mentioning them just in case. Also anyone reading this, feel free to add on, I'm sure there are many I forgot!

Lolita and Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis

The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie by Ágota Kristóf (I think this one was originally three short novels but in English publication they combined it into one volume)

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

The Iliac Crest by Cristina Rivera Garza

A few other books that I wouldn't straightforwardly categorize the way you described but might still be of interest (all of them are really excellent imo):

A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe: Including this one because you mentioned ethics and the narrator is quite pathetic and repulsive, but in a way that's often encouraged (or at least not discouraged) by the society around him.

History of Violence by Édouard Louis: The narrator himself isn't particularly unreliable, but the story’s told through an interesting framing device—he’s listening to his sister recount an attack he survived and mentally noting when he disagrees with how she describes it or characterizes him, so it plays with narrative.

A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov: Classic multiple narrator/book within a book situation

The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead: The narrator isn't knowingly withholding information from the reader, but there are a bunch of twists and turns that keep you guessing (you discover them as she does.)

[shihlun]

Juzo Itami

- A Quiet Life

1995

[kvetchlandia]

Kenzaburō Ōe     Uncredited and Undated Photograph

“One day Bird had approached his father with this question; he was six years old: Father, where was I a hundred years before I was born? Where will I be a hundred years after I die? Father, what will happen to me when I die? Without a word, his young father had punched him in the mouth, broke two of his teeth and bloodied his face, and Bird forgot the fear of death.”  Kenzaburō Ōe, “A Personal Matter (Kojinteki na taiken)” 1964

[poppy5991]

Just finished A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe and JFC that was dark. Anyway, now I can’t help but think about the fact the people who complain about MHA’s character writing being problematic would fucking hate a lot of seminal Japanese literature. Nobody give them a copy of this book or No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai.

[gendzl]

—Kenzaburō Ōe, tr. David L. Swain

[sebastianbenbenek]

Zerwać pąki, zabić dzieci

Zerwać pąki, zabić dzieci

“Zerwać pąki, zabić dzieci” to przejmująca opowieść o grupce chłopców z poprawczaka, którzy zmagają się z wojenną rzeczywistością. Brzmi banalnie, ale podane jest w doskonale okrutnej, dosadnej formie, która nie stara się niwelować uczucia wściekłości czytelnika. Continue reading Untitled