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The Seamless Universe of Oe Kenzaburo

by Celeste Loughman?

No term or concept appears more frequently in e Kenzabur's writing than "ambiguity." e made it the focus of his 1994 Nobel Lecture, "Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself," and has acknowledged directly its prominence in his thinking: "I wrote a book entitled 'The Methods of the Novel' (1978) in which I explained that the concept of ambiguity was very important to me" ("Interview" with Yoshida, 372). Closely associated with ambiguity is the idea of simultaneity-of past and present, fact and dream, history and myth-which results in the ambiguity or blurring of distinctions and boundaries that constitutes e's seamless universe. At the same time, however, Oe counterbalances ambiguity with a vision of human history connected by an underlying structural certitude.

In a discussion of his novel The Game of Contemporaneity (orig. Dojidai Gemu, 1979), e mentions coming in contact with the Mural Movement during a visit to Mexico:

Octavio Paz said that Mexico is a place where history is constantly bleeding. And there I found ancient times and the contemporary coexisting. Those colossal murals depict Mexican history from ancient times to the present synchronically. I said to myself, can it be done in literature? If you consider The Game of Contemporaneity as a mural, it portrays the history of a village from ancient times to the present. Right beneath the mural is a giant sprawling and looking at the entire history as contemporaneity. Both the writer and the reader can also read the novel in that fashion. (Quoted in Wilson, 125)

As his comment implies, e aimed at a spatial rather than chronological representation of history. The narrator imagines the power of experiencing all of human history simultaneously, thus eliminating the boundaries of past and present and allowing the reorganization of history. As in Faulkner, the same events are related from several different perspectives and in different sequences, resulting in a confusion of fact, memory, fantasy, and chronology. e's intention was, as he says, "to present ambiguity in 'Contemporary Games'-that is to say, one reality conveying many meanings." And he adds, "Since regional folklore and regional myths contain this element of ambiguity, I clearly intended to delve into this matter in the regional myths" ("Interview," 372).

Although an ambitious, clever narrative, much of The Game of Contemporaneity is a more contrived, self-conscious elaboration of ideas that e brought together in his earlier, more admired work, The Silent Cry (orig. Man'en gannen no futtoboru, 1967; Eng. 1974), which is the focus of this essay.1 Like the later novel, The Silent Cry is concerned with history bleeding. The following passage is not from the novel, but it could be:

He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together-the old stories, the war stories, their stories-to become the story that was still being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time. (Silko, 246)

The passage is from Leslie Marmon Silko's 1977 novel Ceremony, and its connection with The Silent Cry is strong. Tayo, the central figure of Silko's work, is a mental casualty of World War II, suffering from guilt, loss, and displacement related to the cousin-brother who was killed by the Japanese while Tayo survived. Where modern medicine fails to heal his affliction, the rituals-or ceremony- associated with ancient American Indian myths succeed. Part of Tayo's healing is his realization of the interconnectedness of all human beings and experiences in time and space.

The Silent Cry is a story of two brothers who, like Tayo, are in a sense casualties of the Pacific War and its aftermath and who, also like Tayo, return to their roots for atonement, renewal, a new beginning. Their name, Nedokoro, means "root place." The narrator is twenty-six-year-old Mitsusaburo (Mitsu), a peripheral character who acts as the commentator on his world. He is first encountered sitting in fetal position mired in soil in a pit dug for a septic tank as he contemplates his friend's bizarre suicide and also his wife's alcoholism, which followed the birth of their deformed son. The time is the early 1960s. The younger brother, Takashi, returns from America, where he has been touring in a play, Ours Was the Shame, "a penitential piece" meant to atone for the 1960 riots and for mistreatment of the American president when he was in Japan to sign the revised U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. At Takashi's urging, the two head for their native village, Mitsu to find a new beginning, his "thatched hut," and Taka to lead an uprising of young peasant men. He wants to re-create an 1860 episode involving their great-grandfather and especially his younger brother, who led the exploited peasants in their revolt against the wealthy farmers, including the Nedokoro family. Now the enemy is the "emperor," a Korean supermarket czar who is exploiting and impoverishing the peasants. Takashi does not want merely to emulate his great-granduncle, but to "be able to experience as intensely as possible what great-grandfather's younger brother went through spiritually" (183). Because of the story that the great-granduncle had cut a clearing in the forest as a training ground to prepare the men to fight, Takashi decides to organize the young men of the valley for football practice as training for the uprising. As has often been noted, the intention to fuse 1860 and 1960 is clear from the original title of the novel, usually translated as "Football in the Year 1860." Within the novel there is no reference to football in 1860, but the title accurately conveys the novel's tossing the characters back and forth between 1860 and 1960. When Mitsu watches Takashi run naked in a ritual dance in the snow, he thinks:

The essence of that moment would be drawn out indefinitely; direction in time was swallowed up and lost amid the steadily falling flakes, just as sound was absorbed by the layer of snow. All-pervasive time: Takashi as he ran stark naked was great-grandfather's brother, and my own; every moment of those hundred years was crowded into this one instant in time. (146)

On returning to his native village, Mitsu had experienced a similar sensation of undifferentiated time:

As I bent down over the spring to drink from it directly, I had a sudden sense of certainty: certainty that everything . . . was just as I'd seen it twenty years before; a certainty, born of longing yet to myself at least, utterly convincing, that the water now welling up so ceaselessly was exactly the same water that had welled up and flowed in those days. (58)
e's treatment of reversible time is informed by the work of Mircea Eliade,2 who, when distinguishing between sacred and profane time, says:

One essential difference between these two qualities of time strikes us immediately: by its very nature sacred time is reversible in the sense that, properly speaking, it is a primordial mythical time made present. Every religious festival, any liturgical time, represents the reactualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past, "in the beginning." Religious participation in a festival implies emerging from ordinary temporal duration and reintegration of the mythical time reactualized by the festival itself. Hence, sacred time is indefinitely recoverable. (68-69)

Echoing Eliade, e uses the ancient Bon Lantern Festival, when the spirits of the dead return to earth. In the Nembutsu ritual dance, performed as part of the festival, the dancers are imbued with the spirits of the figures being represented. Each year the "sacred" events of communal myth are reactualized during the dance, and both the spectators and performers are transported to the time of the initial happening. Takashi describes such a happening when as a child he experienced the murder of his brother S during a raid on a Korean settlement:

As a kid I actually saw, in the Nembutsu dance at the Bon Festival, the 'spirit' of S, in the winter jacket worn by naval air cadets, fighting the men from the Korean settlement at the head of a party of young men, until he was finally beaten to death, stripped of his jacket, and left lying face down in just his white undershirt and shorts. I told you, didn't I, that his arms were raised as if he was dancing, with his legs spread like those of a hurdler in action? (123)

The experience was like that described by Eliade. It was not, Takashi says, "a memory of the real-life raid on the Korean settlement, but an experience in the world of the dance, in which the facts were reworked in visible form through the communal emotions of the people in the valley" (123).

By meticulously reproducing the daily life of 1860, Takashi wants to recover the past even more precisely than in the experience of the Nembutsu dance: "I want to start another rising here, to reproduce the rising of our ancestors a century ago even more realistically than the Nembutsu dance. Mitsu-it's not impossible!" (182). When a young man is expelled from the group and the village after an attempted rape, the 1860 episode is recovered again: "Would you believe it, Mitsu, he was trying to cross the forest in all this snow and get to Kochi! He was identifying with the young fellow in the 1860 rising!" (182).

In The Silent Cry the past is not only recoverable, but also continually revised; and each revision makes the past both contemporaneous and ambiguous. Of his aim in literature, e has said: "To create myths, modify myths and deconstruct myths is the most important method of my literature" ("Conversation" with Nathan, 5). One of Mitsu's principal functions is to destroy and reconstruct myths. He is persistent in undermining Takashi's reverence for S and particularly his great-granduncle as heroes. Although acknowledging as dream memories the heroic poses of S, Takashi insists on the truth of the vision of his brother "standing at the head of a group from the valley doing battle with the pick of the men from the Korean village" (75). Mitsu instead portrays S as weak, timid, and a laughingstock: "I found a perverted pleasure in waiting for the fresh flaws that my corrections lured from Takashi's memory and shooting them down as they appeared" (74). Even more important to Takashi is the image of his great- grandfather's younger brother in scenes of heroic resistance as leader of the peasants in the 1860 uprising. Mitsu again imputes Takashi's vision to dream rather than fact and reasons that the ancestor actually fled into the forest and disappeared to escape retribution. Toward the end of the novel, the reader learns that Takashi's dreaming may be closer to the truth than Mitsu's reasoning. S appears more like a hero than a hapless victim, and discovery of a cellar beneath the storehouse reveals evidence that great-grandfather's younger brother did not flee but remained a leader of the resistance. There is no certainty, however; so the past remains suspended in the present, and truth elusive.

This deconstructive handling of history is part of the broader meaning of the novel. Speaking critically of Japan's cultural climate, e says: "Never have we witnessed, in intellectual journalism in our country, the synchronic existence of two opposing new schools of thought-for example, structuralism and deconstructionism-and the resulting combination of antagonism and complementarity, which can lead, in turn, to a mutual deepening of the two schools" ("Japan's Dual Identity," 365). Actually, The Silent Cry is itself an example of "the synchronic existence of two opposing new schools of thought." Here, deconstructionism and structuralism exist simultaneously.3 Even as e is deconstructing village history and myth, he is disclosing their underlying structural connectedness. Whereas Henry Adams searched for a sequence of human history and found it in energy or force, e finds in human history a sequence of violence. In its reactualization of violent events from the village's past, the Nembutsu dance is an acknowledgment and ritual rendering of the legacy of violence. The spirit of destructive malevolence is concretized in the Chosokabe, "a creature of terrifying size that exists everywhere in time and space" and that is an "ever-present reality" in the village (42). e universalizes the sequence of violence by linking the histories of Japan and America. He focuses on three years-1860, 1945, and 1960-which bleed into one another in the course of the novel.

Throughout the 1860s Japan experienced its own civil war in the many, often bloody uprisings of the peasants against economic suppression and exploitation. In choosing the date of 1860 for the fictional uprising in the novel, Oe intentionally, if obliquely, makes the connection with America on the threshold of its Civil War. There is even the similarity of brother fighting against brother. Although the American Civil War is never mentioned directly, it is recalled in a catalytic incident that is an ironic reminder of the history of blacks in America and the war that should have ended their debasement. Shortly before Takashi returned to Japan from the United States, he encountered Mitsu's friend, who was studying at Columbia, and handed him without comment a pamphlet about the civil-rights movement:

The frontispiece was a photograph of a black, his body so scorched and swollen that the details were blurred like those of a crudely carved wooden doll, with a number of white men in shoddy clothes standing round him. It was comic and terrible and disgusting, a representation of naked violence so direct that it gripped the beholder like some fearful fantasy. (17)

Recalling the pamphlet later, Takashi remarks: "A terrible picture, the sort of thing that tells you something about the essential nature of violence" (156). The friend believes that the pamphlet was given to him intentionally, and the image of the horribly beaten black man becomes fused with the source of his own condition: "With the inevitability of two drops of water merging into each other, sight linked itself immediately with the ill-defined trouble in his own head" (17). He has suffered from a mental disturbance ever since he was badly beaten in one of the 1960 riots, possibly by Takashi, who fought for a time on both sides. Ironically, the friend had attended the riot not to fight but to rescue his wife. From the beginning of the novel Mitsu has been trying to fathom why his friend had "daubed his head all over with crimson paint, stripped, thrust a cucumber up his anus, and hanged himself" (4). Though horrible, the behavior is understandable if the friend came to recognize, and could not tolerate, the essential human capacity for violence and for victimization of the powerless. His defilement of his body can be seen as an acknowledgment of human degradation, and his suicide an act of atonement-one of several in the novel-for that degradation. After his death, his grandmother connects him with Sarudahiko and, in doing so, affirms the sequence of human violence by alluding to its presence in the origins of Japan. The reference is to a Japanese creation myth involving Sarudahiko the divine, who met with a representative of gods who were intruding on the earth. In a show of power, the representative of the intruding gods slashed the mouth of one of the inhabitants, a sea slug, "who resisted in silence" and with whom Mitsu identifies his friend (6).

When Takashi gives him the pamphlet, the friend suspects that it is linked also to Takashi's own problems. He is right. Takashi is aware of his own violent nature, admitting, "I've been torn all along between the desire to justify myself as a creature of violence and the urge to punish myself for it" (211). And he links that violent nature to his involvement in the 1960 riots and his fighting on both sides:

The reason why I deliberately chose to get mixed up in violence during the campaign against revision of the Security Treaty-and the reason why, when I found myself associated with the violence of the weak forced into opposition against unjust violence, I chose to ally myself with unjust violence, whatever its purpose-was that I wanted to go on accepting myself as I am, to justify myself as a man of violence without having to change. (211)

At this point he has not confessed his most compelling reason to punish himself: his culpability in the rape and suicide of his sister. His touring in Ours Was the Shame was phony penitence, but the shame he feels and the desire to repent for his treatment of his sister are genuine. Thus, the rape and suicide of his sister are superimposed on the image of the beaten and scorched black man to produce a single image of victimization of the weak and powerless. Takashi finds a means of repentance by leading the uprising against the "Emperor," ironically using violence to atone for violence.

If the 1860 peasant uprising in Japan recalls the American Civil War and the 1960 riots against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty recall the civil-rights movement in America, the year 1945, especially the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, links the histories of Japan and America even more forcefully and affirms the interconnectedness of history. Mitsu remembers the Nembutsu procession during the war, when "spirits" in army uniforms were introduced:

They were the ghosts of men drafted from the valley who had been killed in battle. The number of them in uniform increased every year. The "spirit" of a young man who had been working in a Hiroshima factory and was killed by the atomic bomb came down from the forest with his whole body blackened like a lump of used charcoal. (125)

Oe has often discussed and written about the atomic bomb and its implications, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are never far from his consciousness. Here, however, he does not distinguish the bombings significantly and instead includes them as but further instances of the universal, historical pattern of violence and destruction.

In the summer of 1945, after the end of the war, the brother S was killed by the Koreans, and in one version of the incident, related by S's friend, a priest, his death is linked to the 1860 uprising: "There were things in S's behavior that could only suggest he had the 1860 rising in mind when he resolved on his own course of action. I don't think I'm just forcing an analogy in linking 1860 and the summer of 1945" (117). Filling in the blanks of the priest's version, Mitsu concludes that S was bothered that great-grandfather's brother was the only rebel leader not executed, and therefore S, in atonement, decided that he would be the one to die in the raid (117). The year 1945, like 1860 and 1960, commemorates the never-ending sequence of violence that has no boundaries. Another link between Japan and America is the enslaved condition of the Koreans referred to in the novel. The connection with the experience of black Americans is pointed in Mitsu's comment about the Koreans in Japan: "They didn't come here voluntarily in the first place. They were slave labor brought from their own country against their will" (188).

The culminating events of Takashi's failed uprising are in keeping with his violent character. Although Mitsu casts doubt on the accuracy of Takashi's story-another example of the indeterminacy of truth in the novel-Takashi may very well have, as he asserts, raped and brutally murdered a young woman in the village. Believing that he will be arrested and put to death, he commits suicide by shooting himself in the face. Whether he deliberately committed an act that would result in punishment by death as atonement for the violation and death of his sister is one of the uncertainties of the novel, but such behavior would be consistent with his pattern of violence, guilt, and atonement. Once, he said, he had tried to escape the violence which surrounded him. Having been told by Mitsu that he had stood in a dark kitchen calmly chewing candy after learning that S had been killed, Takashi explains his behavior:

So, though I was only a kid, I found myself surrounded by terrifying violence: after all, corpses and madmen represent violence in its ultimate form. I was driven into a corner from which I couldn't escape no matter how clever I was. By sucking my candy so carefully I was really hoping to make my consciousness burrow down inside my body, turning its back completely on the violence outside, much as a wound buries itself in swelling flesh. (143)

Tayo, in Ceremony, faces a similar challenge against "witchery," his term for the destructive forces which, like the Chosokabe, have existed at all times and in all places. With a weapon in his hand and ready to kill, he decides not to. Choosing not to match violence with violence, he defeats witchery and achieves regeneration through a series of ritual acts that comprise the ceremony of tribal myth. Unlike Tayo, Takashi was not able to turn his back on the violence outside or within himself. In his last conversation with Mitsu, he says that he wants to tell the truth and confesses the relationship with his sister and his responsibility for her suicide. Written on the wall of the room where his body is discovered is his statement in red pencil, "I told the truth." The truth that he told is the only unequivocal truth in the novel, the reality of violence, symbolized by the color red in Takashi's bloodied face and the painted corpse of Mitsu's friend.

The particular form of violence that pervades the novel and creates its atmosphere of despair is the degradation of the flesh. The grotesque suicides of Takashi and Mitsu's friend are the grossest but only two of the many descriptions and incidents, ranging from mild to horrible, in which the body is desecrated. The mildest examples are the comparisons to lower forms: Mitsu describes his wife's hand as "scrawny and stringy as a monkey's" (9); he describes himself as a "vomiting dog" (167) and repeatedly as "just a rat." More serious are the sexual debasement and perversion, deformity, mutilation, and decay that are everywhere in the novel. Takashi has sex with an old, foul-smelling prostitute in a dangerous New York area, deliberately inviting disease and attack. Mitsu's friend descends into orgies of masochistic sex. Takashi seems to revel in describing the decay of S's body as he witnessed or, in his incipient madness, dreamed it: "The ants had completely eaten away the eyes behind the tightly closed lids, leaving red holes the size of walnuts from which a faint, reddish light guided the tiny feet of the ants as they marched to and fro, treading the trifurcated path of ears and nose" (71). Later, with what Mitsu calls "a note of defiant exhibitionism," Takashi describes in detail his murder of the village girl by repeatedly smashing her head with a rock (224). Besides the psychological deformity revealed in the behavior of Takashi and Mitsu's friend, the world's deformity is symbolically represented in the grotesque obesity of the peasant woman Jin, who in her monstrosity and anticipated death is regarded as another scapegoat, atoning for the monstrousness in the world. The implication is that the birth of Mitsu's brain-damaged son is to be expected in such a world.

Oe has explained the presence of deformity and of sexual depravity in his works more positively than the evidence indicates. One connection he has made alludes to the Russian formalist method of "making strange." Asked about sexual depravity in his novels, e said: "I have simply utilized sexual elements as the most concrete means to defamiliarize the mundane lives of human beings" ("Interview," 373). More often, e identifies his method with the grotesque realism of Rabelais, especially as interpreted by Bakhtin. In his study of Rabelais, Bakhtin says: "Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one" (21). Similarly, in his book The Methods of the Novel, e says: "Our literature should adopt the image system of grotesque realism as its integral part and, in so doing, should bring about a real regeneration of human life-in this way I intend to formulate the future of Japanese literature" (quoted in "Interview," 373). e may intend to "bring about a real regeneration of human life," but there is a contradiction between what he says and what his works reveal: "e certainly presents pictures grim enough to alarm readers, but instead of suggesting the advent of new hope, he perpetuates an ominous possibility that the outcome of rebirth and regeneration will be worse yet, for example, as in the form of insanity or physical deformity" (Yoshida, 95).

Tayo in Silko's novel recognizes that there are no boundaries, only transitions. The Silent Cry goes further to show that in the transitions there is also diminution. As John Barth says in his novel Giles Goat-Boy, "Everything only gets worse, gets worse" (xxi). In his understanding of the cyclical process of repetition with diminution, the narrator of this novel, written about the same time as The Silent Cry and employing a similar method of grotesque realism, would fit easily into e's world: "There is an entropy to time, a tax on change: four nickels for two dimes, but always less silver" (763). As in Barth's novel, everything in The Silent Cry gets worse, becomes trivialized or monstrous. What was once a thriving Korean settlement is now a chicken farm; the storehouse, from which the great-grandfather had defended his family in the 1860 uprising, will now be reconstituted as a restaurant; the "emperor," the moral force to whom the people must now pay homage, is a greedy supermarket czar. Like the 1860 uprising, the 1960 version is a failure; but this time the shame of the peasants' capitulation is "but a squalid, impotent variety" (252). Mitsu in his inert nastiness and Takashi in his tawdry violence are themselves squalid and impotent varieties of their great-grandfather and his younger brother. In a comparison of the two uprisings that recalls Eliade's idea of sacred time, e states that in reenacting the past there is inevitably diminution:

You mentioned how the sacred is violated in order to keep it sacred. As a historical event, this peasant revolt was also sacralized. But as soon as this resistance is recuperated in a contemporary scenario, as it does in my novel as a grass-roots attack on a supermarket, or rather shopping center, the sacred gets trampled upon, becomes despised, denounced. It is this process that constitutes the theme of my work. ("Conversation" with Pease & Wilson, 23).

After the violence, degradation, and diminution, e's attempts to end his works on a regenerative note lack conviction. In an earlier novel, A Personal Matter, Bird emerges from an episode of degraded sex on the threshold of a new beginning. Similarly, The Silent Cry is given a happy ending of sorts. Mitsu and his wife, Natsumi, who has been in an alcoholic stupor for much of the novel and who is carrying Takashi's child, will try to salvage their marriage, first at long distance as Mitsu leaves for Africa to build his thatched hut, to begin a new life. Takashi has been incorporated into village myth, another spirit to be invoked at the next Bon festival. The fate of the characters, however, is less important than their function to convey e's multiple perspectives on time and human history. They show the absence of boundaries between past and present, between truth and falsehood, between fact and dream. Further, they show that the structural link in human history is violence, that the present profanes the past, and that there is an entropy to time. These perspectives undermine Mitsu's hope for a new beginning and make the optimistic conclusion ironic.

Oe's thought has continuity. In his Nobel Lecture, most of which is a collection of ideas that he has expressed over the years, he comments that the title The Flaming Green Tree, the last installment in a recent trilogy of novels, was taken from a stanza in Yeats's poem "Vacillation" (27). In that stanza can be found ancient myth, ambiguity, and the merging of past and present, linking the poem to e's earlier fiction as well as to his recent work. Written more than a quarter of a century ago, The Silent Cry is indisputably one of e's finest novels and an enduring statement of his art and thought.