The two most powerful writers about the traumas of WW2, in my reading experience, are the German W.G. Sebald and the Japanese Ooe Kenzaburo. Both men were children during the actual fighting, and both write about the shame and denial they observed in the adult communities in which they grew up. Both are obsessed with memory, with the loss and recovery of memory, but their literary modes could hardly be more different. Sebald is a writer of dispassionate rage -- yes, I intended that oxymoron -- who distances his subjects with exquisite verbal delicacy. For Sebald, memory is the only reality. Nothing exists except in memory, and when the memory is lost, the reality dies with it. Sebald is heir to the melancholy rationalism of German literary culture. Ooe's literary culture, from Bunraku to Meiji to modernism, is one of sensation and sensationalism, of staged hysteria, assaultive imagery and lurid exposure. For Ooe, memory is an inescapable but inexplicable burden, a riddle one must solve in order to live, in hopes of breaking through the past to the present.
Ooe has just two stories to tell, which he has recast with new brilliancy and insight in all of his books. Both are catastrophic. The older story is that of a boy, obviously the author himself, in a remote valley of Japan, discovering his own personhood at exactly the moment of Japan's crushing defeat in the War. It's a tale of irreparable disillusionment and shame. The early story Prize Stock and the later The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away are both stories of that moment. Ooe's other theme is also autobiographical; in 1964, when Ooe was 29, his first child was born, a son who suffered brain damage at birth and who grew up mentally handicapped and autistic. The father's ferocious bond with his `retarded' son is the subject of the story Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, as well as the implicit motif of Agwhee the Sky Monster.
The Day He Himself is the longest and boldest story in this volume, which was not originally written as a unified collection. It's also the most violent, grotesque, obscene, and agonizing. A 35-year-old man is confined to bed in a hospital or an asylum, dying of liver cancer that he may be imagining. He is obsessed (there's that word again) with dictating the true "history of the age" -- by which he means the moment of transcendance when his father died and thus liberated the divine chysanthemum spirit of the suddenly human God-Emperor -- to an amanuensis who may be either a nurse or his wife, so that it can be presented to his mother-enemy upon his death. Both the scribe and the mother refuse to be constrained by the `dying' man's reality. Difficult and hideous as it is, The Day He Himself is arguably Ooe's most luminous masterpiece. I'd suggest ignoring the translator's order and reading the three other, shorter stories first, saving this glorious ordeal for last.
Prize Stock is a far less arduous puzzle to read but no less viscerally shocking. That boy in the village, on the backward island of Shikoku, finds himself temporarily the proud guardian of a captive American soldier, a black man whom he can't understand except as a docile animal. After all, the captive is language-less and inscrutable yet clearly sentient. Shared humanity is NOT a given. The contact has a horrific outcome.
Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness is told by the grotesquely fat father of a mentally defective son, who takes the boy to a zoo to attempt to stimulate his short-sighted, deformed eyes. Irrational violence occurs, the father and son are separated, and the psychological aftermath is .... not perhaps what you'll expect.
In Agwhee the Sky Monster, the narrator becomes the paid companion of a famous artist who has `lost his mind' and is haunted by the ghost of a baby whose death he permitted.
Obviously, none of these stories are frivolus or frolicksome. And they are very foreign in sensibilities, as foreign to an English reader as that gruesomely beastialized captive American was to the villagers of Shikoku. Don't expect an easy universal human sympathy when you read Ooe Kenzaburo. Prepare yourself to be challenged emotionally and intellectually.
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