The Marginal World of Oe Kenzaburo: A Study of Themes and Techniques by Michiko N. Wilson

Author:Michiko N. Wilson [Wilson, Michiko N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Minority Studies, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781315286273
Google: -IgYDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-09-16T04:30:27+00:00

That the death of Mishima galvanized the composition of My Tears is no secret. In the prologue of the second publication of My Tears, Ōe draws the relationship between Mishima’s suicide and the Emperor System: the ostracized “A Political Boy” is still alive and well in Ōe’s mind. The devastating reception of the story had led him to seek elsewhere a literary mode that would free him from the “shackles of the Emperor System, a suppressor of political imagination” (p. 245). The most notable thing about Ōe’s post-1968 stories that deal with sociopolitical topics is the adoption of black humor, exaggeration, madness, the parodic, and the satiric. My Tears maximizes this “legitimacy of the exercise of a free imagination that is politically committed,”27 but not bound to the mimetic representation of reality. The work is his challenge, as a writer, to “the cultural tradition headed by the Emperor System,” whereas Mishima wrote Runaway Horses as a justification of that tradition and system. In a world turned upside down, Ōe parodies the “possessed words of equivocation” that allowed Mishima to create the ideal youth, whose eloquent speech is unequalled. The thirty-five-year-old narrator of My Tears plays a “double” for both the dead author and the canonized boy, “the wrong side” of everything the Emperor System continues to suggest. Instead of the divine Emperor waiting for the narrator/biographer to wipe his tears away (the title of My Tears clearly indicates the presence of the Emperor by the use of the verb “to wipe” in honorific form, nuguitamō), it is his mother’s “scratchy thumbs” that “expertly wipe away the tears in the corners of his closed eyes.”

At the end of a narrative discourse that zigzags, spins, and seesaws, who is given the final words? “Sooner or later the Japanese are going to change their attitude about what happened, and I intend to live to see it, yessir!” (162/105). Such is the hope the narrator’s mother expresses. “About what happened” (kono koto ni tsuite) refers to August 15, 1945, the one event narrated n times in connection with the Emperor System. The mother pities her son for the first time: “And here he is thirty-five years old, it’s a cruel business! When he was a child he’d dream the teacher at elementary school was asking him IF THE EMPEROR ORDERED YOU TO DIE, WOULD YOU DIE? and he’d sob and repeat the cruel answer in his sleep, YES, I WOULD DIE, I WOULD DIE HAPPILY! and he is thirty-five years old and still weeping away as if the teacher was asking him that same question, it’s a cruel business, yessir!]]” (162–63/105–106). No matter how he shuts himself up in seclusion, whether he is a conservative or a progressive, Ōe repeats, as long as the Emperor System remains, a Japanese writer cannot disavow his political involvement.28 Writing, for Ōe, is more than “a personal matter”: it is a political act.

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