——the Nobel Lecture in 1994 (Excerpted)

Kenzaburo Oe

[1] During the last catastrophic World War I was a little boy and lived in a remote, wooded valley on Shikoku Island in the Japanese Archipelago, thousands of miles away from here.At that time there were two books by which I was really fascinated: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.The whole world was then engulfed by waves of horror.By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors.The protagonist of The Wonderful Adventures of Nils is transformed into a little creature, understands birds’ language and makes an adventurous journey.I derived from the story sensuous pleasures of various kinds.Firstly, living as I was in a deep wood on the Island of Shikoku just as my ancestors had done long ago, I had a revelation that this world and this way of life there were truly liberating.Secondly, I felt sympathetic and identified myself with Nils, a naughty little boy, who while traversing Sweden, collaborating with and fighting for the wild geese, transforms himself into a boy, still innocent, yet full of confidence as well as modesty.On coming home at last, Nils speaks to his parents.I think that the pleasure I derived from the story at its highest level lies in the language, because I felt purified and uplifted by speaking along with Nils.

[2] After I got married, the first child born to us was mentally handicapped.We named him Hikari, meaning “Light” in Japanese.As a baby he responded only to the chirps of wild birds and never to human voices.One summer when he was six years old we were staying at our country cottage.He heard a pair of water rails warbling from the lake beyond a grove, and he said with the voice of a commentator on a recording of wild birds, “They are water rails.” This was the first moment my son ever uttered human words.It was from then on that my wife and I began having verbal communication with our son.

[3] Hikari now works at a vocational training centre for the handicapped, an institution based on ideas we learnt from Sweden.In the meantime he has been composing works of music.Birds were the originators that occasioned and mediated his composition of human music.On my behalf Hikari has thus accomplished the prophecy that I might one day understand the language of birds.I must say also that my life would have been impossible but for my wife with her abundant female force and wisdom.She has been the very incarnation of Akka, the leader of Nils’s wild geese.Together with her I have flown to Stockholm and the second of the prophecies has also, to my utmost delight, now been realized.

[4] Kawabata Yasunari, the first Japanese writer who stood on this platform as a winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, delivered a lecture entitled Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself. It was at once very beautiful and vague.I have used the English word vague as an equivalent of that word in Japanese “aimaina”.This Japanese adjective could have several alternatives for its English translation.The kind of vagueness that Kawabata adopted deliberately is implied in the title itself of his lecture.

[5] Under that title Kawabata talked about a unique kind of mysticism which is found not only in Japanese thought but also more widely Oriental thought.By “unique” I mean here a tendency towards Zen Buddhism.Even as a twentieth-century writer, Kawabata depicts his state of mind in terms of the poems written by medieval Zen monks.Most of these poems are concerned with the linguistic impossibility of telling truth.

[6] Why did Kawabata boldly decide to read those extremely esoteric poems in Japanese before the audience in Stockholm? I look back almost with nostalgia upon the straightforward bravery which he attained towards the end of his distinguished career and with which he made such a confession of his faith.Kawabata had been an artistic pilgrim for decades during which he produced a host of masterpieces.After those years of his pilgrimage, only by making a confession as to how he was fascinated by such inaccessible Japanese poems that baffle any attempt fully to understand them, was he able to talk about“Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself”, that is, about the world in which he lived and the literature which he created.

[7] To tell you the truth, rather than with Kawabata my compatriot who stood here twenty-six years ago, I feel more spiritual affinity with the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in literature seventy one years ago when he was at about the same age as me.Of course I would not presume to rank myself with the poetic genius Yeats.I am merely a humble follower living in a country far removed from his.As William Blake, whose work Yeats revalued and restored to the high place it holds in this century, once wrote: “Across Europe and Asia to China and Japan like lightning’s.”

[8] Yeats is the writer in whose wake I would like to follow.I would like to do so for the sake of another nation that has now been “accepted into the comity of nations” but rather on account of the technology in electrical engineering and its manufacture of automobiles.Also I would like to do so as a citizen of such a nation which was stamped into “insanity in enthusiasm of destruction” both on its own soil and on that of the neighboring nations.

[9] As someone living in the present would such as this one and sharing bitter memories of the past imprinted on my mind, I cannot utter in unison with Kawabata the phrase “Japan, the Beautiful and Myself”.A moment ago I touched upon the “vagueness”of the title and content of Kawabata’s lecture.I would like to use the word “ambiguous” in accordance with the distinction made by the eminent British poet Kathleen Raine; she once said of William Blake that he was not so much vague as ambiguous.I cannot talk about myself otherwise than by saying “Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself ”.

[10] My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernization since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity.I too am living as a writer with this polarization imprinted on me like a deep scar.

[11] This ambiguity which is so powerful and penetrating that it splits both the state and its people in various ways.The modernization of Japan has been orientated toward learning from and imitating the West.Yet Japan is situated in Asia and has firmly maintained its traditional culture.The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia.On the other hand, the culture of modern Japan, which implied being thoroughly open to the West or at least that impeded understanding by the West.What was more, Japan was driven into isolation from other Asian countries, not only politically but also socially and culturally.

[12] In the history of modern Japan literature the writers most sincere and aware of their mission were those “post-war writers” who came onto the literary scene immediately after the last War, deeply wounded by the catastrophe yet full of hope for a rebirth.They tried with great pains to make up for the inhuman atrocities committed by Japanese military forces in Asian countries, as well as to bridge the profound gaps that existed not only between the developed countries of the West and Japan but also between African and Latin American countries and Japan.Only by doing so did they think that they could seek with some humility reconciliation with the rest of the world.It has always been my aspiration to cling to the very end of the line of that literary tradition inherited from those writers.

[13] What I call Japan’s “ambiguity” in my lecture is a kind of chronic disease that has been prevalent throughout the modern age.Japan’s economic prosperity is not free from it either, accompanied as it is by all kinds of potential dangers in the light of the structure of world economy and environmental conservation.The “ambiguity” in this respect seems to be accelerating.It may be more obvious to the critical eyes of the world at large than to us within the country.At the nadir of the post-war economic poverty we found a resilience to endure it, never losing our hope for recovery.It may sound curious to say so, but we seem to have no less resilience to endure our anxiety about the ominous consequence emerging out of the present prosperity.From another point of view, a new situation now seems to be arising in which Japan’s prosperity is going to be incorporated into the expanding potential power of both production and consumption in Asia at large.

[14] To define a desirable Japanese identity I would like to pick out the word “decent”which is among the adjectives that George Orwell often used, along with words like“humane”, “sane” and “comely”, for the character types that he favored.This deceptively simple epithet may starkly set off and contrast with the word “ambiguous” used for my identification in “Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself”.There is a wide and ironical discrepancy between what the Japanese seem like when viewed from outside and what they wish to look like.

[15] If you will allow me to mention him again, my mentally handicapped son Hikari was awakened by the voices of birds to the music of Bach and Mozart, eventually composing his own works.The little pieces that he first composed were full of fresh splendor and delight.They seemed like dew glittering on grass leaves.The word innocence is composed of in — “not” and nocere — “hurt”, that is, “not to hurt”.Hikari’s music was in this sense a natural effusion of the composer’s own innocence.

[16] As Hikari went on to compose more works, I could not but hear in his music also “the voice of a crying and dark soul”.Mentally handicapped as he was, his strenuous effort furnished his act of composing or his “habit of life” with the growth of compositional techniques and a deepening of his conception.That in turn enabled him to discover in the depth of his heart a mass of dark sorrow which he had hitherto been unable to identify with words.

[17] The voice of a crying and dark soul is beautiful, and his act of expressing it in music cures him of his dark sorrow in an act of recovery.Furthermore, his music has been accepted as one that cures and restores his contemporary listeners as well.Herein I find the grounds for believing in the exquisite healing power of art.

[18] This belief of mine has not been fully proved.“Weak person” though I am, with the aid of this unverifiable belief, I would like to “suffer dully all the wrongs” accumulated throughout the twentieth century as a result of the monstrous development of technology and transport.As one with a peripheral, marginal and off-centre existence in the world I would like to seek how — with what I hope is a modest decent and humanist contribution — I can be of some use in a cure and reconciliation of mankind.

[1994]

Notes

1.Text C is the body part of the lecture given by the author when he received Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994.

2.Kenzaburo Oe (大江健三郎): He is a Japanese author and a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature.His works, strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory, deal with political, social and philosophical issues including nuclear weapons, nuclear power, social nonconformism and existentialism.Oe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 for creating “an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today”.

3.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: It is a novel by Mark Twain, first published in England in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885.Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written in the vernacular, characterized by local color regionalism.The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River.Satirizing a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist about twenty years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism.

4.The Wonderful Adventures of Nils: It is a work of fiction by the Swedish author Selma Lagerl?f.It was published in two books, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils in 1906 and Further Adventures of Nils in 1907.Selma Lagerl?f, like many leading Swedish intellectuals of her time, was an advocate of Swedish spelling reform.When published in 1906, this book was one of the first to adopt the new spelling mandated by a government resolution on April 7, 1906.

For Fun

Works to Read

1.The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 《奇鳥行狀錄》by Murakami

It is a novel by Haruki Murakami.The first published translation was by Alfred Birnbaum.The American translation and its British adaptation, dubbed the “only official translations” (English) are by Jay Rubin and were first published in 1997.For this novel, Murakami received the Yomiuri Literary Award, which was awarded to him by one of his harshest former critics, Kenzaburo Oe.

2.Aghwee The Sky Monster by Kenzaburo Oe

It is a 1964 short story/novel.It has been translated into English by John Nathan and published in the volume Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, along with the title story, Prize Stock and The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away.Aghwee was one of the first in Oe’s series of stories inspired by the birth of his autistic son Hikari.

3.The Dancing Girl of Izu《伊豆的舞女》by Kawabata

It tells of the story between a young student who is touring the Izu Peninsula and a family of traveling dancers he meets there, including their youngest girl on the onset of puberty.The student finds the na?ve girl attractive even though he eventually has to part with the family after spending memorable time together.

Movies to See

1. My Geisha (1962)

It is an American comedy film directed by Jack Cardiff, starring Yves Montand, Shirley MacLaine, and Edward G.Robinson, and released by Paramount Pictures.The film was produced by MacLaine’s then-husband Steve Parker, and written by Norman Krasna, based on Krasna’s story of the same name.

2. Lost in Translation (2003)

It is an American film written and directed by Sofia Coppola.It stars Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson.The film revolves around an aging actor named Bob Harris (Murray) and a recent college graduate named Charlotte (Johansson) who developed a rapport after a chance meeting in a Tokyo hotel.The movie explores themes of loneliness, alienation, insomnia, existential ennui and culture shock against the backdrop of a modern Japanese city.