Lecture 2000-10-16

Kenzaburo Oe: In Search of a Spiritual Saviour

Dr. Hisaaki Yamanouchi

Summary of the October meeting:

The joint meeting of the Asiatic Society and International House, the first such gathering since 1973, was a landmark event. Dr. Hisaaki Yamanouchi spoke on "Kenzaburo Oe; In Search of a Spiritual Saviour", and a further lustre was added to the occasion by the presence of Mr. Oe himself. We were also happy to see Dr. Carmen Blacker on her annual visit from Cambridge. Mr. Mikio Kato, Executive Director of International House, welcomed all of those present and spoke of our past history of joint activities. He then yielded the floor to Dr. Berendt, who gave an outline of the Society's activities before introducing the speaker.

On the occasion of being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, said Dr. Yamanouchi, Kenzaburo Oe announced that he would write no more novels, but instead would devote himself to philosophical exploration. Nevertheless, in 1999 he published Somersault in two thick volumes. To some extent, this is a sequel to The Flaming Green Tree, a trilogy published in 1995; in this trilogy and in Somersault Oe is concerned with the question, could there be any possibility of salvation for mankind in this age of uncertain faith and conflicting values? Oe has now been writing continuously for more than 40 years since 1957, always cultivating new ground. His early short stories were collected and published in 1958. In one, The Arrogance of the Dead, a student is working his way through college by looking after the dead bodies kept in formalin at the School of Medicine. He feels he is in no better state than the dead bodies, and the dead have the further advantage of not being subject to the miseries of this present life; paradoxically, they are more dignified than the living. In another story, The Catch, for which he won the Akutagawa prize in 1958, a black American fighter pilot has been shot down near a village (in Shikoku, where Oe comes from) and is imprisoned in a cage. He is befriended by the village boys, and the theme of the story centres on the antithesis between the inhuman attitude of the adults in the village and the human attitude of the boys. In a postscript to this collection of stories, Oe epitomizes the theme running through them as "the state of confinement" shared by all the main characters in the stories. This perhaps unconsciously reflected the confinement felt by all Japanese at the time, and felt more keenly by writers such as Oe.

In 1964 he wrote A Personal Matter, a story about the birth of a handicapped baby whose father has to come to terms with the harsh reality; it is an account in fictional form of the author's own experience. In the same year he wrote Hiroshima Notebook, a series of reports on the victims of the atom bomb, and both these books have the common themes of the survival of a life bordering on death. Oe's works have often been compared to those of Kobo Abe, which are also concerned with a state of confinement; but in contrast to the rootlessness of Abe's characters, those of Oe have their roots in the countryside.

Dr. Yamanouchi then proceeded to a synopsis of Somersault, with apologies for the fact that a summary could not do justice to the artistry of the original. The story begins with a prologue introducing an incident that took place fifteen years before the main action. A ten-year-old boy comes on to a stage carrying his model design for a future city which is to be entered for a prize. On the way it becomes entangled with a young girl dancer, and to save her from injury the boy drops his model, which shatters in pieces on the floor. One of the judges is a painter, Kizu, who will come back fifteen years later after teaching in the States, partly because of a suspected spread of cancer but also to try and find the boy who made such an impression on him with his "beautiful eyes in a dog-like face".

In the main body of the novel two major characters are introduced. They are the leader of a new religious cult and his deputy, known in the story only as "Patron" and "Guide." The office work in their headquarters is managed by "Dancer," the dancing girl in the prologue. Kizu appears at a swimming club, where he meets a young man named Ikuo, and a friendship develops between them. One day Ikuo sees in Kizu's sketch book a picture of the girl in the incident fifteen years before. He tells Kizu that he himself was the boy concerned, and Kizu arranges for him to meet Dancer. It is only made clear as the story unfolds what the nature of the religious cult is, and what is meant by "somersault". Patron, the visionary, and Guide, his interpreter, have preached an imminent Apocalypse. Part of their organization consists of a group of scientists, some of whom plan an attack on a nuclear power station to hasten the Apocalypse. At this point, Patron announces that all his preaching has been nonsense (this is the "somersault"). In so doing he loses face but prevents the subversive action of the radical scientists, who later take revenge by persecuting Guide, bringing on a stroke, and finally compassing his death. Here readers might be reminded of Aum, but Patron disavows his own doctrines, which the leader of Aum has never done. In fact, explicit distinctions are made between Patron's religion and Aum; any resemblances are at most a parody of Aum.)

In a scene where he asks Kizu to take the place of the invalided Guide, Patron expounds his doctrines, which seem to be a synthesis of many religious beliefs. We all have within us particles or waves of light given us by the One, whom we may call God. They are not our property but are entrusted to us and must finally be returned to their originator; therefore they must be kept clean and fresh. Even if we are engulfed by a sense of ecstasy during meditation, we must never lose contact with these waves of light. The central idea put forward here is of the One from whom all phenomena emanate and to whom they must eventually return. Dr. Yamanouchi opined that this doctrine seemed to be pantheistic rather than monotheistic, and closest to the theological views of Spinoza, whom Oe said he would be studying instead of writing novels after receiving the Nobel Prize.

At this point it is worth considering what kind of people are attracted to religion. The major characters in Somersault have all undergone some kind of traumatic experience. Guide is a survivor of the atom bomb in Nagasaki, which killed his mother. His father was in the army in China. When he returned he refused to take care of his son, who was brought up by an uncle. Guide first became a Roman Catholic and then a Protestant, before finally joining Patron's cult. Ikuo has a dark past, and cannot adjust to society. Dancer started as a lodger in the house of Patron and Guide, and decided to work for them as they were kind to her. Kizu may have some vague expectation that Patron's religion will cure him of cancer. Another character who plays an important role in the latter half of the novel is Morio, who is physically and mentally handicapped, but has an uncommon gift for music (like Oe's own son). Each of the characters, then, is someone out of the ordinary.

In the second volume of the novel, ten years have elapsed and Guide has died. Patron is planning to revive his cult in a disused church building in the remote countryside in Shikoku. This church is the one that was the focal point in the trilogy The Flaming Green Tree, to which Somersault is a sequel, so it is necessary to take a look at this earlier book. A family living in the heart of the countryside is collectively the incarnation of the genius loci. The grandmother, who is the chronicler of the family history, dies, and her place is taken by her grandson, Gee, who has returned after living in the outside world. He starts a "Society of the Woods"which develops into a "church". The aim of the church is to protect the environment and build a community living in harmony with nature. Its ultimate aim is the salvation of souls, not only those of the community but those of the wider world outside. Allusions are repeatedly made to W.B. Yeats' poem "Vacillation", with its flaming green tree, which Yeats combines with the myth of Cybele and Attis, and in Oe's novel there is a tree of that description on an island.

Gee's "Church of the Flaming Green Tree" was started in a marginalized area with the expectation of extending its influence to the larger world. By contrast, Patron's revival of his cult in this church represents a move from the city to the countryside. Somersault builds up carefully towards its climax. Preparations are being made simultaneously for Patron's announcement of the revival of his cult, at which he will unveil a triptych specially painted for the occasion by Kizu, and for a local festival commemorating the souls of departed folk heroes, including the previous generation of Gee's family. Gee's son, "Young Gee", a mysterious boy, will lead a band of boys who are to light the woods with lanterns. The two ceremonies will take place in full view of the island with the flaming green tree. Patron is to make his speech dressed and masked to resemble an effigy of the late Guide, and simultaneously another effigy of Guide is to be burnt on the island as part of the festival of the dead. The speech has a great impact on the audience, but after the effigy on the island is burnt it turns out to contain the body of Patron. The speaker was not Patron, but Young Gee, the embodiment of the genius loci who now takes over Patron's church, the reverse of what was thought to be happening. The revival of the original Church of the Flaming Green Tree is thus occasioned by the revival of Patron's cult and made possible by Patron's act of self-immolation. At the time of his "somersault" Patron had made a fool of himself; this time he had taken the opportunity to make amends for Guide's death and his own past actions.

There is a peaceful epilogue to the story. The revived community is run successfully by Young Gee. Kizu dies of cancer. Ikuo is now married to Dancer. While the main body of the action was set in the world of the extraordinary, the epilogue brings us back to the world of the ordinary. Here Oe is reminding us that our world is made up of two elements: the ordinary and the extraordinary. We cannot always live in the security of the ordinary; confrontation with the extraordinary brings various states of mental confusion, but in the midst of it some people attain the power of vision, as the main characters of Somersault do. In this book the author gives us hints of the search for a spiritual saviour. With the death of Patron, his old church ceases to exist but is revived as a new church. It also begins to flourish in a local community deeply rooted in nature, which at the same time is transmitting its message to the wider world outside; the marginal is seen to be exerting its positive influence on the central.

In the ensuing question time, Dr. Yamanouchi passed the baton to Mr. Oe and invited him to speak for himself. Mr. Oe began humourously by saying that he had understood almost all of the speech because he was used to Dr. Yamanouchi's English. This was because Dr. Yamanouchi had taped his acceptance speech for the Nobel ceremony, and he had listened to it over and over, even on the plane, but had failed to master Dr. Yamanouchi's Cambridge accent. On a more serious note, he mentioned the importance of the idea of "remorse" in Dr. Yamanouchi's study. On the comparison with Abe, he said that he felt that if Abe had lived one year longer, he would have won the Nobel Prize.

He said that in his book he had used three writers in particular to create a kind of "burlesque" theology: Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano for the idea of returning to the origin; Toshihiko Izutsu's writings on Islamic thought for the meaning of the oneness; and Gershom Scholem's history of Jewish mysticism, which made him aware of the close connection between the Jewish and Islamic creeds; there were thus shadows of Christianity, Islam and Judaism in the book. He had also taken ideas from Shabbetai Zvi, the 17th century self-proclaimed Messiah. He questioned the description of Spinoza's theology as pantheistic; it was monotheistic, though, being deeply Jewish, it differed from Christianity. Spinoza had been his fourth influence in shaping his "pseudo-Bible". He had left Patron's religion ambiguous.

He was now reading the collected works of Northrop Frye ("the patron saint of Yamanouchi sensei"!) especially the early works and in particular the Norton lectures. He was impressed by the "ambiguity" of the myths of different religions, and their allegorical use.

He was now working on a new novel that was a kind of personal history in which the characters are modeled on himself, his wife and son, and his brother-in-law Juzo Itami. Again, the hero commits suicide; this is Oe's attempt to come to an understanding of the motives that led to his own brother-in-law's suicide. He wanted to give the hero a precise creed; could Dr. Yamanouchi perhaps provide some suggestions?

The meeting was brought to a conclusion with a vote of thanks ably proposed by Dr. Charles De Wolf, who said he had known Dr. Yamanouchi for twenty years, and had been inspired by him to read The Flaming Green Tree in 1994, challenging though it was to the non-native reader of Japanese. He then demonstrated the thoroughness of his reading by quoting from The Flaming Green Tree a reference to International House!

Adapted from "The Asiatic Society of Japan Bulletin No. 9", November 2000, compiled by Prof. Hugh E. Wilkinson and Mrs. Doreen Simmons.