The legacy of Oe Kenzaburo, novelist, Nobelist, pacifist

THE SECOND WORLD WAR, which ended when Oe Kenzaburo was ten, coloured his life’s work. When he was a schoolboy his teacher used to ask: “What would you do if the emperor asked you to die?” Each pupil in his class had to answer in turn: “I would cut open my belly and die, sir!”

Mr Oe, who died on March 13th, joined the chorus. But he sensed that something was rotten about it. His grandmother used to tell him subversively humorous anti-nationalist stories. In time, he grew to loathe the emperor-worshipping militarism that led Japan to inflict such horrors on its neighbours and, ultimately, call down such horrors upon itself.

In this, he stood in contrast to Mishima Yukio, a Japanese writer a decade his senior, against whom for a while he competed for literary laurels. The two great novelists could hardly have been more different. Mishima basked in his celebrity, earning vast sums for writing film scripts and sometimes starring as a tough guy—a samurai or a gangster—in his own movies. He adored the swagger of military uniforms and had an erotic fixation with his own violent death. He led a small private army, staged a pantomime coup attempt in 1970, ostensibly to restore the emperor to power, but perhaps to give himself a reason to commit seppuku (ritual self-disembowelment), which he did when his coup failed.

Mr Oe was quiet, bookish and more pacifist than the pacifist governments that have ruled Japan since the American occupation ended in 1952. He abhorred the war, urged closer ties between Japan and the neighbours it once invaded and refused Japan’s “order of culture” because he would have had to receive it in person from the emperor (the son of the one in whose name he was once expected to be ready to disembowel himself).

“Mishima considered [the emperor system] the font of Japanese culture,” wrote Susan Napier, a scholar of Japanese literature; “Oe believes [it] to be one of the most pernicious threats to a truly democratic modern Japan. Both writers deal widely, even perhaps obsessively, with these issues in their [work].”

Mr Oe’s first novella, “The Catch”, was published when he was only 22. It tells of the strange relationship between two young boys and a captured American airman on the island of Shikoku, where Mr Oe grew up. It won Japan’s most prestigious award for an up-and-coming novelist and launched his career.

He wrote movingly about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the flash of which was visible from his childhood home. His mother, who was out in the garden, saw it light up the sky over the Seto Inland Sea. Mr Oe interviewed several of the survivors in 1963 for “Hiroshima Notes”, a searing book of essays that began his lifelong campaign against nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

That year also gave him another tragic inspiration that suffuses much of his work. In 1963 his wife gave birth to a son with a cerebral hernia: brain tissue poking out of his skull. Mr Oe was so distraught that he ran away to attend a conference in Hiroshima on nuclear disarmament. In “A Personal Matter”, a semi-autobiographical novel, a young teacher with a similarly afflicted baby dreams of running away to Africa and guiltily hopes the child will die. (The novel was translated into English by Mishima’s translator, John Nathan; Mishima was so upset at what he saw as a betrayal that he broke off contact with Mr Nathan.) Mr Oe returned to the topic in what is perhaps his finest work, “The Silent Cry”, the story of a marriage made wretched by a sick child.

Japanese ultra-nationalists, who even after the formal end of the emperor cult continue to make criticism of the imperial family hazardous, detested Mr Oe. Some of his metaphors repelled them; for example when he used sexual imagery to explore Japan’s relationship with the United States. He received death threats.

In 2005 he was sued for defamation for what he wrote about the battle of Okinawa. This was a horrific clash near the end of the war, nicknamed the “typhoon of steel”. Japanese soldiers and civilians with sharpened sticks defended Japan’s fifth-largest island against American forces. Perhaps half of the 300,000 islanders died. Mr Oe lambasted Japanese troops for having pressed civilians into committing mass suicide, by falsely telling them that if captured by the Americans they would be raped, tortured or worse. An ageing veteran of the battle sued him, loudly supported by ultra-nationalists. But Mr Oe won because he was telling the truth: many civilian survivors have confirmed his account.

“In Oe’s work…challenges from the past again and again evoke new answers,” noted the Swedish academy when awarding him the Nobel prize for literature in 1994. In the end, Mr Oe’s answers have aged better than Mishima’s. Japan is at peace, and drawing closer to former victims such as South Korea. Children with awful medical problems are, by and large, treated with compassion. And the ultra-nationalists who drive around Tokyo bellowing martial slogans are considered faintly ridiculous. ■