Volume 11, Number 6 · October 10, 1968
Days of Marvelous Lays
By D.J. Enright
A Personal Matter
by Oë, Kenzaburo, Translated from the Japanese by John Nathan
Grove, 214 pp., $5.00
The Pornographers
by Akiyuki Nozaka, Translated from the Japanese by Michael Gallagher
Knopf, 305 pp., $5.95
The blurb tells us that thirty-three-year-old Kenzaburo Oë is 'the most dynamic and revolutionary writer to have emerged in Japan since the end of the War,' that he is 'without doubt the first truly modern Japanese writer,' and that 'he has wrenched Japanese literature free of its deeply rooted, inbred tradition and moved it into the mainstream of world literature.' One would deduce from these descriptions that either Oë is Supermansan or else, enfeebled by centuries of incest, Japanese literature is peculiarly backward! What the blurb doesn't tell us is that fiction was somewhat doubtfully part of the Japanese literary tradition, and that because of its low status compared with poetry and philosophical writing, it showed a distinct tendency toward the pornographic throughout the nineteenth century. Thus, at the end of the War, Japanese writers of fiction had a good start: they were already 'modern.' They were already pretty near 'the mainstream of world literature,' if this mainstream consists of the writers whom the blurb lists as Oë's 'influences and literary heroes'—Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean-Paul Sartre. To mention only some of the more respectable novelists who have been translated in English, Junichiro Tanizaki, Osamu Dazai, Shohei Ooka, and Yukio Mishima (whose Temple of the Golden Pavilion has a character who tramples on the belly of a pregnant prostitute and another who rapes a sixty-year-old widow while she is worshipping his clubfeet)—these are sufficient to indicate that where extreme situations in fiction are concerned Oë is no great pioneer. In truth he can only seem revolutionary to someone who still thinks of Japan in terms of priests chanting sutras and elegant geisha entertaining their cultured guests with readings from Lady Murasaki and Lady Shonagon.
Review, 1898 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |