Recently in Japan a novel of ‘infidelity’ has been read so widely as to become a social phenomenon. Here, however, the theme of double suicide as the ultimate consequence of a love affair has tended to be contained in narratives of extremely narrow scope with no bearing on social situations. Very different from them is your novel which also deals with the theme of infidelity. In your My Son’s Story the daughter is upset when she comes to know about her father’s secret. She attempts to commit suicide. She gets over her predicament, however, and transforms herself by taking part in the liberation movement with her comrades. Her mother, too, through collaborating with her, comes to lead an entirely new life. She never flinches in the face of oppression. Further this brings about her father’s regeneration as a leader. And the son comes to write a novel about the entire history of the whole family.
I sincerely hope that My Son’s Story will be read by a larger audience in Japan. I wish that The House Gun also would be translated into Japanese as soon as possible. You deal with the theme of the new role of family and that of violence. These themes are most relevant to the Japanese consciousness of our era. You have been ‘selected’ by these themes and you tackle them with utmost sincerity.
One of the central social problems of present-day Japan is juvenile delinquency resorting to violence. A boy killed another boy, who was inferior physically as well as intellectually, and hung up the victim’s head in public. On another occasion a middle-school boy stabbed his woman teacher to death with a knife. There have been a number of suicide cases as a result of the bullying of weaklings. An old man was beaten to death by two girls; a father killed by his son and his son’s friend.
The mass media in Japan is busy dealing with these social phenomena in wide-ranging terms such as the personality of the juvenile delinquent, the state of local communities, the Juvenile Law, the national education system, etc.
More relevant to me as a writer is to deal with the problem as that of the inner psyche of these juvenile delinquents. It is characteristic of our age that when a symbolic or typical incident brings a cluster of problems to the surface, then, as if given stimulus to turn into an avalanche, similar kinds of incidents follow in its wake. I have once written to express my wish for the children to be restored to their normal selves with the power of self-respect inherent in them originally.
My remarks evoked the criticisms against me from a sometime school-teacher and writer of children’s literature, and a woman actively engaged in running a circle of children and their mothers. They said: attention must be drawn not to the power inherent in children but to the external pressures that are driving them into difficulties; one must try to listen to their muted cries for help. I had to admit that they were right. Even so, I still hold that education, whether public or private, should be based on trusting the power of recovery inherent in children themselves.
We must be wary of the view gaining more ground and spreading widely: that responsible for children’s bent towards violence are the Juvenile Law and the education system, which were both moulded under the democratic constitution after the end of World War II. According to this view even the democratic idea of the family is criticised. Such views are nothing but an unmistakable variation of the blatant neo-nationalism that has been aggrandising itself during the recent years in Japan.
I fear that such views will give rise to another avalanche in the mass media in Japan: tolerant laws that should protect juvenile ‘rights’ (even this word in Japanese is now used in a pejorative sense) will be turned into the ones that would bind them; schools would be furnished with equipment for containing violence; and the family would become a repressive institution. Children as a whole would then find themselves cornered even further.
Under such circumstances the family relationship in particular would see a grotesque re-emergence of undemocratic environment that I experienced as a child during World War II. You would come to consider, again, Japan and the Japanese ‘different’ or deviated from the norm. All this would no doubt disturb you in the Western world.
What then could specifically be done with the deplorable state of violence occurring frequently in which some children prey upon other children or are preyed upon by them? As a writer (for the writer in many respects stands on the same side with children) I think as follows: now the whole world is covered with massive violence; children’s bent towards violence in Japan is not a phenomenon unique to Japan; all the children of the world, in their perception and consciousness of their era, are the mirrors upon which that massive universal violence is reflected or are its miniature models. We grown-ups cannot segregate children and put them aside. We cannot but stand all on the same side, listen to all their cries for help, whether muted or amplified, and confront face to face the roots of violence. Only with such an essential shift of attitude on our part would the family, as a flexible instrument for children and grown-ups alike, be able to restore our true selves with the power inherent in us.
My reading of your novels has shaped these thoughts of mine. I am thus writing this letter in the hope that your answer will serve as the best possible encouragement for Japanese children and their parents.
Yours sincerely,
Kenzaburo Oe
Johannesburg, 18th April 1998
Dear Kenzaburo, (may we use our given names?)
Your letter brings the pleasure of realization that we are simply taking up from where we were interrupted by the end of our encounter in the Tokyo hotel six years ago. There was so much to exchange; it has existed, in the parentheses of our separate lives, ready to continue any time. The ambiguity, the connections that criss-cross against chronology between that short meeting and what was going to happen — an invisible prescience which would influence our individual thinking and writing—that turns out to have presaged the links of our then and now. You came to our meeting unknowingly in the foreshadow of the terrible earthquake that was to devastate a Japanese city later that year, and that I was to use, in a novel as yet not conceived, as a metaphor for apocalyptic catastrophe wreaked by nature, alongside that of contemporary devastation by humans upon themselves in Eastern Europe and Africa.
And so now I should not have been surprised that you, writing to me, are preoccupied by the question of violence entering deeply into your awareness, just as it has made its way into mine. This is a ‘recognition’ between two writers; but it goes further. It is the recognition of writers’ inescapable need to read the signs society gives out cryptically and to try to make sense of what these really mean.
I must tell you that when I began to write The House Gun it came to me as the personal tragedy of a mother and father whose son, in a crime of passion, murders their human values along with the man he kills. The parallel theme, placing their lives in the context of their country, the new South Africa, was that they — white people who in the past regime of racial discrimination had always had black people dependent upon them—would find themselves dependent upon a distinguished black lawyer to defend their son. That was going to be the double thesis of my novel. But as I wrote (and isn’t it always the way with us, our exploration of our story lures us further and further into the complexity of specific human existences?), I found that the context of mother, father, and son was not existentially determined only geographically and politically; there was the question of the very air they breathed. Violence in the air; didn’t the private act of crime passionel take place within unconscious sinister sanction: the public, social banalisation of violence?