You know — more telling, even, than any statement in your letter — years ago you made a remarkable implicit claim for the ability of children to restore the power of self-respect inherent in them. The children in your early story (in English translation entitled ‘Prize Stock’) are the ones in a remote Japanese village who, by their actions and attitudes, teach the adults that the black American airman who has fallen into their hands during the war is a human being, capable of emotional response and suffering. Taking your premise that the power of self-respect is inherent in children, this means that it also must still exist, dormant, in the substance of adult men and women. How shall we release this power of restoration in our present era and circumstances?
Kenzaburo, you did not know how much you were speaking for the end of our millennium when you once used these words: Teach us to outgrow our madness.
Sincerely,
Nadine
10 May 1998
Dear Nadine (please allow me to reciprocate using each other’s given names)
Thank you very much indeed for your welcome reply. It has served to rescue me from the sense of helpless isolation from the whole world as well as from the Japanese society, to which I have recently been susceptible. Your letter reminds me of the same kind of encouragement that I experienced in watching on television the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics held in Nagano, Japan, last February. The keynote of the ceremony was basically one of age-old nationalism. The ceremony reached its climax, however, when my friend Seiji Ozawa conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the provincial town of Nagano with its orchestra while simultaneously the singers sang in unison at a number of places — in Africa, China, etc., with the Song of Joy resounding all over the world.
Seiji did his best to conduct whole mankind on this planet to unity by overcoming the time-lag that would normally be unavoidable in satellite transmission. I was deeply struck by the determined conviction which I detected in his face. By determined conviction I mean his act of praying — he once told me that while engaged in the performance of music he would attain the feeling that he was praying.
Dear Nadine it was thoughtful of you to remind yourself of my O Teach us to Outgrow our Madness. I am grateful to you and alive to the poignancy attached to the phrase. For the title of my work I borrowed the phrase from W. H. Auden’s poem. It constitutes a part of the ‘voice of Man’ uttered in the middle of the battle between the Japanese army and the Chinese guerrillas. This universal voice concludes as follows: ‘Till, as the contribution of our star, we follow/The clear instructions of that justice, in the shadow/Of whose uplifting, loving and constraining power/All human reasons do rejoice and operate.’
Along with this prayer, which has not been fulfilled, I cannot but think of the sufferings that Seiji Ozawa himself experienced during the post-war period. A contemporary of mine, Seiji as a boy was brought up on the Chinese mainland.
As for the background of urban violence in the newly-born South Africa, you have traced it in the whole modern history that began with apartheid. Dear Nadine, I admire your insight and courage, in contrast to the inadequacy of the Japanese media searching ineffectively for the origin of juvenile violence in this country.
Many people here say that the present juvenile violence is the product of the post-war democracy, the family system based on it, and the educational system as an extension of these. Notably enough, nobody speaks of the historical process by which, from the beginning of modernisation, Japan perpetrated violence to the utmost in other parts of Asia for the sake of self-aggrandisement until the end of World War II, when the massive violence of nuclear weapons burnt down the two Japanese cities. It seems that people have failed to reflect upon how ‘the violence in the air’, in your words, has been engendered. People are failing to do what we soon did after the end of the War.
An objection will be readily raised that there is little bearing of the Nanking incident on the Japanese children of today. This is the situation which I find myself in. I, for one, assert that it would be an effective way of anti-violence education to think, together with children, how Japanese citizens as a whole could make up for the irredeemable violence committed by the state in the past. Adults will have to change before children; adults thereby will restore confidence that they can change — these could be the concrete plans to be put into practice both at home and at school.
When I, an undergraduate student of foreign literature, started my career as a writer, I embraced the following two fundamental principles. One was to recapture afresh what custom had bedimmed: all the lustre of either consciousness or sensibility. On looking back I realize that this was nothing but ‘defamiliarisation’ as defined by the Russian formalists. Not only the novelists but also the media have the obligation to show to adults as well as to children the heavy and weary weight of death, violence and pain that comes home to human existence.
Another of my principles was to attach primary importance to imagination. In those days my contention was that there was in ordinary Japanese no equivalent to ‘imagination’ either in English or French. It is urgently needed to investigate whether serious literature and writings in the mass media give expression adequate enough to evoke imagination about death, violence and pain.
You are particularly concerned about the colossal mass media targeting children as their audience and instead of making them feel the images of death and violence as reality, represent these images as something with which they could not be directly involved. As a result death, violence and pain become something commonplace in the consciousness and sensibility of children. Their imagination has been numbed.
Such a trend is explicitly evident in the representation of chaotic future society by means of the visual media and cartoons (accompanied by words) produced under its influence. However, the masterpieces in Utopian literature, from Thomas Moore through Zamiatin to George Orwell, were invariably concerned with the present in which they lived, suffered and entertained their hopes. In the images of a violent future world prevalent in the visual media are reflected the men and society common to the present world, as you have agreed with me, ‘overshadowed by massive violence’.
In my first letter I also wrote that ‘all the children of the world, in their perception and consciousness of their era, are mirrors upon which the massive universal violence is reflected or are its miniature models.’ Children perceive ‘the violence in the air’ overshadowing the present age and are familiarised to representations of violence by the visual and various other media. Under the circumstances, how vulnerable they are! As regards their vulnerability I may put it another way by saying that they can easily be victimised and incite those who are willing to victimise them. They can at once be weaklings who are victims of violence and bullies who exert violence — against other children, against their family members, or even against themselves by means of suicide, as Dante depicts in Canto XIII of Inferno.
What then should we do? I know from experience, painstaking though it may be, that I could not avoid thinking of what I should do as a novelist. As I am sure that you will never misunderstand me, I do not in the least regard the writing profession as something of a privilege. I simply wish to restore confidence that, in this age of the endless expansion of the visual media, television, computer games, etc., the novel’s apparently old-fashioned methods of representations have the power of ‘defamiliarising’ death, violence and pain and could play the role of revitalizing and developing imagination for that purpose.