Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself: The Nobel Prize Speech and Other Lectures

The text of Kenzaburo Ōe's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize from 1994, as well as two lectures given at US universities in 1986 and 1990, and a short series of lectures on Japanese literature "before a Scandinavian audience" (whatever that means) from 1992.

The themes all overlap somewhat: Ōe talks about the romantic affection for Scandinavia he got from reading The marvellous adventures of Nils as a child, and about what he sees as the important moral thread in Japanese literature, from Murasaki Shikibu through Soseki Natsume to himself and the other socially-critical writers who came to prominence in the post-war years.

Ōe talks about the themes that have particularly concerned him: the memory of Japan's aggression in the war show more and the need for reconciliation and demilitarisation, the need to recognise the importance of peripheral cultures in Japan, especially that of Okinawa, and his own experience as the father of a mentally-handicapped child.

He identifies a similar moral imperative (but coupled with deeply-flawed politics) in Mishima, but he obviously doesn't have much time for the more aesthetic, mystical approach of Tanizaki and Kawabata, who hardly get a mention apart from an acknowledgment of the latter in the Nobel speech — whose title is a play on Kawabata's speech "Japan, the beautiful and myself". (He's also rather dismissive of the "consumer-culture literature" of manga, Banana Yoshimoto and Haruki Murakami — I wonder what he thinks about the way Murakami is regularly mentioned now as a Nobel candidate?)

It's notable that in Stockholm he draws his cultural references from Yeats, Auden, Orwell and his own teacher, Kazuo Watanabe, rather than from great Japanese writers. An interesting little collection, and it makes Ōe come across as a very sympathetic sort of character. show less

Pretty interesting set of speeches about the nature of post-war Japanese literature from Oe.