On the occasion of the death of the Japanese Nobel Prize winner for literature Kenzaburo Oé, La Vanguardia recovers this interview, published at the end of 2005.
When his disabled son was born in 1963, Kenzaburo Oé went to Hiroshima to soak himself in human pain. Even today, his eyes look far away when he thinks about it. “Hikari underwent a life-or-death operation,” he tells us, over a cup of steaming tea, on the sofa in his Tokyo home, “because a bright red lump had to be removed, as big as a second head, attached to the back of his skull.” The result of the intervention was an irreversible mental disability. Oé’s reaction was then to travel to Hiroshima to explore suffering. An irrepressible internal impulse pushed him to learn about the effects of the atomic bomb of 1945, and to interview the survivors of hell. From there arose his ‘Notes on Hiroshima’. “It was the most exhausting and depressing trip of my life. But, after a week of being there, I found the key to get out of the deep neurotic and decadent pit into which I had fallen: the deep humanity of its people. I was impressed by his courage, his way of living and thinking. Although it seems strange, it was I who left there encouraged by them, and not the other way around. I linked my personal pain to that of those men and women, I decided to resist and fight like them. I felt impelled to examine my entire human condition, I reexamined my ideas and assumed a moral sense of existence. Since that day, I have looked at the world through the eyes of the people of Hiroshima. After that initial visit, I have returned on multiple occasions. I have often been struck by the news that one of my new friends had died in the aftermath of the explosion. Many of them did not want publicity, nor to be constantly reminded of their condition as victims, they needed to be able to build a new life without the constant presence of that horror. I have attended many funerals, including that of the widow of the poet Sankichi Toge, who wrote excellent verses about the misery of the atomic bomb and about the dignity of people who decided to resist misfortunes. Her widow committed suicide after the shock caused by the acts of vandalism against a monument with the inscription of a poem by her husband. Toge wrote:
‘Give me back my father, give me back my mother /
Give me back my grandfather and my grandmother; /
Give me back my sons and daughters. /
Give me back to myself. /
Give me back to the human race. /
As long as this life lasts, this life,
give me back my peace
May it never end’”.
We are sitting in the dining room of the house of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature, Kenzaburo Oé. Tokyo megalopolis, residential neighborhood of Setagaya. The zen tranquility of this room has little to do with what we saw through the window of the taxi that brought us here: huge gray skyscrapers very close to fast three- and four-story highways. Men in suits and ties – all in the same suit – walking very quickly to work. Lights of small shops open 24 hours that sell meat, MP3 players and underwear at the same time. The taxi driver got mixed up with Oé’s address, because in Tokyo the streets don’t have numbers. To orient themselves, people are guided by the drawings of the plans that appear on the business cards, which indicate the establishments next to the house they are looking for (‘florist’, ‘hotel’…). But in Setagaya there are only small houses, and the map did not help much. In the end, the driver left us at a corner: “It must be around here”, and disappeared with a smile. We wandered for a while through nameless streets and gardens with well-pruned trees, but shadowed by a dense and chaotic network of power lines that makes the whole area ugly. And as we rounded a corner, we caught sight of a man in the background waving his arms like sails. “Here here!”. It was Kenzaburo Oé.
After leaving our shoes at the entrance to his house, we entered the dining room door, and someone yelled at us, in Spanish: “How are you, friends?!” It was Hikari, the son of Kenzaburo Oé, that character named Eeyore in his father’s novels. “He has learned a few phrases on a late-night language program on Japanese television,” revealed Oé, who now, while his wife serves us coffee, sandwiches, and cheesecake, remembers that, that year in 1963, when he returned from Hiroshima, “I realized that I could never write again without referring to my son, and I made him the center of my work.”
Oé answers us while Hikari, at the next table, listens to music. Our presence is an interruption of his highly regulated daily life: “I get up at seven in the morning, I never have breakfast. For four or five hours I work. Then after I eat, I go back to work from one to five. And then I go to the pool to swim. When I come back, I have dinner with my wife and son and go to bed. I always write here, in the dining room, while Hikari watches TV or listens to records.
The garden is full of bird feeders and houses, which come every day to satisfy their appetite. The Nobel laureate stares at one with black and white plumage: “It’s a shiju-kara… We feel a lot of affection for the birds, we take care of them as if they were family, because it was thanks to them that my son spoke. We thought that perhaps he would never speak, but I played him records with the songs of the different species of birds and a human voice that named them, so that he would learn to identify them… and finally, one day, when he heard the chirping of one in the garden, called it by name. For a while, he only responded to birds, not people.”
Sitting on the sofa in the dining room that we have seen described so many times in his work, we have the feeling of having entered one of his books and interviewing the characters. On the mini system, a melody composed by Hikari plays, who, although he acts like a child most of the time, expresses himself deeply through music. So much so that he has become a successful composer. “Some of his records have sold more than certain of my books,” says the writer, pleased. This is a piece that he composed for me on my 70th birthday, in January 2005. It is a song to encourage his father, so that he continues writing and is happy despite his 70 years. The two of us have always been encouraging each other, one with music, the other with writing. In fact, I know his inner depth thanks to his music.”
Oé takes a book from his library and recites to us, in English, a part of Blake’s poem “Milton”: “‘Awake, oh young people of the new age! Oppose your fronts to the ignorant mercenaries! For we have mercenaries in the camp, in the court, and in the university: who, if they could, would lower the mental forever, and prolong the corporeal war. That is the message I would like to convey to the youth. I am against the concept of an army, a group of people who do not move according to their conscience but following other people’s orders. Unfortunately, in today’s Japanese society, not only in the army, but also at work, there are very few who are self-aware, who are mentally independent. I defend the existence of the individual as an autonomous thinking entity. This appears in Blake’s poem, and it works for the young people of Spain and also for the young Americans who join the army without thinking.
A setback interrupts our conversation. Oé receives a call informing him that his conference the next day in defense of the pacifist values ??of the Japanese Constitution will not be able to be held at the scheduled hotel. “They will have to accompany me… Upon learning of the content of my talk, the hotel management has refused to accept us. But the manager summons me to a meeting to help me urgently find another location”. So we have to go there and, to graphically take advantage of the displacement, we asked Oé to do it by metro.
-By subway? It’s something exceptional, I haven’t used it for ten years, but if that’s your wish…
As Oé gazes curiously at a woman whose kimono sweeps the platform, he explains that his fellow citizens are “worried about an imminent big earthquake that looks like it’s going to hit Tokyo. Experts estimate there’s a 70% chance that, in the next thirty years, that catastrophe would come, which would cause some 13,000 deaths”.
The train arrives, one of whose carriages, pink in color, is “only for women”, since, in the rush hour crowds, the groping that some suffered had become a problem. The curious solution was to create an exclusive space for them. We sit, then, in a “masculine” car, with dozens of men dressed again in the same dark suit. Some drink vitamin complexes and many others sleep. Japanese workers only have one week of vacation a year, and their working hours are very long. All this, without counting that the trips to the workplace range from one to three hours.
“A terrorist attack that I remember very much – continues Oé – is 11-M in Madrid because, very few days later, I landed in Spain to present a book. I had an image of the Spanish as very happy people, party-goers, with a passionate heart, lots of laughter… In short, a country full of sun, light and bustle. And, suddenly, I found myself with a large concentration of people who filed past in silence, sad, with dark expressions that reminded me of the Quixote of the last chapters, where he is already down and disenchanted. I also saw the power of the people to run a country democratically and vote for a left-wing alternative (Zapatero). That is enviable, because in Japan the leftist parties are very weak, they have very few seats…”
Terrorism, war, destructive personal relationships… Violence is always present in Oé’s novels. “I hope it’s not possible to misinterpret that,” he replies. I do not sing of violence, I reflect it with my writer’s tricks in the most realistic, graphic and visual way, in an objective way, as if it were a documentary, so that later the reader wonders what that can lead us to”. And sexuality? “In my country, it is very repressed, it does not express itself freely, there is great modesty. I speak of a happy sexuality, where the young person is free to express himself one hundred percent through it. That theme is more present in my first books, because now, when I’m older, sex is not what makes me lose sleep, right?
Finally, we arrive at the hotel that has banned the Nobel Prize. It is, curiously, the Century Hyatt, the luxurious establishment where ‘Lost in translation’, the famous film by Sofia Coppola, was filmed. In the negotiation with the hotel management -which we cannot attend-, it makes excuses. As Oé later tells us, “they felt guilty. It is inconceivable that conditions would change with such short notice. Places like that, conservative, even in a big city like Tokyo, reject me. The reason they gave me is that political rallies are not allowed in this hotel. But I am happy because they have worked hard to find me an alternative place, which, in fact, is even better… and ten times less expensive”.
In front of the enormous government building, near the hotel, Oé once again tells us about his relationship with pain. “Since I was a child I have been interested in how our limited body handles suffering. As a child, I used to go fishing. And I looked at the fish with the hook attached, which moved a lot. He suffers horrors, but in silence: he does not scream. The child that I was thought: how much unexpressed pain! That was the first stimulus that led me to be a writer, because I thought that we children couldn’t make ourselves understood well either. I became a writer to reflect the pain of a fish. And today I feel, above all, a professional in the expression of human pain, which I seek to show as precisely as possible”.
As we make our way to the busy Asakusa Buddhist temple, the writer realizes that today is Culture Day, when the emperor awards an award for an exemplary cultural achievement. “It is a highly coveted award, because it entitles you to a pension. I rejected it. When he was little, I lived how the emperor was considered a deity, within the framework of a very strong nationalism. And that scares me, it’s the opposite of democracy. For me, refusing that award was refusing the power of the emperor to recognize my work and give me an award. Who is he to say that I am a good writer? Despite the fact that I gave up my pay, far-right and right-wing groups demonstrated in front of my house: ‘You’re not Japanese!’ They shouted, ‘Why do you have such big ears if you can’t listen!’… He came out my wife outraged and, with a voice louder than the megaphones, yelled at them: ‘Pichashortas!’. My son was so struck by that expression that he memorized it and for some time was repeating it, even in the most inopportune situations.
Bustling with tourists and worshippers, Asakusa is “a very important place for faith. I am not a religious person, not even a believer. But, as a child, I listened to the animistic stories of my mother and my grandfather, who prayed to the forces of nature. I have also read the Koran, the Bible, the ‘Divine Comedy’, Blake…”. Oé is committed to the private religiosity that this place symbolizes, as opposed to the ultranationalism of the Yasukuni Shinto temple, “where several war criminals are buried.”
-Some of your books fit in your pocket, but for ‘Somersault’ you need a backpack.
It’s funny that you say that. Do you know how my mother raised me?
–No.
Oh, you did very well. “Kenzaburo wears very strange clothes,” people said. And it is that my mother always sewed me a very big pocket so that I could carry a book there to read and, on the other side, she sewed me another even bigger pocket for the dictionary. So she could always look up all the words she didn’t understand. Someday I will write something about it.
What books did your mother put in your pocket?
–I don’t know how he did it, but he got foreign novels in the middle of the war: ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and many others. She was a tender woman who, as she got older, became very tough and demanding. When they gave me the Nobel, the journalists went to visit her in her village, and she told them: “In Asia there have been two very good writers, and only one of them, Tagore, got the Nobel. Compared to him, my son is rubbish.”
Oé takes us to a traditional tavern “to drink a little”. Although the neighboring tables stare at us, he avoids them by sitting with his back to them, at a table in the corner. “I like warm beer -he smiles-, combined with shots, I put a shot in the beer and drink it. Before, I used to go to bars a lot, with people from publishing houses, but I always ended up fighting because they told me that my way of writing was not good, and I would get angry. The older writers prodded me with that…”.
The bottle of sake runs out as daylight leaves the streets of Tokyo. Leaving the tavern, Oé decides, unusually, to return to her house by subway. But she didn’t tell us that she never takes it? “When he was young and used public transport, he took advantage of the journey to write a diary. Today I want to remember those days. I will take the subway and write everything that has happened to me during the day with you”. As the escalator makes him disappear underground, he waves his right arm and yells at us: “Bye, friends!”
