Seventeen & J: Two Novels

  SEVENTEEN & J

  Text © 1991 Kenzaburō Ōe

  Introduction © 1996 Masao Miyoshi

  This edition published in 2015 by Foxrock Books/Evergreen Review in association with OR Books. Previously published by Barney Rosset in 2002 at Foxrock Books and in 1991 at North Star Line.

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  ISBN 978-1-68219-015-9 paperback

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction BY MASAO MIYOSHI

  Seventeen

  J

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  BY MASAO MIYOSHI

  The Sixties began early in Japan. While the Japanese economy expanded by leaps and bounds after the War, much of it was thanks to U.S. cold war patronage; the strain of the contradictions between rising material ease and widening social fragmentation—economic pride and political shame—had been ever acute since Japan began to recover from a near-zero productivity at the time of its defeat in 1945. The tension nearly exploded toward the end of the 1950s.

  In early 1960, Premier Nobusuke Kishi, formerly a Class-A defendant in the Tokyo War Crime Tribunal, signed a new Mutual Security Treaty with the United States and sought its ratification in the Diet. Fierce opposition broke out from a loose coalition of unionists, Communists, students, scholars, women, and urban voters who feared the further surrender of Japan to the United States. These groups also feared the erosion of civil rights finally granted them after the brutality of World War II, itself a disaster resulting from a century of imperial militarism. Kishi resorted to parliamentary manipulations and, by physically removing the Lower House opposition members from the Diet building, rammed through the ratification in June.

  In the first half of 1960, the country rocked with protests and demonstrations that often mobilized waves of activists numbering hundreds of thousands onto the streets of Tokyo and around the Diet building in particular. In the aftermath of Kishi’s strong-armed tactics, the outraged opposition forced the cancellation of President Eisenhower’s plan to visit Japan for the celebration of the U.S.-Japan alliance, and ultimately toppled the Kishi cabinet. In the long run, the effect of the 1960 protest was perhaps minimal: Japan was securely chained to U.S. foreign policy, and the domination of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party remained unshaken for over thirty years. Nevertheless, this was the first time in Japan’s history that people seriously challenged the power and authority of the government. It was into this political turbulence that Kenzaburō Ōe, born in 1935, reached his precocious maturity as a writer.

  There was a particular circumstance that occasioned Ōe’s writing of Seventeen. After the Diet was dissolved, the chairman of the Socialist Party was stabbed to death in October 1960, while engaged in a public debate for the upcoming election. Over the summer there had been several political murder attempts (including one by an extreme right-winger on Prime Minister Kishi), and yet this assassination especially shocked the nation because the National Broadcasting Corporation captured the entire event on film. The culprit, seized on camera, was a seventeen-year-old terrorist named Otoya Yamaguchi, determined to fulfill his life’s goal by killing a “traitorous” leftist leader. The attack was made even more sensational as the youthful “patriot” hanged himself three weeks later in a juvenile penitentiary. Before his suicide Yamaguchi scribbled on a wall, “Service for my country seven lives over. Long live His Majesty the Emperor.”

  This violent history did not end there. In December of the same year, a writer named Fukazawa Shichiro wrote a bizarre dream-take about Emperor Hirohito’s family, describing their public decapitation in a revolution. Another right-wing youth—he too happened to be seventeen years old—was enraged by what in his eyes amounted to a blasphemy and found his way into the home of Shichiro’s publisher. Failing to find the publisher, he plunged a knife into his wife and killed her maid.

  Ōe published Seventeen in January 1961. The story tells of an adolescent modeled after Yamaguchi, who saves himself from self-hatred and depression by joining a right-wing gang. In its sequel, A Political Youth Dies, published the following month, Ōe represents the juvenile activist’s final deliverance through assassination and suicide. He freely mixed the known details of Yamaguchi’s life into his portrait in the two novelettes. Details are drawn with oppressive sordidness, especially in Seventeen. The right-wing reaction was instantaneous. Ōe received threatening letters from ultra-nationalistic gangsters who were infuriated by his insults to the emperor and his depiction of their young hero as a compulsive masturbator. Someone hurled rocks at his study; a dozen right-wing thugs screeched menacing threats in front of his house; and midnight phone calls never stopped. Ōe’s thoroughly frightened publisher offered apologies to his readers in the March issue of the journal, alienating Ōe this time from the readers on the left (which included a woman who swore to attack Ōe for his “cowardly acquiescence” with the compromising publisher). The history of these events is detailed in his later “fiction,” Letters to the Memorable Year (1987), where an account of his youthful self not fully comprehending his own political position rings painfully true:

  I blamed myself that I did not handle Seventeen and A Political Youth Dies with greater skill. That is, I could have written without provoking the right wing and yet making my message more forthright. I could have done this here, done that there . . . such thoughts kept recurring. My regret always ended in the shame that I had lost all prospects of book publishing in the face of rightist threats, while having to receive letters from the left wing every day that charged me with cowardice—all this because of my careless way of writing. Worse, I even felt that novel writing was itself an irremediable error of my life . . . . I gave up French studies by turning into a novelist and essayist. As a result I couldn’t even count myself among my college classmates. It was too late to start all over again as a scholar of French literature . . . .

  In the face of threats from the right and contempt from the left, Ōe was suicidally depressed between 1961 and 1963. In the highly politicized Sixties, the pressure on writers to announce their commitments and affiliations was immense, and the scrutiny and interrogations were ruthless. In 1963 he wrote Sexual Humans (Seiteki ningen) a novella with a title so in Japanese as to be nearly untranslatable, hence in this volume altered to J, the protagonist’s name. It expresses the nadir of Ōe’s anguish and depression in the Dolce Vita mood of decadence and abandon in its first half, and in the rapist sublimation through commuter-train molestation in the second part.

  Ōe had been enormously prolific. Early in 1958 he had already received the Akutagawa Prize, a prestigious award, while he was still a twenty-three-year-old undergraduate. By the time he wrote Seventeen and A Political Youth Dies in 1961 at the age of twenty-six, he had published numerous stories, novellas (e.g., Nip the Buds, and Shoot the Kids; 1958), and essays. A glamorous, brainy author, he was surrounded by an admiring circle of readers, critics, and scholars who saw in him a promise greater than any in his peers, including Yukio Mishima, who was Ōe’s senior by ten years. His model-student background was enhanced by the support given by his mentors in literature and academia, many o
f them associated with the University of Tokyo. In 1960 he married Yukari Itami, the beautiful daughter of Mansaku Itami who introduced film to Japan early in the century, and the sister of Juzo, the best-known director in Japan now, who was Ōe’s high-school friend. He was defiant in challenging literary conventions and bourgeois codes but was never reckless. He met Mao Zedong and Jean Paul Sartre in his travels abroad around this time. Too academic and too literary to be an unambiguous political activist, Ōe was always performing a “solemn tight-rope walk,” as he called it with self-irony in his first collection of essays in 1965. This “ambiguity” lasts to this day—even after he titled his Nobel acceptance speech in 1994 “Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself.”

  Seventeen is so resolute in its rejection of the right-wing extremism that it unavoidably turns into a hyperbolic caricature of a fanatic adolescent, betraying along the way signs of discomfort about sexuality that are not altogether in the author’s control. The obsession with masturbation, for example, is not easy to explain in terms of the young man’s psychology alone. At the same time, the casual remarks on the Nazi uniform and the Imperial Way Party discipline serve as a prophetic blueprint for Yukio Mishima’s last novels as well as his actual life as it draws closer to his suicide ten years later.

  A Political Youth Dies (Seiji Shonen Shisu) has never been reprinted in any language after its first appearance in the Bungakkai journal in February 1961. The tale is a sequel to Seventeen as is made clear by the subtitle, “Seventeen, Part II.” The reason Ōe gives for his reluctance to reissue it is the threat of the right wing, which is very much alive even today. His brother-in-law, the film director Juzo Itami, was nearly stabbed to death a few years ago after making a film that ridiculed the gangsters. When Ōe received the Nobel Prize and refused the Order of Culture from the emperor, the right-wing threats were revived: a truck with a loud speaker was parked in front of his house, broadcasting menacing messages once again; threats to the safety of Ōe and his family were issued; posters calling him a traitor were posted all over Tokyo. Under the circumstances, Ōe’s cautiousness must be respected and, therefore, A Political Youth Dies is not included in this volume.

  Gangsters, however, are ordinarily not well-trained as literary critics—although I should add in this case that professional critics who have read the novelette also seem misguided in reading the tale as “leftist” either in praise or complaint. A Political Youth Dies is not anti-rightist propaganda. It may have started out as an attack on Yamaguchi and his colleagues in right-wing terrorism; after all, it was meant to be the continuation of Seventeen. And yet even a casual reading would reveal a fundamental difference between Seventeen and this work.

  True, the narrator is the same seventeen-year-old emperorist. He pursues the program outlined in Seventeen to murder a leftist leader, presumably the Socialist Party Chairman, and rage against those who are disloyal to the emperor. In one section of the story, the remarks published by the actual commentators concerning the Yamaguchi incident are quoted with their real names, identifying the two tales with the event of October 1960. What separates this story from both the external Otoya Yamaguchi and the narrator of Seventeen, however, is its tone, thought, style, sensitivity, responsiveness, and mental alacrity. Vulnerability, anxiety, imaginative vigor, and intelligence, as well as suspiciousness and hostility, are clearly discernible in both the narrator and the characters as seen through his eyes. The adolescent “I” is still an Imperial Way member, and yet he is aware of the subtle differences among its members others. He is endowed with imagination, sensitivity, and curiosity, even about those who would oppose him.

  The narrator visits Hiroshima for the atom-bomb anniversary meeting and encounters activists from the left as well as the right. Before long there is a violent confrontation of the opposing groups, and the “I” assaults the progressive students and citizens with brutal force. In his extreme loyalty to the emperor, he is indifferent to issues like humanism, peace, the nuclear bombs, or even war destructions. And yet his record of the trip to Hiroshima has a number of passages that could have been lifted out of Ōe’s later Hiroshima Notes. The reader is introduced to a writer whose name, Seishiro Nambara, more than faintly resembles the name of Kenzaburō Ōe in kanji, his customary trick in fiction. The writer is a fearful, intellectual, gay leftist; the type most despised by the radical right-wingers. The drunken weakling displays unexpected courage, however, quietly declaring his intention to fight back should the thugs choose to attack him. In this confrontation scene, care is taken to make sure that both parties be allowed to talk with each other with little authorial intervention. After the trip to Hiroshima the narrator begins to distrust his party; it seems too comfortable with peaceful life. He misses the glory of the fight that he enjoyed at the time of the Security Treaty struggle. During his desperate search for belief and certainty, he has a revelation and sees the vision of the emperor. Bliss is attainable in the ecstasy of action for the absolute.

  The scene of the assassination is described in a combination of the second person and the third. Either way, the voice of the adolescent is replaced here by quotations from several TV commentators and journalists. Before the tale reaches this portion, however, the dominant perspective of his dramatic monologue is largely appropriated by the terrorist youth. It is not that the work has abandoned its critical position on imperial absolutism and rightist extremism. Only the contempt that kept the characters of Seventeen at a distance from the reader vanishes. There is a sort of intense sympathy that refuses to be taken lightly. The loneliness of the young man is unmistakably inscribed in the texture and feeling and thoughts that were largely absent in Seventeen. Similarly, the freedom and relief that the narrator experiences in his solitary jail cell is not that of a murderous fanatic who gloats over his accomplishment, but that of a sensitive youth who has finally escaped the impossible pressure of his mission, having fulfilled the absolute dictate of his revelation. What is conveyed is not the structure of terrorist ideas but the existential authenticity of his craving for belief and certainty, a dangerously contagious crisis and a desperate facing up against it. Finally, the substance of the novelette could be taken to have little to do with the ideologies of the right or the left.

  The story can be read as an anti-fascist statement, or the reverse, namely that A Political Youth Dies reveals Ōe to have a rightist double in himself, and that despite his announced anti-emperorism, he hides the awe of the monarch that was ingrained into him while still a young boy during World War II. However, it might be more insightful to read the story as possessing the energies of belief and disbelief, or political commitment and disengagement, or action and reflection, or even fiction and nonfiction. Ōe’s postwar embrace of freedom and democracy, for instance, is subtly entangled with a distrust of such humanist celebration. Ambiguity is ineradicable here. But instead of being at ease with ambiguity, Ōe seems compelled to question its instability, to work it through to arrive at unambiguity, certitude. Unambiguity of ambiguity, or ambiguity of unambiguity; The process is endless, and in this shifting complexity, Ōe’s work nearly always grows its roots.

  Those who are curious about Ōe’s discipline in producing A Political Youth Dies should read Runaway Horses, Part Two of the tetrology The Sea of Fertility, which Yukio Mishima wrote ten years later. The tale is also about a young right-wing assassin who also takes his own life after murdering a political potentate for the glory of the emperor. The settings are, of course, quite different, as Mishima was always susceptible to the stylish glamour of a revue-like theatricality. But even here, some imagery resembles Ōe’s work. As the hero commits harakiri at the end, for instance, he has the vision of a glorious emblazing sun.

  As far as I know no one has pointed out Mishima’s heavy borrowing, if not outright plagiarism, of the younger writer’s earlier work. At the same time, Mishima’s identification with the handsome young boy is embarrassingly unguarded and unqualified. His pronouncement of the emperorist program, too, is so transp
arent that Runaway Horses is nearly unreadable—except as part of Mishima’s biography. This—Mishima’s self-indulgence and Ōe’s discipline—might be the greatest difference between the two writers.

  Ōe published Sexual Humans (Seiteki Ningen) in May 1963, more than two years after the two political tales. Just as Seventeen was subdivided into two parts of Seventeen and A Political Youth Dies, Sexual Humans (J hereafter) is also composed of two parts. According to Ōe’s scheme as explained in “A Solemn Tight-Rope Walk,” “sexual” and “political” are counterpoised to each other though they seem also integral in a complicated way. Thus, a chain of dialectics, or a series of binaries, is his intellectual consistency. And again there is the ecstasy of action for the absolute.

  It is fascinating to note that the young chikan boy’s unfinished poetic masterpiece has the title of “A Solemn Tight-Rope Walk,” the title of Ōe’s actual essay discussing Seventeen and J. Ōe says he himself wanted once to write a collection of poems while he was in his twenties under the title of A Solemn Tight-Rope Walk. The adjective, he explains, means that what appeared to the others as an absurd balancing act was for himself a dead-serious performance. Ōe knew that he was being watched, and he was frightened. After eight years of fear, brief reliefs, and blinding despair, he still didn’t know what he had learned from the balancing act. He does not make clear what he was trying to balance at the time. As for politics, he was clearly on the side of the sovereignty of the individual citizen as against the external absolute authority (“Kenpo ni tsuite no kojinteki na taiken”). He was also firmly for the renunciation of war, and he was troubled by the recent reversion to the prewar ideology among some people.

  There is no doubt that in Ōe’s earlier writing the political and the sexual were intimately connected, but what exactly the relationship was is far from clear. They are in contrast: political as combative versus sexual as assimilative, for example; or the political as rejecting the absolute, while the sexual as accepting the absolute (“Warera no sei no sekai”). How this scheme works in the context of Seventeen, A Political Youth Dies, and J (“Sexual Humans”), I and II, is not easy to decipher. Is politics represented by the narrator’s general hostility in Seventeen? Is the absolute being accepted in the two parts of J? How? At any rate, what does become clear is that Ōe in the 1960s seems to have been carefully distancing himself from both politics and sexuality no matter how the two were related to each other. In this view, politics is inevitably masturbatory, as Seventeen seems strongly to suggest. But then sexuality, too, unavoidably leads to autoeroticism, even when it victimizes a woman in the act of molestation. There seems to be no exit in either route.