Son’s Disabilities Force Man to Muse on His Own Defects

ROUSE UP O YOUNG MEN OF THE NEW AGE!

A Novel

By Kenzaburo Oe

Translated from the Japanese by John Nathan

Grove Press

260 pages; $24

The oeuvre of Kenzaburo Oe, holder of the 1994 Nobel Prize in literature, comprises more than 15 volumes of fiction and essays. However, Oe remains best-known for his 1964 novel “A Personal Matter,” and justly so: Even today, this hour-by-hour chronicle of a self-lacerating young father’s coming to grips with the birth of his brain-deformed son has lost none of its searing immediacy.

“Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!,” originally published in Japanese in 1984, is not Oe’s most recent novel. But it is his newest appearance in English, in this able and judicious translation by John Nathan, who has also contributed an illuminating afterword. The novel has a special significance within the arc of Oe’s literal life-in-fiction. Aspects of the handicapped child who entered the world in 1964 have provided the inspiration, or compulsion, for a whole series of novels, notable both for their bending of autobiography into fiction and for the sheer originality of Oe’s vision. In the year in which this novel takes place, the burdensome, beloved son has reached the age of 20. For the narrator father, here called simply K, this marks both an ending and beginning, a time for summing up. For Oe the writer it appears to demand the final version of his fictionalization of self-with-son.

Neither man goes easy on himself. At the outset of the last chapter, the writer and essayist K declares outright, “My purpose, on the occasion of my son’s twentieth birthday this coming June, was to survey the entirety of our--mine and my wife’s and his younger brother’s and sister’s--days together with him until now and into the future. I also wanted a book of definitions of the world, society, and mankind based on my own life.” In this brief yet extraordinarily dense novel, the “entirety” is conveyed through a series of dramatic incidents, generally not at first glance closely related as narrative, but more as the plausible associations of K’s memory. These include episodes of arresting vividness.

One occurs at an indoor swimming pool where K has been doggedly attempting to teach his son (lugubriously nicknamed Eeyore) to swim. During a break K’s attention is diverted by the bumptious and distrusted Mr. Shumata, trainer of a shady group of young paramilitary men. Suddenly, the young men start shouting. “With a move so very slow it felt contemptible even to myself, I turned around and verified that Eeyore was not sitting on the bench. As I stood there Mr. Shumata sailed past me with astonishing agility .... Before the ripples had spread across the surface I glimpsed Eeyore, his mouth wide open, slowly sinking as though he were swimming in space. ‘Down, down thro’ the immense, with outcry, fury & despair’--the line occurred to me out of context as I leaned over the tank with both hands on the rim. In front of my nose, Mr. Shumata’s large, red foot with the missing toes was thrust above the water as he spiraled perpendicularly down to the bottom of the tank.”

Oe’s skill shines through as the impact of these incidents and images accumulates. The end effect is less a survey and more a convincing impression of landscape, perspective and detail as conveyed by a few brushstrokes from the hand of a master. The reader experiences not only the stumbles and surprises of Eeyore’s maturation (like Oe’s son he begins to emerge as a gifted composer) but also the middle-aged K’s gnawing self-doubt and anxieties. He wonders: “It seemed to me I had failed to accomplish a single thing

K mentally flagellates himself for falling short of his second goal: to define the world, society and mankind. The grandiosity of his mission betrays a surreally off-kilter quality in his overall outlook--a tendency to assign emblematic significance to his thoughts and actions and assume society at large does the same. Not coincidentally, with this trait he also mirrors the combination of artistic star-reaching and personal diffidence characteristic of K’s artistic idol, 18th century poet William Blake. Throughout, “Rouse Up O Young Men” is saturated, effectively and poignantly, with lines from Blake’s poetry, re-creations of his artwork, episodes from his life. The interweaving of two writers, and of biography and autobiography, may not be everyone’s cup of bancha. But for those who enjoy reading with minds open to the new, K’s dawning conception of his son as embodying Blake’s visions of both good and evil, and his final intimation of revelation and forgiveness, are among the ample rewards.