Oe's novel reflects on father's death
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Kenzaburo Oe
The cover of “Suishi”
By Nam Hyun-woo
Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe's 2009 novel, “Suishi (Death by Water),” provides what Korea and some other surrounding countries have been calling for from Japan, an acknowledgement of its past deeds.
The autobiographical novel, of which Oe said, “What I can do in the format of a novel is done,” took six years to be translated into Korean and will be released in English in October.
This is the fifth novel with Kogito Choko, an old and eminent novelist who is an alter-ego of Oe himself, and bears a strong critical metaphor of Japan's militarism and emperor worship. With Choko's process of investigating his father's death, the 80-year-old reminisces not only about his novelist career but also taps into “his father,” who critics say is one of the main themes of Oe's opus.
Choko's father drowned when Choko was 9, in a river swollen during a big storm. Choko has been recalling his father's death in his dreams for about 60 years and planning to write a novel about it as his last. He tries to get a red suitcase thought to contain documents about his father's death and sends some drafts of the novel, but that only affects his relationship with his mother.
Ten years after her mother's death, Choko's sister gives him the suitcase, but its contents reveal few details of the death. Also in the case is “The Golden Bough,” by James George Frazer, which has a part that describes how a king is murdered and world power reassembles highlighted.
Choko remembers his father and a group of soldiers discussing a rebellious plan to stage a suicide bomb attack on the Japanese king, though he is not sure whether it is a dim memory or his imagination. The soldiers later explain it was nothing more than a joke and his mother and sister said the father died while fleeing rebels -- similar to his -- after Japan lost World War II.
But after reading the highlighted part, Choko convinces himself that his father died while carrying out the plan. Author Oe later explained that “The suicide bombing means the collapse of Japan's nationalism and totalitarianism.”
Choko has to abandon his plan to write the novel, but finds the will to continue looking into his father's death as he cooperates with a theater troupe recalling his early novels and dramatizing the process of writing the novels.
Among the troupe, a female actor named Unaiko influences Choko and she serves as a character propagating Oe's criticism of Japan's wartime sex slavery.
When Unaiko was 17, she was raped by her uncle, who is a high-ranking bureaucrat, and forced to have an abortion. When she showed her underwear tainted with blood to an aunt, the aunt brought her to Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan's war dead, saying “Let's talk about that at the most sacred place after you clean up your mind and body.” The uncle also says, “We enjoyed mutual masturbation under consent.” The remark overlaps the Shinzo Abe administration's apparent attempt to justify their past.
In March, when “Suishi” was released in Korea, Oe said: “The sex slavery came from Japan's discriminative culture against woman. Though it is questionable that Abe will apologize for the past, Japanese people have strong sense of guilt.”
About “Suishi,” Oe said: “The theme of this story is the father's death. Through the father in the novel, I tried to portray totalitarian Japanese adults who are haunted by emperor ideology and how Japanese people who are living in a post-war democracy should introspect and behave.” He said he would stop writing novels and focus on nonfiction works about Japan's peace.
Oe won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994, but declined Japan’s highest artistic honor, the Imperial Order of Culture, in opposition to Japan’s emperor-worshipping past. He has been criticizing his country's rightist movement. On May 3, Oe lashed out at Abe's speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on April 29 as “explicit lies.”