Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness: Four Short Novels [Paperback]

"Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness" is four seperate novellas dealing with themes that will be familiar to Oe readers. One, a sardonic, existentialist musing, finds a man lying in bed reliving his childhood under his fanatical, revolutionary father. He himself feels helpless to deal with reality, and has hidden himself behind goggles. Maybe he is ill, maybe not. Most readers will find the story as difficult a read as the "Ben" sequence of Faulkner's "the Sound and the Fury," and twice as strange. Another deals with the relationship between a boy and a black prisoner in WWII-era Japan, and reminds me a bit of "Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids." The very best, though, deals with a character representative of Oe himself, and his relationship over Pepsi and Noodle soup with his retarded child. The strive for communication and understanding between the two is part of what makes Oe such engaging reading to begin with

The two most powerful writers about the traumas of WW2, in my reading experience, are the German W.G. Sebald and the Japanese Ooe Kenzaburo. Both men were children during the actual fighting, and both write about the shame and denial they observed in the adult communities in which they grew up. Both are obsessed with memory, with the loss and recovery of memory, but their literary modes could hardly be more different. Sebald is a writer of dispassionate rage -- yes, I intended that oxymoron -- who distances his subjects with exquisite verbal delicacy. For Sebald, memory is the only reality. Nothing exists except in memory, and when the memory is lost, the reality dies with it. Sebald is heir to the melancholy rationalism of German literary culture. Ooe's literary culture, from Bunraku to Meiji to modernism, is one of sensation and sensationalism, of staged hysteria, assaultive imagery and lurid exposure. For Ooe, memory is an inescapable but inexplicable burden, a riddle one must solve in order to live, in hopes of breaking through the past to the present.

Ooe has just two stories to tell, which he has recast with new brilliancy and insight in all of his books. Both are catastrophic. The older story is that of a boy, obviously the author himself, in a remote valley of Japan, discovering his own personhood at exactly the moment of Japan's crushing defeat in the War. It's a tale of irreparable disillusionment and shame. The early story Prize Stock and the later The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away are both stories of that moment. Ooe's other theme is also autobiographical; in 1964, when Ooe was 29, his first child was born, a son who suffered brain damage at birth and who grew up mentally handicapped and autistic. The father's ferocious bond with his `retarded' son is the subject of the story Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, as well as the implicit motif of Agwhee the Sky Monster.

The Day He Himself is the longest and boldest story in this volume, which was not originally written as a unified collection. It's also the most violent, grotesque, obscene, and agonizing. A 35-year-old man is confined to bed in a hospital or an asylum, dying of liver cancer that he may be imagining. He is obsessed (there's that word again) with dictating the true "history of the age" -- by which he means the moment of transcendance when his father died and thus liberated the divine chysanthemum spirit of the suddenly human God-Emperor -- to an amanuensis who may be either a nurse or his wife, so that it can be presented to his mother-enemy upon his death. Both the scribe and the mother refuse to be constrained by the `dying' man's reality. Difficult and hideous as it is, The Day He Himself is arguably Ooe's most luminous masterpiece. I'd suggest ignoring the translator's order and reading the three other, shorter stories first, saving this glorious ordeal for last.

Prize Stock is a far less arduous puzzle to read but no less viscerally shocking. That boy in the village, on the backward island of Shikoku, finds himself temporarily the proud guardian of a captive American soldier, a black man whom he can't understand except as a docile animal. After all, the captive is language-less and inscrutable yet clearly sentient. Shared humanity is NOT a given. The contact has a horrific outcome.

Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness is told by the grotesquely fat father of a mentally defective son, who takes the boy to a zoo to attempt to stimulate his short-sighted, deformed eyes. Irrational violence occurs, the father and son are separated, and the psychological aftermath is .... not perhaps what you'll expect.

In Agwhee the Sky Monster, the narrator becomes the paid companion of a famous artist who has `lost his mind' and is haunted by the ghost of a baby whose death he permitted.

Obviously, none of these stories are frivolus or frolicksome. And they are very foreign in sensibilities, as foreign to an English reader as that gruesomely beastialized captive American was to the villagers of Shikoku. Don't expect an easy universal human sympathy when you read Ooe Kenzaburo. Prepare yourself to be challenged emotionally and intellectually.

"Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness" collects four stories--novellas, really--from the first 15 years of Oe's career. Each is unique in narrative style, in tone, and in pace, but all four deal with similar themes that matured over the years.

"Prize Stock" (1957), one of Oe's very first stories and perhaps his most famous, is about a black American airman captured during the war by the residents of a remote village, who take him prisoner but hide him from the authorities in a cellar, where he seemingly manages to befriend the local children. In "Aghwee the Sky Monster" (1964), a narrator recalls a friend haunted by the spirit of a son born with serious brain damage. It is one of the earliest of many works (including the masterpiece, "A Personal Matter") featuring such a child, inspired by Oe's own son Hikari, who in fact eventually overcame serious disabilities to become a respected composer of music.

An "idiot child" is also at the center of the title story (1969), which is my favorite of the collection--and may well be the best short work Oe ever wrote. "A fat man" takes his beloved son for a pleasant day at the zoo. Assaulted by hoodlums and tossed into the polar bear pond, he regains consciousness to discover that the child is missing. The trauma serves as a catalyst for coming to terms with the man's relationship with his own father, whose death had been a mystery to him.

Similar themes and characters populate the longest and most complex selection, "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away" (1972). A hospital patient believes he has cancer--although his doctors insist he does not. Much of the man's first-person, non-linear rant is told to the "the acting executor of the will," that is, his wife. Bedridden, he lives in his past, brooding over his estrangement from his mother and recounting his father's suicidal mission to save Japan from defeat at the end of World War II--an event the narrator distorts in memory. Oe apparently intended this as an anguished parody of Yukio Mashima's suicide. While eerily compelling, the story can be difficult and baffling. It strongly echoes Oe's earlier novel "The Silent Cry," which (I think) deals with these themes much more successfully--at least for readers unfamiliar with Japanese history and traditions.

What is most notable about Oe's work is that the same characters, ideas, subjects, and even certain scenes appear repeatedly in his many works--yet each story or novel is utterly distinctive. And his offbeat, sometimes morbid humor often catches readers unawares. His fiction translates remarkably well to English, and I never feel like I've read the same work twice.