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Reviewed by:
  • The Novels of Ōe Kenzaburō
  • John Whittier Treat (bio)
The Novels of Ōe Kenzaburō. By Yasuko Claremont. Routledge, London, 2009. xi, 210 pages. £75.00.

First, a prolegomena. These days of late are not kind to single-author studies. A few years ago, a student of mine with a promising manuscript received a quick rejection from a major university press stating it no longer handled such (though it was once famous for them); and a senior colleague at that same university once jokingly (?) referred to me and my ilk as "zenshū guys."

One guesses that were Stephen Greenblatt to offer this aforementioned press his latest tome (or less) on Shakespeare, it would surely scramble to find room for it on the next season's list. There are single-author studies, in other words, and there are single-author studies. Greenblatt is regarded as intellectually adventuresome; those of us in modern Japanese literary studies, sedentary. Critics have a point, of course. Our books on canonical authors, afforded cover by their sakkaron accomplices in Japan, traditionally suffer from what Edwin McClellan once termed my field's "dirty little secret": a dissertation-stage graduate student reads deeply in one selected writer but in his or her even adjacent milieu (much less history), only shallowly—if at all. Guilty as charged.1

I say traditionally, because this is less the case nowadays. But the defense I wish to mount begins with the probably audacious assertion that a person (admittedly another embattled category) can matter as much as a theme or a theory. This is obvious in the main to literary scholars, who often attempt to be novelists or poets themselves and understand how uniquely [End Page 351] idiosyncratic, and worthy of close attention, any individual's words can be; it is just as often not so clear to historians, who are seldom in the business of making history on their own. My defense now skips to its end with the workaday observation that ours is a field that still lacks for the most part just what our undergraduate students most urgently desire: intelligent, readable English-language monographs on the Japanese writers they want to write their end-of-term papers about.

So I commend Yasuko Claremont, senior lecturer at the University of Sydney, and her publisher Routledge for giving us The Novels of Ōe Kenzaburō. It is an excellent study of Ōe Kenzaburō (1935–), one of only two Japanese novelists to receive the Nobel Prize for literature (Kawabata Yasunari in 1968, Ōe in 1994). It displaces all previous English-language writing on him, save for the few essays here and there that deal with those parts of the Ōe oeuvre she does not take up. I would have welcomed, to note one lacuna, Claremont's thoughts on Ōe's 1990 Chiryōtō (Tower of healing). But those missing parts are not many. Claremont surveys most of Ōe's wellknown works of fiction published between 1957 and 2006 and identifies his longstanding project, "extending over fifty years," as "a search for spiritual identity in a world where evil and indifference constitute an enduring part of human life" (p. 170). The trajectory takes us, in Claremont's workman-like chronological progression, from the award-winning short story "Shiiku" (Prize stock; the story of a captured black airman during the war) in 1958, to Bird's dilemma in Kojinteki na taiken (A personal matter) in 1964, to his construction of a personal cosmology in Dōjidai gēmu (The contemporary game) in 1979 through to the apocalyptic Chūgaeri (Somersault) in 1999 and beyond. Claremont notes that many of Ōe's perennial themes, such as resistance to state power, sensitivity to violence, and mythology, are featured from the start (though they are reworked in "three phases of nihilism, atonement and salvation" [p. i]), as has been the influence exerted on him by Jean-Paul Sartre, Norman Mailer, and immediate postwar Japanese writers—supplemented liberally by Wilhelm Reich, Mikhail Bakhtin, Mircea Eliade, Dante Alighieri, William Blake, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and others. (Ōe's novels often read like a fresh diary of his last night's reading: with considerable understatement...

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