Remembrance|Kenzaburo Oe: A keen thinking writer who gladly remains lonely

On March 13, the death of Kenzaburo Oe, a famous contemporary Japanese writer and Nobel Prize winner in Literature, was revealed by the Japanese media, in fact, Oe's death on March 3.

In an exclusive interview with The Paper, Professor Qiu Yafen, president of the Japanese Literature Research Branch of the China Foreign Literature Society and researcher at the Institute of Foreign Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, believes that this may be because Dajiang's funeral took the form of a "family funeral". "This is a small-scale farewell funeral that is not disclosed to the public in advance, and the news of the death is only widely announced after the funeral."

Kenzaburo Oe Visual China data map

In Qiu Yafen's view, framing Kenzaburo Oe as a "left-wing progressive writer" is too general. "The right-wing forces in Japan are very strong, and Mr. Oe has been harassed by them during his lifetime. But it cannot be said that what the right wing opposes is the left wing. I also noticed that some media outlets called Oe an 'existential' writer when reporting. In fact, there are obvious traces of imitation of Sartre's style in the early period, but later he kept a certain distance from Sartre. Nor did he ever admit to being an existential writer, and considered himself the successor of Japan's 'post-war' literature. ”

"In my opinion, Oe was a keen intellectual writer, and there were few writers as conscious as him in postwar Japan. Moreover, he belongs to the high life of the writer, born before the war, experienced the Second World War, and saw the development and change of Japanese society after the war to today. He has always had profound insight and criticism of the post-war Japanese government's complete packaging of itself as a "victim" and even prevaricating and shirking its responsibility and responsibility for war crimes. Professor Qiu Yafen said.

"I also want to correct myself a little. Dae was born in 1935, and after the September 18 Incident broke out, Japan quickly installed the puppet Manchukuo after occupying northeast China. Now that our country's historical expression has changed the eight-year War of Resistance to the 14-year War of Resistance, the anti-Japanese rescue movement of the Chinese people has never stopped. Therefore, Dae should have been 'born in wartime'. There used to be three ways to say it in Japanese: before, during and after the war, but then the word "wartime" was quietly erased, and many people who studied Japanese ignored this. After the Meiji Restoration, Japan's foreign aggression and expansion did not stop. ”

"He is sober aware and tries to reveal the truth"

In 2000, six years after Kenzaburo Oe won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he came to China at the invitation of the Institute of Foreign Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

"This matter was personally initiated by Mr. Xu Jinlong at that time. When Dajiang gave a speech in a foreign language, Mo Yan was also on the scene. The two writers maintained correspondence, and Dajiang later visited Gaomi, Shandong, specifically to see Mo Yan's hometown. I was only in my thirties at the time, and I had just returned from studying in Japan, but I could see from the look in Oe's eyes that he was different from most Japanese people, very calm and sharp. He has a natural coldness for the times, and the loneliness of the so-called thinker is very obvious in him. ”

"After the war, the Japanese government did not really reflect, but tried to cover up and whitewash their war crimes. Yasunari Kawabata worked closely with the Japanese government, both before and after the war, and in fact helped erase this memory. Including Trout II, he is also a well-written writer, and his masterpiece "Black Rain" is a masterpiece describing the atomic bombing of Japan, which gives the Japanese a global business card of "war victims". Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the dropping of atomic bombs) are, of course, Japan's national wounds, but Japan is first and foremost the "perpetrator" of World War II, not the victim. ”

Kenzaburo Oe has always distanced himself from the Japanese government. He is soberly aware and tries to reveal the truth. But Dajiang's writing is more difficult, and his masterpiece "Football in the First Year of Wan Yan" is his masterpiece that won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but many Japanese just can't read it. Japanese sentences are joined together by intermediate particles, so that Japanese sentences can be practically infinitely extended. 1967's "Football in the First Year of Wanyan" marked the maturity of Dajiang's literary creation, and a sentence in the book is often as long as three or four lines, and many are still compound sentences one by one. Professor Qiu Yafen said.

On May 25, 2015, local time, Lyon, France, at the 2015 International Fiction Forum, Japanese writer and 1994 Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe delivered a speech.

At that time, someone asked Kenzaburo Oe why he wrote such a difficult sentence? His answer was that he did not want his work to be brought to war by young Japanese again. During World War II, many Japanese soldiers went to war with novels such as The Tale of Genji. Oe's intention to use such writing to create a sense of alienation and strangeness in the language is to attack Japanese society. ”

Of course, Kenzaburo Oe's ideological maturity did not happen overnight. He entered the Japanese literary scene at the age of 22 and is known as a 'student writer'. "In 1960, a huge protest movement broke out in Japan against the new security treaty between the United States and Japan. At the same time, Kenzaburo Oe was making his first visit to China as the youngest writer in the Japanese literary delegation. In China, he also participated in protests in support of the Japanese people and was cordially received by Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and others.

"1963 was a difficult year for Dajiang. His eldest son was born in this year, and the child was born with a disability, which hit him so hard that he even wanted to commit suicide at one point. Later, in order to transcend this suffering, he went to Hiroshima to experience the suffering of more people there. We can see the changes in his two 'notes' before and after. The publication of the Hiroshima Notes in 1965 established him as a great writer, and the book was full of sympathy for the suffering of his compatriots, no different from most similar works of the time and since. And in the "Okinawa Notes" published in 1970, his reflection on the war has been clearly sublimated and transcended. ”

The publication of the Okinawa Notes caused great controversy in Japan. The book details the mass suicides of hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers and civilians at the end of the Battle of Okinawa. Oe believes that during the Battle of Okinawa (the landing campaign of the U.S. Army on Okinawa Island from March to June 1945 during the Pacific War), the local military and civilians chose to commit mass suicide at the behest of the Japanese military. In that tragedy, about 200,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians committed suicide, including more than 430 residents of Zamami Island and Tokashiki Island who collectively self-determined. In July 2005, Umezawa Yu, who was the commander of the Japanese army at Zama-Mijima, and others, took Kenzaburo Oe and the publishing house to court, demanding that publication be stopped and that damages be paid for the damage to his reputation.

Oe suffered a lawsuit that ended in his victory in 2011. In addition, although it is said that Japan seized the first colony of the island of Taiwan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895. But before that, Japan had already embarked on the path of militarism, annexing the Ryukyu Kingdom, which would later become Okinawa Prefecture. Therefore, Oe wrote "Okinawa Notes", which undoubtedly provoked the sensitive nerves of Japanese society, and must be rejected by Japanese right-wing forces, thinking that he slandered Japan's history and let him get out of Japan. ”

"His award is a victory of the edge against the center"

"The Japanese wabi-sabi aesthetic has its roots and origins. But after the war, this aesthetic, wrapped in consumerism, became a glorified package, and then became a tool for Japan's right-wing forces to wash away the bloody and brutal truth of their own imperialist rise. And what we should be wary of is that behind this 'aesthetic Japan', its bloody colonial history and various war crimes. At this point, Dajiang is very calm and objective, and he has been chasing after and revealing the truth of this history. ”

"In the 90s, Western scholars generally considered Japanese writers such as Yasunari Kawabata and Trout Fufuji together in the context of Japanese literature, believing that their works were relatively close in style and tonality. Kenzaburo Oe and Abe were placed in another group. Oe and Abe are alumni of the University of Tokyo, but they have maintained a cautious distancing from the city and the Japanese government throughout their lives. ”

"Japan is an island country, four large islands, Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku and Hokkaido. Tokyo is located on the largest island, Honshu, and Oe's homeland is on the smallest island, Shikoku. Although Oe has been living in Tokyo since then, he has always maintained his identity as a Shikoku. In his writing, a pair of concepts often appear: edge and center. I think this is also why, after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, Oe himself gave the explanation that this was the triumph of the periphery (literature) over the center. ”

In 1994, after Kenzaburo Oe won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he also said, "If Mr. Abe Kobo is alive, this honor will be him, not me." In this regard, Qiu Yafen said that after the war, a group of "post-war" writers appeared in Japan. "Abe Public House is one of the representative figures. Originally from Hokkaido, he came to China with his father's 'Immigration Pioneer Group' and grew up in Shenyang. After finishing elementary and junior high school in Shenyang, he was admitted to Tokyo Imperial University and returned to Japan. Abe can be said to be a genius, he studied medicine at Imperial University, and he was very good at science, especially mathematics. When he graduated, the school gave him advice: you can give you a diploma, but you are not allowed to practice medicine for life. ”

This was exactly what Abe wanted to do as a writer. His first novel, The Sign at the End of the Road, was hailed by critics as an 'epoch-making event'. In fact, Abe's English skills were also outstanding, and he was one of the few Japanese writers at the time who could keep pace with Western modern and postmodern literature. And this person is also an all-rounder, in the 80s of the last century used computer writing, in addition to writing novels, stage plays, movies, television, photography, racing cars, and even inventions. If he had not died of sudden intracranial hemorrhage in 1993, he would have been a serious contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. ”

As for the dissemination of Kenzaburo Oe's works in China. Qiu Yafen recalled that after Dajiang visited China with a delegation in 1960, he was introduced by the magazine "World Literature" sponsored by the Institute of Foreign Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which was in charge of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. In June 1960, World Literature published "Voices of New Hope" written by Dae and translated by Mei Tao, expressing his determination to oppose the new security treaty between the United States and Japan. After that, the domestic academic and publishing circles did not maintain a continuous focus on contemporary Japanese literature, which naturally changed after the reform and opening up. Dajiang once again entered the Chinese people's field of vision, mainly after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994. ”

"Mr. Xu Jinlong has done a great job here, and I have only written about Mr. Dajiang in the history of the novel and the preface of the translation. I have great respect for his style, he is a calm, rational writer who can face history objectively, which many Japanese people today do not want to face and remember. In fact, it is not so much independent as he is a 'lonely' writer and gladly remains 'lonely'. ”

P.S. "Voices of New Hope" Kenzaburo Oe