ABSTRACT
O - e’s children’s book ‘Jibun no kie’ no shite de (Under ‘My Soul’s Tree’,
2001) contains a beautiful picture drawn by O - e’s wife, Yukari, of a boy
meeting himself in old age beside a tree.7 In the same book, towards the end, there is another picture showing the reverse: an old man meeting himself as a child. The first picture demonstrates a child’s wonder as he asks the old man, ‘What has happened in your life?’8 The second picture illustrates the author, now old, expressing encouragement to future generations by saying, ‘You will continue as you are now, ever improving with learning and the experiences you will have.’9 It is interesting, on this point, that the Japanese word kodama, meaning tree spirit, includes an ancient belief that each tree has its own spirit, and this is brought out clearly in noh drama, where a pine tree at the back of the stage indicates the passage of a heavenly spirit coming down to earth through the tree. It is small wonder, then, that after his upbringing and childhood exposure
to village legends, O - e has reacted so strongly to the power of mythology.
‘Myth’, he has said, ‘shows the way how one individual views the cosmological structure to which this society, this world, has expanded’.10 The legend of the soul’s tree, so firmly retained from his childhood, undoubtedly accounts for his attraction to Western writers who have taken up themes dealing with renewal and immortality. Blake’s mythology, Yeats’s later poems, Bakhtin’s theory of grotesque realism, Eliade’s investigations into archaic ritual and Jung’s theory of the immortal child – all have in common themes of cyclical regeneration and all have found their way into O
