ABSTRACT
Japanese women writers such as Nakamoto Takako and Hirabayashi Taiko suggest that the American occupation, despite the many changes it brought, exerted comparatively little effect on the nation’s women. Yes, they imply, women gained new legal freedoms, but familiar forms of oppression continued at home and in the workplace. The two male authors discussed in the present chapter, Ōe Kenzaburō and Nosaka Akiyuki, have consistently emphasized the occupation’s impact and the dramatic changes it brought. At the same time, however, both men reveal how the occupation served to exacerbate divisiveness already present within Japanese society. Ōe’s “Human Sheep” (“Ningen no hitsuji,” 1958) shows how relationships of domination between the occupiers and the occupied are replicated among the Japanese, while Nosaka’s “American Hijiki” (“Amerika hijiki,” 1967) insists that an entire generation of Japanese men continues to be plagued by memories of the occupation era, memories that isolate them from relatives and co-workers.1 Both stories also deploy many of the literary approaches to the occupation typically found in men’s writing and discussed in earlier chapters. For example, they represent the experience of foreign occupation in terms of linguistic and sexual impotence, employ symbolic landscapes that frame the narrative as an allegory of occupied Japan, and use the figure of a prostitute to mediate relationships between Japanese men and the occupation soldiers. Readers familiar with the reputations of Ōe and Nosaka might find it odd to discuss these two writers together. Ōe has always been treated as a serious author by Japan’s literary establishment, even by those critics who berate his distinctive literary style as “Japanese literature that reads as if directly translated from a European language.” But Ōe’s early stories such as “Prize Stock” and “Human Sheep” show the author capable of writing with great beauty and power. Ōe has also been among the nation’s leading intellectuals since the early 1960s. Born in a village on the island of Shikoku in 1935, he graduated from the Department of
French Literature at Tokyo University (Japan’s most elite university), and at age twenty-three he was awarded the Akutagawa Prize for “Prize Stock.” One need hardly add that in 1994 he became the second Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. Despite these accolades and his established position within the nation’s intellectual circles, Ōe has not assumed the air of a staid literary patriarch. Even when treating the most weighty issues he can be extremely funny, and he has never shied away from sexually provocative material. (Early in his career, he noted his fondness for Henry Miller and, more recently, for Milan Kundera.) Ōe has also been an outspoken advocate for leftist political causes. In 1960 he traveled to the People’s Republic of China and called for greater cultural contact between China and Japan; throughout the 1960s and 1970s he wrote nonfiction about the ongoing impact of the atomic bombings, America’s occupation of Okinawa, and the Vietnam War. After receiving the Nobel Prize, he canceled a much-publicized trip to Paris at the invitation of the French government in order to protest the nation’s nuclear tests in the South Pacific. He also rejected a prestigious cultural award that was to be presented by Emperor Akihito.
