ABSTRACT
The 1967 award-winning novel, The Football Game of the First Year of Manen (Manengannen no futtobōru, hereafter Manen), tells of the adventures of two brothers who return to their native village in the valley on Shikoku, in search of their roots and to start a new life. As this story, set in 1960, moves toward the future, there is another story that moves back into the past, the tale of the two brothers’ great-grandfather and his younger brother, who were involved in the Manengannen (1860) uprising. And crosscutting the development of the two stories is the private quest of the narrator, Mitsusaburo: to seek the meaning of his only friend's death. Manen is Ōe's first post-1964 novel that experiments with “multilayeredness” and simultaneity of narrative discourse. A reading of Manen requires more than tracking the “unfolding of the story”: it requires us “to recognize in it a number of ‘strata,’ to project the horizontal concatenations of the narrative onto an implicitly vertical axis; to read a narrative … is not only to pass from one word to the next, but also from one level to the next.” 1
