The Light from Within and Without: Ōe Kenzaburō's Hiroshima and Humanism

Abstract

In the opening to the speech he delivered upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature in 1994 entitled "Japan, The Ambiguous and Myself" (あいまいな日本の私), Ōe Kenzaburō recounts his childhood enchantment with the Swedish fairy tale The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and his fascination with the Nils' rebirth by the end of the story as encapsulated in the line "I am a human being again." Ōe's identification with Nils and his final declaration recalls the existential questions Ōe poses in his works about it means to be "human," and his desire to rationalize the shades of good and evil present in people and events throughout history. Having grown up under the specter of moral atrocity and ambiguity that characterized the aggressions of World War II and the atomic bomb, Ōe after tries to find beneath the immense destruction, uncompromising dogma and miserable suffering a glimmer of humanity and hope (希望). A critical juncture (分岐点) in Ōe's career as a writer and in his personal life came to inform his views on humanism; in 1963, he took on an assignment with the journal Sekai (世界 - The World) to cover the upcoming Ninth World Conference against Atomic and hydrogen Bombs in Hiroshima (the essay was later published as a part of the compilation Hiroshima Notes) and also saw the birth of his mentally handicapped son Hikari (光 meaning "light" in Japanese). As Ōe himself remarks, this confluence between the universal and the personal engendered a "determinative shift in [his] life" and from this intermingling of his private life with the experience of Hiroshima, an experience that that bears heavily on the definition of human existence, Ōe produced two of his most famous works, Hiroshima Notes (ヒロシマ・ノート, 1965) and A Personal Matter (個人的な体験, 1964). Ōe's preoccupation with his own life set in the context of the constant threat of nuclear was demonstrates his belief that rather than remaining to separate spheres, universal truths (人間一般にかかわる真実) and personal matters (個人的な体験) necessarily and inexorable influence each other in an endless cycle. Reflecting upon his life and career in 1994, Ōe told the people in Stockholm that "the fundamental method of [his] writing has always been to start from the personal matters and then link them with society, the state, and the world in general." Reading Hiroshima Notes and A Personal Matter as though they are part of the same project to construct a concept of humanism that recaptures a definition of "Hiroshima" which imparts lessons to Japan in the nuclear age, it is possible to also understand how Ōe perceives the unprecedented destruction of the atomic bomb and he "suffering towards a miserable death" (悲惨な死えの闘いをつづけている) of the Hiroshima survivors (referred to in Japanese as hibakusha) as touching each and every human life as the post-nuclear world moves "toward and unknowable future" (何とも知れない未来に). This flow between the internal and the external, in turn, subsumes within itself themes about mand's dal nature, one capable of deception(欺瞞), darkness (暗闇), evil (悪) and absurdity (不条理) as well as patience (忍耐), dignity (威厳), courage (勇気) and hope (希望). In taking these terms (which appear frequently in both Hiroshima Notes and A Personal Matter) and the contrast born from them into consideration, Ōe's concept of humanism becomes clear, one in which "courage" springs from the "misery" of something as extreme as Hiroshima. And for Japan - a nation that fell victim to the atomic bomb, but also willfully forgets its own wartime past - it means accepting responsibility (責任) for its actions towards other Asian nations as well as for the hibakusha themselves, whose story is all too often obscured by the politics of the Peace Movement, the prejudice towards hibakusha illnesses, and the collective amnesia and self-deception toward the realities of Japan's wartime past.