Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness is a collection of four short novels by Kenzaburo Oe which focus on the disillusionment of Japanese characters whose traditional values have been blasted away just as certainly as Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
Oe's early heroes have been expelled from the certainty of childhood, into a world that bears no relation to their past. The values that regulated life when they were growing up have been blown to smithereens . . . ' what confronts them now, the postwar world, is a gaping emptiness, enervation, a terrifying silence like the eternity that follows death (xv).
This does not mean that the characters in these stories are without hope, although that hope is hardly rooted in the real world. So alienated from that real world is the protagonist in "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away" that he imagines a world of myth which transcends the real world, and even history. He imagines a mythical victory in which the traditional values of Japan are revived. The story also transcends sanity, or at least what would pass for sanity in the real world. Reading this first short novel in the collection, the reader enters a realm where it is not certain what is going on, if the protagonist is truly dying of cancer, if the events recounted are truly happening in the real world or merely in the world of imagination. However, the emotional content of the mind of the protagonist is clear and genuine. He suffers mightily from a rage at the desecration of traditional Japanese values, faith and culture, and yearns with all his being to create or recreate those demolished values.
If the protagonist is indeed imagining the disease killing him, and having a mad conversation with himself, or with his disease, which might symbolize the desecrated nation itself, the author gives us enough details to argue that the cancer is genuine:
I'm cancer, cancer, LIVER CANCER itself is me! Throwing open his robe irritably he...