Four Short Novels by kenzaburo Oe

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 tradit

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mbolic power is meant to be a sign of the youth of Japan and its ability to endure overwhelming suffering and emerge with its hope intact. In "Prize Stock," Oe tells the story of a young boy---again symbolizing the Japanese and their loss of their connection with the traditional ways of the past---who meets a black American pilot downed over his town. To that point, the boy says "to us the war was nothing more than the absence of young men in our village and the announcements the mailman sometimes delivered of soldiers killed in action" (118). But his meeting the American pilot changes all that. Two major events occur in the awakening of the boy's consciousness. First, he comes to recognize that the enemy is "like a person!" (146), instead of some animal or monster: "We understood then that we had been joined to him by a sudden, deep, passionate bond that was almost 'human'" (147). The connection on a human level with the enemy is at first greeted with joy, even ecstasy, among the boy and his friends. The connection frees the boy from his connection with his town's adults. Then, trying to help the black American soldier, the boy himself is taken prisoner by the man, and he feels rage and betrayal. The black soldier is killed by
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Approximate Word count = 1397
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)