I really liked “A Personal Matter”, but this collection of shorter stories seemed like a rehash of similar ideas. Or maybe they came first and I read these in reverse order.

3.5 stars
I almost DNF-ed this book (for the 2nd time), but I’m glad that I soldiered on. I particularly enjoyed the last two novellas, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness and Aghwee the Sky Monster. All of these novellas explore father-son relationships, and the narratives and trauma that can be passed on to family members.

The novella Prize Stock felt very out of place in this collection, and I wish it had been omitted. Maybe there is a connection I’m missing? The other stories all have clear connective threads: a (possibly mad) father who has trapped himself in a shed with his eyes and ears turned off from the world around him; a son who is born with a mental/cranial defect; a son obsessed with understanding and connecting with his father; a father obsessed with understanding and connecting with his son; the struggle to grasp what real and what is ‘madness’.

I found the writing style of the first (and longest) novella, The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, confusing and laborious to read. I often couldn’t tell who was speaking (perhaps this was intentional as our narrator seems to have a loose grasp on reality). Within a single paragraph there would be multiple voices and references to past, present, and delusion... I felt like I was looking at a cloudy sky: sometimes I could see the hint of a brilliant sun, but then it was quickly obscured by the cloudy writing style..

This collection for four novellas/short stories, translated by John Nathan, contains two of Kenzaburō Ōe's earlier works:

Prize Stock (飼育) [1957] - a short story written at the start of his career, and which won the prestiguous Akutagawa Prize.

Aghwee the Sky Monster (空の怪物アグイー) [1964] - one of the first of Ōe's stories inspired by the birth of his mentally handicaped son Hikari in 1963, and published at the same time as the better known A Personal Matter, where the father of the handicapped child makes a different choice.

and in addition:

Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness (われらの狂気を生き延びる道を教えよ) [1969]

The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away (みずから我が涙をぬぐいたまう日) [1972]

Overall a great overview of Ōe's earlier work and the origins for the themes in his later novels.

The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away

"His Majesty the emperor wipes my tears away with his own hand"
(a deliberate mistranslation by ultra-nationalist troops of Bach's German cantata "Da wischt mir die Tränen mein Heiland selbst ab")

The narrator of this unsettling novel is lying is hospital dying, or, rather, convinced he is dying, of liver cancer, wearing brass underwater goggles with lenses covered with green cellophane, and dictating a last testament, an account of his "Happy Days" in the valley where he lived as a child, during WW2. His account is, he claims, true to the past but not necessarily the present:

"When I sensed the difficulty in my liver was incurable, I declared my freedom from all bonds connecting me to the real world that was holding me dangling from its fingertips, so there's no telling whether I actually experienced what I say, correspondence in reality in itself has never meant anything anyway, "he" says. The truth is, I'm heading straight back towards my Happy Days in the past, and if bringing some detail in that past sharply to the surface requires it, I'm prepared to alter the present reality however I please."

The story is told in an indirect style. The words we are reading have been dictated to a nurse, whom the narrator refers to, to her frustration as "the acting executor of the will". In his account he refers to himself in the third party, and the book we read is frequently interrupted by brief discussions and disputes between the narrator, and the nurse, written in [[double square brackets]]. This rather elaborate style was one Oe was to move away from drastically in his later novels starting with Somersault in 1999, and the novella reads as quite a contrast to his more recent works.

The narrator's "Happy Days" (the score of the song "Happy Days are Here Again" even features in his text) were spent, as often in Oe's novels and his own life, in a remote valley deep in the forest. His "Happy Days" begin when, close to the end of World War 2, his father, a veteran of the Manchurian campaign, returns to the village, dying of cancer, and moves in, not to the house, but to the outhouse. His elder brother is still fighting in the War, but when he deserts it causes an irrecoverable split between his mother, worried for the brother's safety and "a certain party"(as she refers to his father from that day on), who regards him as a traitor.

"[[To make someone sound like an imaginary figure can be a way of debasing him, but it can also be a way of exalting him into a kind of idol. So please don't change to "father", keep on writing a certain party.]]"

The day Japan surrenders, his father, is persuaded to lead a makeshift rebellion by a small group of ultra-loyalist troops. But the escapade is a farce, the obese and crippled a certain party is towed out of the valley in a makeshift wagon ("a ridiculous box on top of two sawed-off logs"), joined by the narrator who is wearing a "fake helmet pulled down over his ears and his shirt of woven grass and his old trousers tied with a rope below his knees - lord knows why! - and his straw sandals." (per the mother). Their bizarre plan: to somehow steal 10 US airforce plans and bomb the Imperial Palace, hoping this will force the people to rise up. Except the whole plan unravels when, visiting a bank to legitimately withdraw some funds, they are mistaken for bank robbers and killed in a shoot-out.

Ever since his mother has belittled his father, and the narrator, with "malice [that] was threatening to pulverise the very bedrock of his identity", and the last will and testament we are reading is intended as the narrator's deferred revenge:

"At the end of the tape which the acting executor of the will would play when he had entered a coma he wanted to record the following words to his mother, who would be coming alone from the house in the valley: Please make sure you stay to observe my body decomposing; if possible I would like you to observe even my putrified and swollen insdudes burst my stomach and bubble out as gas and muddy liquid."

Oe's work is highly self referential and it was particularly fascinating to read this after Oe's[b:Death by Water|25110738|Death by Water|Kenzaburō Ōe|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1439857765s/25110738.jpg|44804509] novel Death by Water, written 35 years later . The narrator of that novel, a fictional alter-ego for Ōe , is himself also the author of an identical novel called "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away." In Death by Water "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away" is explained as a "grotesquely exaggerated" account of the author's father and "it also included what some critics perceived as a merciless caricature of my mother."

Fascinating 4 stars

Aghwee the Sky Monster

Aghwee the Sky Monster, published in 1964, was one of the first of Ōe's stories inspired by the birth of his mentally handicapped son Hikari in 1963, which was to become a near constant theme in his novels.

It's closer to a short story than even a novella and written in relatively unelaborate prose.

Unusually for Oe, the first person narrator here is not the father of the child, but rather a student employed as a companion for "D", a composer. (Itself significant, since Oe's son Hikari is a noted composer - is D living the life that his son would otherwise have fulfilled?).

D's son was born with a brain hernia, as with Hikari, but the composer makes a very different choice, working with a doctor to let his son die as an infant.

D now suffers from visions of "a fat baby in a white cotton nightgown, big as a kangaroo", which regularly descends from the sky to accompany him - Aghwee the Sky Monster, the spirit of his son. His former wife explains to the narrator "Our baby spoke once when it was alive and that was what it said - Aghwee."

He is now detached from the present world ("since I'm not living in the present time I musn't do anything here in this world that might remain or leave an imprint"), living only for his visits with Aghwee.

And the narrator writes the story many years later, prompted by an accident when he too sees Aghwee:

"When I was wounded by those children and sacrificed my sight in one eye, so clearly a gratuitous sacrifice, I had been endowed, if only for an instant, with the power to perceive a creature that had descended from the heights of the sky."

This is more of a foundation text that of high merit it its own regard, one for Oe completists. Indeed again this is a key reference in Death by Water, and also interesting to contrast to A Personal Matter, written in the same year, where the narrator makes a very different choice.

2.5 stars stand-alone, 4 when read with other stories.

Prize Stock

A short story written at the start of Ōe career, set in a remote valley (a signature Ōe theme) largely cut off after a flood washes away the main bridge.

The opening sets the scene nicely:
"My kid brother and I were digging with pieces of wood in the loose earth that smelled of fat and ashes at the surface of the crematorium, the makeshift crematorium in the valley that was simply a shallow pit...in search of remains, micely shaped bones we could use as medals to decorate our chests"

The story is set during the Second World War but "to us the war was nothing more than the absence of young men in our village and the announcements the mailmen sometimes delivered of soldiers killed in action."

When a black American airman is shot down and captured, the villagers treat him as a "catch", like a wild boar - "until we know what the town thinks. [we're going to] rear him."

With the children, "engrossed in the first real experience of their lives" in charge, the scene seems set for a Lord-of-the-Flies type narrative of child cruelty, but a connection opens up:"we were jolted by the discovery that he could almost smile. We understood then that we had been joined to him by a sudden, deep, passionate bond that was almost 'human.'"

Overall, a rather simple story much less developed that his later work, even that in this volume. 2 stars

Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness [1969]

Another short story/novella with an arresting start:

"In the winter of 196-, an outlandishly fat man came close to being thrown to a polar bear bathing in a filthy pool below him and had the experience of nearly going mad."

This experience, explained later in the story, leads him to "be released from the fetters of an old obsession" (that his handicapped son can't live without him constantly at his side) and also to resolve to "cast off another heavy restraint", calling his mother to demand she return the draft manuscript of a biography of his father.

His father died seemingly insane, spending his last year's locked away, not communicating with the outside world, in a storehouse, sitting in a barber's chair and getting increasingly obese: "He wanted to deny the reality of a world where Japan was making war on the China he revered"

And when his son, nicknamed Eeyore is born with a brain defect (a signature and autobiographical Oe theme), he comes to fear some heriditary link through himself. Hence his plea, to his mother, to elucidate the details of his father's last days, the secret of "not only of his father's self-confinement and death but the freakish something which underlay it" and hence to "Teach me, my mother, how we can outgrow our madness!"

This plea, from which the story takes its title, is a quote from "Night Falls on China,” by W.H. Auden, again another key Oe element being to take inspiration from a, typically British, poet.

Although short, the story successfully captures two of Oe's key themes - the relationship with his handicapped son (there is a particularly successful description of an eye examination, successfully conveying the bewilderment and terror likely felt by Eeyore) and his troubled relationship with his own parents.

Recommended - 4 stars.