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(★)(●´The Catch´［Titulo original : 飼育 (Shiiku, 1958), 大江健三郎 (Kenzaburo Oe)］-a black U.S. airman, held captive in a remote mountain village／ ● `Sakurajima´ ［桜島 (Sakurajima,1946), 梅崎春生 (Haruo Umezaki)］-the last, ominous summer of the war／ ●´Summer Flower´［夏の花 (Natsu no Hana, 1947), 原民喜(Tamiki Hara)］-a man wanders, seeing, unseeing, among the doomed voices of the atomic holocaust／ ●´Bones´［骨 (Hone, 1949), 林芙美子 (Fumiko Hayashi)］-a young mother, turned prostitute, reaches out for life.／ ◆The four stories printed in this book share one common theme --the impact of the Pacific War (1941-45) on the Japanese mind. Purists might complain of the absence of battle scenes in this volume. There are no blood-and-thunder descriptions of fighting, no naval engagements, no jungle fire fights, no dismembered hands hanging from barbed wire.／ It is true that none of these short stories is a pure ´war story´ in the strict sense of the term. Together, however, they compose a fugue based on the war and its aftermath. They are stories of human events that only occur during and as a result of that overwhelmingly inhuman event called war. And though ultimately and universally human, they are at the same time intrinsically Japanese.／ The aim of this collection is to present a spectrum of human situations in wartime, with the proviso that the standard scorched-earth muddy-foxhole drama is readily available on magazine racks or at least once weekly during the prime mid-evening TV viewing time. The emphasis is on tracing the war´s impact on people, not on representing a theater of war. And, being limited in terms of space, we felt obliged to forego a comprehensive picture of the Japanese reaction for a few compelling, typical examples.／ Literature, by definition, goes beyond the psychological case history, and though each of these stories is in its own way a personal record, they all belong to the realm of literature. Our selection was based on the principle that each must be enjoyable as a story, while providing a variety of locales, of characters, and individual responses.／ All the stories in this book were written after the war. Umezaki´s ´Sakurajima´ was published in 1946, immediately following the war, and Hara´s ´Summer Flower´ appeared in 1947. Hayashi´s ´Bones´ was written in 1948, and Ooe´s ´The Catch´ in 1958. Reading these four in their chronological order of publication, a noticeable difference in the tone of each story, in the attitudes of the central characters and of the writers themselves, should be apparent.／ The narrator-hero of ´Sakurajima´, being a petty officer in the navy, is a direct participant, however passive and reluctant, in the military war effort. We feel he is emotionally involved in the war, however aloof and detached he pretends to be. It is already July 1945 when the story begins, and Japan´s impending defeat is in the air. He knows that the landing of U.S. forces is a far from distant reality : ´... I became acutely conscious of something unseen tightening its ring around me and hemming me in.´ Though the story starts with the hero indulging in the common excesses of drink and a night with a prostitute, on the whole his responses are subdued. Being oppressed with a sense of ever-approaching death, he tries to acclimatize to its ´tightening ring´ instead of reacting to it in a violent way. There are no emotional outbursts, no violent conflicts. The tone of the story as a whole is reserved.／ ´Summer Flower´ by Tamiki Hara (1905-51) is even more personal than ´Sakurajima´. Indeed, it is almost straight autobiography, rather than fiction. The author was living in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city on August 6, 1945. He simply relates what happened to him on that fatal day and the following days. He neither comments nor moralizes ; he just reports. This restraint is all the more remarkable for the intensity and indescribable horror of that experience. The memory of that fatal moment may indeed have been instrumental in Hara´s tragic suicide four years after the publication of ´Summer Flower´.／ ´Bones´ by Fumiko Hayashi (1904-51), the only woman novelist represented in this anthology, belongs to a more conventional type of short story : a war widow taking to the streets --the theme seems almost too trite. But the heroine of ´Bones´ is hardly a passive victim, a mechanical doll used to prove some kind of simple determinism. She is thoroughly a victim of war and her country´s defeat, but one senses a certain desperate vitality in her. She is crushed by circumstances, by the shifting forces of the times, but at the same time a unique feminine vitality begins to emerge and assert itself. Her faithfulness to herself and to her dead husband is sacrificed, but she is awakened as a woman, and recovers a sort of self-confidence, however desperate.／ Kenzaburoo Ooe (1935- ) was only six when the war broke out, and there is a sense of aesthetic distance in ´The Catch´ ; it is not so much a personal record as a product of the imagination, a successful evocation of the sensuous world of the grade-school boy. Ooe´s style is remarkable for the freedom with which he uses metaphor --unusual in most Japanese writers, who employ this literary device sparingly and with great circumspection. Ooe sometimes seems to enjoy playing with metaphors for their own sake, but in ´The Catch´ his richly metaphorical style corresponds effectively to the acute, sensuous, and playful sensibility of the village boys.／ One Japanese critic spoke of its ´mischievous inhumanity´ when this story won the Akutagawa Prize. The remark applied not only to Ooe´s style but to his attitude as a novelist. The ´catch´ is a black American pilot caught and imprisoned by some villagers, and looked on and treated as a strange animal ; the boys of the village are particularly excited by their prize. But this is a story of initiation, and the point of the tale lies in the development of a human relationship between these boys and the captive airman. Neglected, left to their own devices by the village adults, the children learn this process for themselves, and an intimacy develops between these ´aliens´ and the alien in their midst. At the very moment of communion, however, the ´catch´ is killed, and the boys stand awestruck. Their initiation is double-edged, a discovery not only of the possiblities of human relationships, but of the evil inherent in human society. [from ´Introduction´]) |
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