Scan barcode
namtabon's review
4.0
ผลงานเคนซาบุโรที่ได้ nobel prize เนื้อหาแบบ dark จับจิต วิพากษ์การเมืองของประเทศญี่ปุ่น และปัญหาสังคมต่างๆมากมาย รวมถึงพูดเรื่องการร่วมเพศแบบถึงพริกถึงขิง ฉากบรรยายการสำเร็จความใคร่ตัวเอง บรรยายไปสยิวกิ้วแล้ว real มากๆ เรื่องนี้แบ่งเป็น 2 part คือ seventeen & J ตามชื่อเรื่อง ชอบทั้งสองเรื่องเลย แต่ประทับใจเรื่องแรกมากกว่า และก็อิงกับบริบทความขวาจัดของประเทศเรา การเป็น ultra royalist จักรพรรดินิยมได้เป็นอย่างดี
archer_sloane's review
dark
medium-paced
2.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual assault, Sexual harassment, and Sexual violence
arirang's review
2.0
Despite his Nobel Prize win, Kenzaburō Ōe rather suffers from patchy translation. Very few of his recent novels have been translated and his earlier works are available from a wide variety of translators by a range of publishers and in a series of now often difficult to obtain editions.
This English edition was published, by Blue Moon books, in 1996, so just after the 1994 Nobel win, and contains two relatively early Ōe novellas, both translated by Luk van Haute (better known for translations from Japanese into Dutch).
Seventeen, published in January 1961, is inspired by a real life incident from 1960, when a seventeen-year old right-wing extremist stabbed to death the chairman of the Socialist Party, following a period of political turmoil over the Japan/US Mutual Security Treaty.
A month later, Ōe wrote a follow up story, A Political Youth Dies, which was so controversial that it has never been reprinted in Japan, or, at Ōe's request, translated into English, since. In a helpful introduction, Masao Miyoshi explains the story of A Political Youth, and intriguingly hails it as a more mature, ambiguous and rounded work than the "hyperbolic caricature of a fanatic adolescent" that is Seventeen.
It's obviously hard for me to comment on A Political Youth but unfortunately Seventeen does rather live down to Miyoshi's summary, perhaps told too closely to the turbulent events of the time to allow Ōe proper authorial distance.
The story, told in the present tense, starts on the first person narrator's seventeenth birthday. Initially he is more preoccupied with masturbation than politics. Full of self-loathing he seems more angry generally than of any specific ideology, indeed his anger is initially aimed at the right:
"The day will come when I'll stab the enemy to death with this Japanese sword. The enemy who I, like a man, will skewer.
That sudden realisation comes to me with a premonition that's brimming with fierce confidence. But where is this enemy of mine? My enemy, is he my father? Is my enemy my sister? The American soldiers from the base? The men in the UDF? The Conservative politicians? Wherever my enemies are, I'll kill them. I'll kill them, I say with the same low cries."
His world is populated with similarly unpleasant teenagers - a classmate who "enthusiastically notes the names of the girls who watch from the sidelines. He keeps a chart of the menstrual cycle of every girl in school. He knows who's safe according to the Ogino rhythn method, and he makes a point of telling them what days they can do it. 'I'm available any time,' he adds."
Through this student, the narrator is hired as a rent-an-audience (a "Sakura") for a right-wing activist, Sakakibara of the Imperial Way Party, ranting outside a commuter station, and he finds a new target for his hostility:
"My hostility and hate I turn solely on the real world, solely on the Others. Always I've been blaming myself, always attacking my weaknesses and covering them with the mud of self-loathing ...
Before long, like it's a dream, my ears start to pick up the words of malice and hate which I myself am slinging at the others of the real world. In fact, it is Sakakibara who's speaking these words, but his expressions of malice and hate are exactly the same as those in my own heart. Sakakibara is my soul screaming."
He joins the Imperial Way, where he discovers oratory skills are not in high demand amongst the rank-and-file: "[Conservative party members] thrash us with words, but we answer by glaring at them in threatening silence, and it soon becomes obvious we're in the right. It never does us any good to associate with those garrulous creatures."
He gradually becomes a rising star of the movement, the most fanatical and violent of the members (at least in his account), and the story appears to be heading for a bloody climax. But without its sequel "A Political Youth", which goes on to describe the narrator's personal and political development, culminating in assassination and suicide, the story is rather unfulfilled.
The Japanese title of the second novella, J, would translate as Sexual Humans, although the translator made the old call that this is "as odd in Japanese as to be nearly untranslatable, hence in his volume altered to J, the protagonist's name." [end of pet peeve]
The first half of the novella describes the 29 year-old J (his nickname), son of a steel company president, and his bohemian acquaintances; Mitsuko, his film-director wife, his sister (a sculptor), a 27 year old actor called "Boy", a middle-aged cameraman, a 25 year old poet and Keiko, a 18 year-old jazz singer and J's lover with a penchant for nudity - who go to J's vacation house to shoot scenes for his wife's short film.
It's a more rounded story than Seventeen, but exactly what point Ōe is trying to make, in describing their tangled love lives, is unclear.
The second half of the novella is set some months later.
J is on the Tokyo underground system, with a 60 year old friend, and sees an 18 year-old "chikan" (a man who gropes women on crowded public transport - albeit normally chikan are older) in the act. He is far from subtle, but intervening they save him from the angry passengers on the pretence that they will take him to the police, but then reveal themselves as fellow chikan.
The boy claims to be a poet:
"'For a long time I've been planning to write a great poem called "Solemn Tightrope Walking,"' the boy said with passion. 'It's a poem like a tempest, with perversion as its theme. So there's a chicken and egg relationship between the poem and me as a pervert.'"
Although when asked if he'd written any lines he responds "Poetry isn't like that. At least mine isn't. One day I know I've finished the necessary preparation to write this poem."
"A Solemn Tightrope Walk" is also the name of an essay Oe himself wrote discussing Seventeen and J, and he explained that "solemn" referred to the fact that acts which for the observer appeared to be absurd balancing acts, were dead serious for the performer. The young boy attributes this quality to the Chikan (which rather ignores the effect on the victim).
Of course a tightrope walk also implies danger, and the danger for the chikan is being caught. And but for that danger, there is no thrill. When one victim willingly goes to a hotel with J, he loses all desire for her.
"Doesn't the idea of a safe Chikan bother you?' the boy repeated.
'You're right it does. But if it is really the destiny of the deviant to be caught and to experience the ultimate humiliation and taste the greatest danger, there's no need to hurry it is there?"
The second half of J is ultimately the strongest part of the two novellas, even if the subject matter is rather unpleasant.
Overall - early and immature works, for Ōe completists but certainly not where I would recommend anyone to start.
This English edition was published, by Blue Moon books, in 1996, so just after the 1994 Nobel win, and contains two relatively early Ōe novellas, both translated by Luk van Haute (better known for translations from Japanese into Dutch).
Seventeen, published in January 1961, is inspired by a real life incident from 1960, when a seventeen-year old right-wing extremist stabbed to death the chairman of the Socialist Party, following a period of political turmoil over the Japan/US Mutual Security Treaty.
A month later, Ōe wrote a follow up story, A Political Youth Dies, which was so controversial that it has never been reprinted in Japan, or, at Ōe's request, translated into English, since. In a helpful introduction, Masao Miyoshi explains the story of A Political Youth, and intriguingly hails it as a more mature, ambiguous and rounded work than the "hyperbolic caricature of a fanatic adolescent" that is Seventeen.
It's obviously hard for me to comment on A Political Youth but unfortunately Seventeen does rather live down to Miyoshi's summary, perhaps told too closely to the turbulent events of the time to allow Ōe proper authorial distance.
The story, told in the present tense, starts on the first person narrator's seventeenth birthday. Initially he is more preoccupied with masturbation than politics. Full of self-loathing he seems more angry generally than of any specific ideology, indeed his anger is initially aimed at the right:
"The day will come when I'll stab the enemy to death with this Japanese sword. The enemy who I, like a man, will skewer.
That sudden realisation comes to me with a premonition that's brimming with fierce confidence. But where is this enemy of mine? My enemy, is he my father? Is my enemy my sister? The American soldiers from the base? The men in the UDF? The Conservative politicians? Wherever my enemies are, I'll kill them. I'll kill them, I say with the same low cries."
His world is populated with similarly unpleasant teenagers - a classmate who "enthusiastically notes the names of the girls who watch from the sidelines. He keeps a chart of the menstrual cycle of every girl in school. He knows who's safe according to the Ogino rhythn method, and he makes a point of telling them what days they can do it. 'I'm available any time,' he adds."
Through this student, the narrator is hired as a rent-an-audience (a "Sakura") for a right-wing activist, Sakakibara of the Imperial Way Party, ranting outside a commuter station, and he finds a new target for his hostility:
"My hostility and hate I turn solely on the real world, solely on the Others. Always I've been blaming myself, always attacking my weaknesses and covering them with the mud of self-loathing ...
Before long, like it's a dream, my ears start to pick up the words of malice and hate which I myself am slinging at the others of the real world. In fact, it is Sakakibara who's speaking these words, but his expressions of malice and hate are exactly the same as those in my own heart. Sakakibara is my soul screaming."
He joins the Imperial Way, where he discovers oratory skills are not in high demand amongst the rank-and-file: "[Conservative party members] thrash us with words, but we answer by glaring at them in threatening silence, and it soon becomes obvious we're in the right. It never does us any good to associate with those garrulous creatures."
He gradually becomes a rising star of the movement, the most fanatical and violent of the members (at least in his account), and the story appears to be heading for a bloody climax. But without its sequel "A Political Youth", which goes on to describe the narrator's personal and political development, culminating in assassination and suicide, the story is rather unfulfilled.
The Japanese title of the second novella, J, would translate as Sexual Humans, although the translator made the old call that this is "as odd in Japanese as to be nearly untranslatable, hence in his volume altered to J, the protagonist's name." [end of pet peeve]
The first half of the novella describes the 29 year-old J (his nickname), son of a steel company president, and his bohemian acquaintances; Mitsuko, his film-director wife, his sister (a sculptor), a 27 year old actor called "Boy", a middle-aged cameraman, a 25 year old poet and Keiko, a 18 year-old jazz singer and J's lover with a penchant for nudity - who go to J's vacation house to shoot scenes for his wife's short film.
It's a more rounded story than Seventeen, but exactly what point Ōe is trying to make, in describing their tangled love lives, is unclear.
The second half of the novella is set some months later.
J is on the Tokyo underground system, with a 60 year old friend, and sees an 18 year-old "chikan" (a man who gropes women on crowded public transport - albeit normally chikan are older) in the act. He is far from subtle, but intervening they save him from the angry passengers on the pretence that they will take him to the police, but then reveal themselves as fellow chikan.
The boy claims to be a poet:
"'For a long time I've been planning to write a great poem called "Solemn Tightrope Walking,"' the boy said with passion. 'It's a poem like a tempest, with perversion as its theme. So there's a chicken and egg relationship between the poem and me as a pervert.'"
Although when asked if he'd written any lines he responds "Poetry isn't like that. At least mine isn't. One day I know I've finished the necessary preparation to write this poem."
"A Solemn Tightrope Walk" is also the name of an essay Oe himself wrote discussing Seventeen and J, and he explained that "solemn" referred to the fact that acts which for the observer appeared to be absurd balancing acts, were dead serious for the performer. The young boy attributes this quality to the Chikan (which rather ignores the effect on the victim).
Of course a tightrope walk also implies danger, and the danger for the chikan is being caught. And but for that danger, there is no thrill. When one victim willingly goes to a hotel with J, he loses all desire for her.
"Doesn't the idea of a safe Chikan bother you?' the boy repeated.
'You're right it does. But if it is really the destiny of the deviant to be caught and to experience the ultimate humiliation and taste the greatest danger, there's no need to hurry it is there?"
The second half of J is ultimately the strongest part of the two novellas, even if the subject matter is rather unpleasant.
Overall - early and immature works, for Ōe completists but certainly not where I would recommend anyone to start.
More...