Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 13, 1995 TAG: 9504130049
SECTION: NATL/ITNL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TERESA WATANABE LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: TOKYO LENGTH: Long
It should have been a crowning moment in the life of Kenzaburo Oe, Japan's brilliant, brooding novelist who won last year's Nobel Prize in literature: June 13, 1963, the day his first son was born.
Except that the baby did not look like a son. Or even a human. ``A monster.'' A two-headed monster with half his brains spilling out, Oe thought as he took his first look at the baby with the red, pinched face, mouth agape in a soundless scream, the tiny head swaddled in bloodied bandages.
Oe's reaction was expressed through Bird, the hero of his celebrated 1969 novel ``A Personal Matter.'' The book mirrors his life - in particular, the hellish week when he faced the choice between death and life for his son, freedom or bondage for himself:
``Like Apollinaire, my son was wounded on a dark and lonely battlefield that I have never seen, and he has arrived with his head in bandages. I'll have to bury him like a soldier who died at war.''
But the boy did not die.
``No longer would the sweet, easy tears of mourning melt it away as if it were a simple jelly. Swaddled in skin as red as shrimp which gleamed with the luster of scar tissue, the baby was beginning ferociously to live.''
The baby was still alive when Oe returned from a short writing assignment to Hiroshima, where the astonishing bravery of the atomic bomb survivors filled him with shame about his own attitudes. When the agonized victims had every reason to commit suicide but did not, when the doctors had every reason to give up but never faltered in trying to heal and comfort their patients, how could he deny the tiny life struggling to survive, his very own son?
Oe chose life - an operation to cut away the protruding brain mass and cover the hole in the skull with a plastic plate. He named his son Hikari, which means light.
Hikari now is 31. He is epileptic and knock-kneed. He is nearsighted and cross-eyed. He understands only simple conversations.
But from the depths of a damaged brain, he hears the melodies of an inner music. He has learned to transfer those chords to paper. Hikari has become a composer of classical music.
In the last three years, he has released two compact discs - short, simple compositions for flute, piano and guitar. Even before his father won the Nobel Prize, both CDs turned gold, with average sales of 160,000 - a smash in Japan's classical recording industry, which considers 10,000 sales a hit. In January, his CDs were released in the United States by Denon Records. And Hikari is bound for further fame. His uncle, noted filmmaker Juzo Itami (``Tampopo,'' ``A Taxing Woman''), has launched a project based on Oe's novel about a family's disabled son, ``A Quiet Life.''
Hikari's big break came in 1991, when he was ``discovered'' by Hiroyuki Okano, head of Western music for the Nippon Columbia record company. ``The Music of Hikari Oe,'' was released in 1992 and became the biggest seller ever in Nippon Columbia's classical music history, Okano says.
He says the smashing sales cannot be explained merely by the father's fame or by public curiosity about Hikari's disabilities. ``Hikari's music is very fresh,'' Okano says. ``Before Hikari, most classical CDs were geared toward commercialism or the scholarly extreme. But Hikari created a new music approachable by a broader audience.''
Some critics call his music pure and beautiful and say that's why it sells so well. Others deem it unremarkable.
Hikari's success as an artist in his own right marks a new passage for father and son. For three decades, Oe has served as Hikari's alter ego, expressing through his works what his son could not articulate for himself. The mission consumed him, changed his literature and, some say, drew his focus away from the broad social issues that created his original celebrity as the voice of Japan's disenchanted postwar generation.
Now, at 60, Oe says that mission is over.
``Hikari has learned to communicate directly with society himself,'' says Oe, with a satisfied smile.
Hikari has expanded Oe and inspired him, fed his dreams and filled his life. He has changed Oe's very concept of manhood, says the writer, who revealed his own transformation in ``A Personal Matter.''
The protagonist Bird begins the novel with a brawl - the quintessential way men have proven their worth through the ages - and ends it with a far more exacting measure of manhood: ``All I want is to stop being a man who continually runs away from responsibility.''
It was thus for Oe.
On a recent evening, he stood sauteing onions that Hikari minced as they made curry together, an occasional ritual to give Oe's wife, Yukari, a break. As Oe stirred the onions in the blackened wok, he recalled his days as Japan's ``enfant terrible,'' the precocious writer who stunned the literary world by winning the coveted Akutagawa Prize while still in college in 1958, with unapologetically leftist works.
But the success oppressed him. He says he was immature and dangerously unstable, staggering under his fame and the fearsome burden of being the spokesman for an entire generation set adrift by the destruction of their values after World War II. And then his creative juices ran dry. He had nothing to write. He says he felt doomed.
When his son was born, Oe felt it personified his life's dead end. But as he anguished over what to do, he was forced into an inescapable showdown with himself and his fears.
His decision to take on the lifelong responsibility to cherish and nurture a brain-damaged son replenished him, giving him new power and creative direction and even a sort of spiritual meaning for a confirmed agnostic.
``I felt I was reborn,'' Oe said. ``My creed became: `If we can live through our difficulties, we can find a new dimension in life.' Without this accident, my life would have been doomed as a decadent writer who lived desperately and died early. I would have stopped writing and possibly committed suicide.''
Oe thought he was saving Hikari that summer day when he decided on the operation. But in fact, he says, Hikari saved him.
by CNB