“About the movie. . .”
“I’ll give you the 16-millimeter Arriflex. Mitsuko has money in the bank in her own name, from selling the first film. And you don’t need to worry about the money my father invested.”
“J, thank you,” the bearded cameraman said. He was moved. Suddenly his shoulders began to shake as softly as a woman’s, releasing all the tension from his body. He returned to the work space with childish sobs in the back of his throat.
For some time J stayed in bed, lying on his back without moving. No thoughts came to him. Occasionally he could hear his wife and the cameraman whispering in the work space. Then he packed his clothes and personal belongings in a suitcase, went down the kitchen stairs to the garage without speaking to his wife, and, for the first time in months, got into the Jaguar. J drove to the headquarters of a steel company in Marunouchi to visit his father, who was president, of the company. He told his father about the divorce and asked him to understand what had happened and why he would be moving back into his father’s house that same day. J’s father smiled gently as he heard J out. Then he asked, “How old are you?”
“I’m thirty,” J replied. The word thirty echoed oddly in his ears. In some strange way he felt guilty. Thirty? At this age, he was no longer a child.
“You’ve lived like a fugitive in hiding ever since your first wife killed herself. But now your second wife has been sleeping with another man, and she’s leaving you. Doesn’t that even things up? How about it? You’re thirty already, aren’t you about ready to start leading a normal life again? This company is building a revolutionary mercury-alloy plant, and as part of the groundwork, I’m going on a tour of our American partners. Why don’t you come along as my secretary? And why don’t you take a job at the new plant? I’ll show you some slides of a forty-story building that was built with nothing but this alloy. It’ll excite you. It’s something worth doing. I know you’re going to take me up on my offer and start a new life for yourself!”
J thought about the offer as he sat watching the slide show with his father. Now that his old friends and wife had left him, one new friend had died in an accident, and the other had vanished into the crowd of ten million people in Tokyo, he was completely alone. This was certainly a chance to return to his old conformist life. To his real life. Of course he knew that it was self-deception, even emotionally, to cancel out his sense of responsibility and guilt for his first wife’s suicide with his second wife’s adultery and betrayal. But wasn’t the very act of acknowledging that self-deception the first step in his rehabilitation to the life of a conformist? He felt that he was beginning now to lay one self-deception on top of another and would go on doing so until he was indistinguishable from the aging monster who was sitting beside him, growling like a disgruntled animal as he watched his color slides. It felt like resignation, and at the same time it felt like being rescued after drifting at sea for too long, even if it was rescue by an enemy ship . . .
In the end J gave in to his father and accepted the offer. His departure for America was three weeks away. His daily life would suddenly turn full circle. As he left the president’s office, walked down the long corridor, and got into the elevator, he imagined his father, whom he had just left, as the image of himself forty years from now. His father now and himself in forty years, both would remain perfectly composed even if they had cancer or faced the risk of cardiac infarction. Neither would ever lose the poker face of the old conformist monster. Yes, his new life as a self-deceiving conformist had just begun. Swinging his shoulders vigorously like a busy, capable, company man, he exited through the automatic door of the building and headed toward his Jaguar, which was parked next to the subway entrance. Suddenly he was so excited he thought he would faint. Abandoning the Jaguar, he ran, nearly jumped, down the stairs into the subway.
He boarded a crowded subway car and, without hesitating, advanced steadily through the tight throng of bodies. With no uncertainty, almost as if by prior arrangement, he arrived at a spot behind a young woman. He took a quick look around. The sound of hot blood ringing in his ears had already swallowed up the rumbling of the train and the noise of the passengers’ voices. He closed his eyes tightly and rubbed his naked penis repeatedly in the warm intimacy of the girl’s buttocks. They were fat as a pheasant’s and they offered him resistance. At once he saw himself as someone who was taking a step forward with no possibility of retreat. A new life, a new life with no deception. With low moans sounding in his blazing head, he climaxed.
All the outside clamor sprang to life again. Surely and ineradicably staining the woman’s coat, his semen was real, a piece of evidence. The ten million strangers of Tokyo glared at J with hostile eyes. J! they seemed to call. Fear struggled against bliss in a wave that rose up interminably and engulfed him. Countless arms had seized him. Overcome with fear, J began to cry. He considered his tears to be his compensation for those his wife had cried the night she killed herself.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KENZABURŌ ŌE was born in 1935 on a remote part of Japan’s Shikoku island. He is credited in part with the modernization and internationalization of Japanese intellectual tradition in the latter half of the twentieth century. Storytelling played a prominent role in Ōe’s childhood. In particular, his grandmother provided an early, defiant framework for the novellas for which he gained recognition early in his career, including Seventeen and The Death of a Political Youth. Her stories were an antidote to the strong imperial influence of his elementary education—crucially, during the period of Japan’s descent into the Second World War. Propelled by his belief in democracy’s viability and necessity following the war, he left for Tokyo to study Rabelais and quickly became enmeshed in the cultural life of the city. He began publishing while still a student and gained a name as a stylist even more accomplished than Yukio Mishima, ten years his senior. In 1994, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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Kenzaburo Oe, Seventeen & J: Two Novels
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