Walking the Wall

I read a book last week called Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe, a Japanese author who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 (I wrote a short review here). It is a powerful and disturbing book that I felt on a first read dealt heavily with the idea of what it means to be human–especially in the topsy turvey world of war. Today I read his Nobel Lecture he gave on accepting the Nobel Peace Prize and I was struck by a few things. He says that two books fascinated him as a young boy living in a world engulfed by “waves of horror”–”Huckleberry Finn” and a “The Wonderful Adventures of Nils“. He says, “By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of secuirty which I could never find indoors” (1). And there is a line when Nils finally comes home and speaks to his parents and says, “I’m a big boy. I’m a human being again!”–Oe says, about his process as a writer, “I have found myself repeating, almost sighing, “I’m a human being again”.

He also speaks about his son, Hikari, who was born mentally handicapped and only responded to the voices of birds, not humans and his first human words were to identify birds and he eventually went on to compose music. Music that, at first, was full of innocence–which Oe defines as composed of “in” or not, and “nocere” or hurt–innocence is the state of not being hurt. But that as Hikari’s ability to compose and his focus deepened–his music became “the voice of a crying and dark soul”. This deepening of understanding “enabled him to discover in the depth of his heart a mass of dark sorrow which he had hitherto been unable to identify with words”. Further, “‘The voice of a crying and dark soul’ is beautiful, and Hikari’s act of expressing it in music cures him of his dark sorrow in an act of recovery”–and in turn cures and restores his listeners. (NOTE: You can listen to clips of Hikari’s music here, beautiful, I ordered the CD)

This opens up “Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids” even more for me, as Oe says that this book is his experience of war–not factual, but emotional. It is his metaphor for the effects of war and it opens up a mass of dark sorrow that is beautiful while it is disturbing

He ends his lecture saying, “I would like to seek how…I can be of some use in a cure and reconciliation of mankind”. A worthy goal of everyone.