Review Of Teach
Us To Outgrow Our Madness: Four Short Novels, by Kenzaburo Oe
Copyright © by Jessica Schneider, 5/5/10
I recently finished reviewing Oe’s well-known novel A Personal
Matter, and was impressed by the way he handled an otherwise PC situation
with maturity and not drenching the reader in sentimentality. This collection,
titled Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness: Four Short Novels offers a good
overview of Oe’s work, even if all the tales are not at the same levels of
quality. While the book claims these to be four short novels, they are really
long short stories, with exception for the first (and longest) story The Day
He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, which is probably the weakest tale in
the collection. It is not a bad story, but next to some of the others,
especially the best tale in the book, Prize Stock, it fades by
comparison.
The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away involves a narrator who is lying in a hospital bed,
believing he is dying of cancer. In addition, he wears a pair of underwater
goggles, which he has covered with dark cellophane. Amid his hypochondria, he
revisits the past, relaying the stories of his youth during the war. Overall,
the story has a lot of good potential, and it is a good story, just not
up to Oe’s best. For one thing, it is a bit too long, finishing at around 110
pages. The sections where the narrator is revisiting his wartime past, telling
his experience of how he heard the Emperor’s voice for the first time and what
a disappointment it was, are the most interesting. The weakest are those
involving his cancer obsession, and him getting agitated at the doctors for not
telling him what he wants to here, that he is in fact dying from it.
The second story in the collection, Prize Stock, is by far the
best and most memorable tale. Narrated by a child who discovers a black soldier,
many elements of racism are touched upon without being preachy. The child’s
voice accurately portrays a youth during that era, and the children marvel at
the black solder as if he were an animal, rather than person. In one scene,
where the boy and his friends notice the black soldier intelligently glancing at
a tool box, they exclaim how “he’s like a person.” They also notice the
things that young boys tend to notice, such as the soldier’s large genitals:
“Suddenly we discovered that the black soldier possessed a magnificent, heroic
and unbelievably beautiful penis.” Ultimately this tale not only touches upon
racism, but the actual process of growing into adulthood, for by the end of the
tale, the boy comments how he “was no longer a child,” and he does so after
referring to the nearby stench as “the nigger’s smell.” Prize Stock
is truly an outstanding piece of literature.
Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness touches upon some of the similar themes in A Personal
Matter, in that it involves a father and his mentally defective son. The
son’s name is Eeyore, and the father is incredibly obese. Oe doesn’t pass on
the opportunity to make some stabs at humor, for there are moments where the
humor seems to be tongue and cheek: “And so it came about one morning in the
winter of 196—that the fat man and his fat son set out for the zoo
together.” The moments where the father is telling the son about seeing versus
imagining while they are watching the animals at the zoo are some of the
strongest parts to the tale. Overall, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness is
a very good tale, just a notch below the previous one.
Lastly, the book ends with Aghwee the Sky Monster, which is a bit
odd. The story involves a man who is haunted by the ghost of a baby in a white
nightgown. Immediately, Beloved comes to mind, and I would not be shocked
if this story offered Toni Morrison some insights. It is still a solid tale,
despite not being as interesting as the previous two stories, and despite
lacking some of the stronger moments present in the first tale.
This collection is very good, with muscular writing and insights
sprinkled throughout. I only found one weak paragraph in the book, where Oe and
his translator (John Nathan) descend into cliché: “…his father telling him
as a child, on another stormy night, that life was like a family emerging from
the darkness, coming together for a brief time around a lighted candle, and then
disappearing one by one into their own darkness once again.”
While
this imagery is trite, the paragraph is forgivable since the narrator is
relaying what the boy’s father said, yet I would still make the argument that
better images could have been used. There is also an amusing introduction
written by Nathan, which gives a bit of background as far as Oe’s life. There
is a funny scene that Nathan describes, involving Oe and Kobe Abe while at a
party for Yukio Mishima, where Oe walks up to Mishima’s wife and calls her a
not so nice name in English. Nathan claims that after hearing Oe’s English, he
decided to be the translator for his work. Hyperbole or not, it makes for
entertaining reading.
Oe is definitely one of the Modern Masters, and this collection offers a
good selection of what one can expect from his writing. Though for those new to
Oe, I would still recommend reading A Personal Matter first, yet the
story Prize Stock is outstanding, and makes any weaknesses in this
collection seem irrelevant by comparison. Hell, even if the other three tales
were terrible, Prize Stock makes the collection worth it. More reviews of
his work will follow.
[An expurgated version of this
article originally appeared on the Blogcritics
website.]
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