Author: Oe Kenzaburo
plot
During the war, a black man from a crashed plane is stranded in a village. The villagers do not know what to do with him because they are awaiting instructions from the government. They “rear” him like livestock temporarily, and the children develop a fascination with him. They soon learn to coexist and have fun with him. This all ends when the adults receive an order to escort the black man to the town; the black man takes the protagonist hostage. The protagonist’s father kills the black man, smashing the boy’s hand in the process. The boy loses his innocence and is no longer a child.
themes
- Centrality and peripherality
- Centralization
- Modernization
- Alienation
- Classism
- Town
- Not standard convention
- Emphasis
- Differentiation
- Discomfort
- Resentment
- Insecurity
- Shame
- Not East versus West
- Human experience
- Child prone to fears
- Powerful
- Threatening
- Not East versus West
- Mob mentality
- Dehumanization vs. shared humanity
- Sexuality and violence
- Libidinal energy
- Fascination
- Body
- Movement
- Excretion
- Not sexuality yet
- Curiosity
- Admiration
- Desire
- Discomfort
- Aggression
- Vulnerability
- Insecurity
- Aggression
- Depiction of disability
- Harelip
- Clerk
- The boy’s hand
- Depiction of multilingual environment
- Through logic
- Lost in narration
- Depictions of the enemy in Japanese war fiction
- Often absent
- Force of nature
- Survive
- Force of nature
- Focus on struggle of soldiers
- Firebombing
- Wood
- Closely packed
- War planes
- Rare
- Wood
- Often absent
- WWII and Japanese psyche
- Forgetting
- Aggressor
- Colonizer
- Victimhood
- Defeat
- Destruction
- National infrastructure
- Loss of generation
- Atomic weapons
- Forgetting
- Race, homogeneity, global racism, and local iteration
- Imagined difference
- Discrimination
- Based on skin tone
- Global discourse
- White supremacy
- Imperialism
- Local discourse
- Colorism
- Valorize lighter skin
- Marker of civilization
- Merging discourses
questions
- Why does Harelip have the conviction that the black man cannot be the enemy?
- Americans = white
- Is it war when there is only one enemy who is human?
- How did Clerk die? Why?
- Children using tail piece as sled
- Hits head on rock
- Death in war
- Unexpected
- Trivial
- Responsibility
- Village killing soldier
- Cost extracted from village
- Karma
- Linked deaths
- Wood to burn
- Preserve body
- Genoa Convention
- Children using tail piece as sled
notes & thoughts
- The protagonist’s fascination with the black man almost seems erotic
- Rage, disappearing mutual understanding
- Adults losing sight of true human connection
- Childlike innocence and goodness — blank slate
- Lost innocence and trust = no longer a child
- Caught up in the mob energy of war and violence (🔗 The Hive)
analysis
- Uses blackness to work through own questions
- Mature great deal after writing
- Bildungsroman
- Realization of separation (^914f88)
- Wounds and scars
- Physical
- Psychic
- Broken illusion
- Safety
- Protection
- Revelation
- Separation of Self from Other
- Apocalyptic deliverance
- Separation of Self from Other
- Broken illusion
- Bookended
- Death
- Cremation
- Changed attitudes
- Contraction of membrane’s boundary (quote)
narratorial positionality and affect
- Child
- Sheltered perspective
Circular transclusion detected: notes/Prize-Stock
- Detachment
- Not author’s perspective
- Pushed outside through narrative ^914f88
- Realization that child and mother are not same
- Separation
- Individualization
- Broken illusion of unity
- Realization that child and mother are not same
- Ignorance
- Detachment from
- War
- Death
- Detachment from
- Naivety
- Typical child narration
- Narrator
- Narrator prime
- Same character
- Later point in time
- Looking back at moment
- Implied secondary position
- Limitations
- More than letting on
- Same character
- Retrospective vs. present
- Sophisticated language
- Childlike comprehension
- Unrealistic
- Powerful
- Childlike comprehension
- Reactive
- Feelings swing
- Insecure
- Chip on shoulder
- Control
- Wants admiration
- Special connection with soldier
- Bond
- Betrayal
- Agression
- Special connection with soldier
- Sheltered perspective
- Sexuality: polymorphous perversity (Sigmund Freud)
- Sensation
- Pleasure
- No form yet
- No structure of erotic desire
- Libidinal energy
- Looking at the body of the soldier
- Identification and alterity
- Alterity
- Opposite of identity
- Otherness
- Identity
- Sameness
- Sources of tension
- Village and town
- Soldier and parents
- Alterity
- Emotional intensity and valence: affect
- Anxiety
- Curiosity
- Fear
- Empathy
- Anger
- Insecurity
- Shame
- Judgment
references
highlights
My brother and I laughed until our blood seethed like liquor – p. 353
My brother and I were small seeds deeply embedded in thick flesh and tough, outer skin, green seeds soft and fresh and encased in membrane that would shiver and slough away at the first exposure to light… . The war did not penetrate the tough outer skin and the thick flesh. – p. 354
Only the children were drowning in the flood of sunlight. My chest tightened with anxiety. – p. 355
Anticipation that was like madness, a heated, drunken feeling, was crackling up and down beneath my skin. – p. 357
Fear, awakened by their pounding feet, pursued them from behind. – p. 359
Violent, dark exhaustion and landsliding disappointment buried me. – p. 369
a faint repulsion connected to desire – p. 375
Shame
Inside a sticky black bag my hot eyelids, my burning throat, my searing hand began to knit me and give me shape. – p. 385
It was as if while I had been in bed the adults had been transformed into entirely inhuman monsters. – p. 387
Inversion of black man as beast
The war that like a flood washing away flocks of sheep and trimmed lawns in some distant country was never in the world supposed to have reached our village. But it had come, to mash my fingers and hand to a pulp, my father swinging a hatchet, his body drunk on the blood of war. And suddenly our village was enveloped in the war, and in the tumult I could not breathe. – p. 389
Father, not outsider, as war