Death by Water will certainly not be for those preferring a ‘‘novelistic novel'', but may appeal to those with an interest in form and the meditative, and the continual structuring or creating of ‘‘reality''.
DEATH BY WATER
Kenzaburo Oe
Atlantic/Allen & Unwin
Nobel prize-winning Kenzaburo Oe is one of Japan's highest-profile novelists, although despite increasing translations into English and French, among other languages, his influence remains mostly within his home country. A student of French literature in the 1960s, Oe, now in his ninth decade, incorporates Western literature, art, history and philosophy with Eastern folklore and history as well as personal memoir. The novel's title is taken from a section of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.
Oe's writing does not find universal favour, however, as he has long been considered a political dissident for his outspoken and written opposition to right-wing politics and conservative, imperial stances. Narrowing his potential readership still further, narrative and character development are of minimal importance in his novels, thrown aside for repetition and continual transformations of material. Oe is an intellectual, his writing concerned with existentialism, layers of meaning and interpretations, and reworkings of art in order to perform new versions of alternative realities.
Somewhat a cult writer locally, Kogito is accosted by the Caveman Group theatre company which is dedicating its entire rationale to (re)creating his oeuvre on the stage. Drawing on Brechtian techniques for ‘‘underground'' and transformative theatre, a main feature of its performances is audience participation, particularly the dog-tossing trope, where audiences react physically to an interpretation with shows of support or revilement. It is inevitably odd, and the characters, based in the Forest House, itself a metaphor for travelling from the outside world towards the inner sanctum of death, delight in endless musings and revisions on prior performances.
While the author's content and form have by necessity developed and changed focus over the decades, Oe claims that he desires to stand apart from other contemporary Japanese writers in his method of writing by elaboration. A reader could only agree with that, for it is fair to assent to the common criticism that he has been regurgitating the same material over and over again. To him his literary output is a ‘‘totality of differences within repetition''. This focus on form will alienate many, as he and his main character cheerfully acknowledge, but there are positives to this as well.
His work is experimental and bold; the characters and actions self-reflexive and reflecting on the transformative nature of art and reality; and the prose inclusive of haiku in depicting the seeming timelessness of the Japanese natural landscape. Authorial quirks combined with translation from Japanese also lead to amusing images, such as when Choko claims to have a ‘‘primordial muscle memory of how to handle the bottle''.
Death by Water will certainly not be for those preferring a ‘‘novelistic novel'', but may appeal to those with an interest in form and the meditative, and the continual structuring or creating of ‘‘reality''.
- Jessie Neilson is a University of Otago library assistant.
