Reviewed by Will Eells<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Death by Water<\/em>, Kenzaburo Oe\u2019s latest novel to be translated into English, practically begs you to read it as autobiography. Like The Changeling<\/em>, as well as many other works not yet released in English, Death by Water<\/em> is narrated in the first person by Kogito Choko, a septuagenarian writer with published works including The Silent Cry<\/em> and The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away<\/em>. If those titles sound familiar to you, it\u2019s because those actually are real-life titles by Oe, The Day He Himself<\/em> in particular being a part of the collection Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness<\/em>.<\/p>\nAs a matter of fact, Death by Water<\/em> is in many ways a direct response to The Day He Himself, and few pages go by without it being mentioned. The reason? Death by Water<\/em> is essentially the story of Choko (our Oe stand-in) trying to re-write the same dramatic event of his childhood as fictionalized in The Day He Himself<\/em>, i.e. the sudden drowning of his father. However, while The Day He Himself is a deliberately grotesque and stylized dramatization of the event, Death by Water<\/em> is a sort of metafiction, a writer writing about the act of writing.<\/p>\nThe plot, such as it is, finds Oe\u2019s stand-in Choko aware of the coming end of his writing career. Besides a monthly opinion piece for the newspaper, he hardly writes anymore. Ten years after his mother\u2019s death, he suddenly gets the chance to retrieve his late father\u2019s old, red leather trunk, containing his notes, diary entries, and evidence of his failed coup attempt after World War II and his escape from perceived authorities leading to his death by drowning. Choko feels he can finally write a definitive version of this turn of events, as in his old age he finds his previous effort, the aforementioned The Day He Himself<\/em>, to be \u201can embarrassingly immature piece of work.\u201d At the same time, he becomes involved with an avant-garde theater company The Caveman Group, who in the past has dramatized Kogito\u2019s work for the stage, and is hoping to create a new work in tandem with the \u201cdrowning novel\u201d Kogito now wants to write. The thing is, about a third of the way through the novel, Kogito discovers his mother has already destroyed most of the trunk\u2019s contents, and Kogito finds himself unable to continue his work.<\/p>\nAnd yet, Death by Water<\/em> continues to amble on for another three hundred or so pages, the ponderous middle section a more generous reviewer might call \u201creflective,\u201d as Oe reconnects with his past, and reflects on the act of writing itself. The novel is absurdly self-aware, as Kogito\/Oe reflects on his own quirks and failures as a writer. He even poses the question directly in a conversation with a friend, who complains:<\/p>\n\u201cAt some point, doesn\u2019t it become overkill? I mean, can these serial slices of thinly veiled memoir really be considered genuine novels? . . . Why do you choose to write about such a solipsistic and narrowly circumscribed world?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything you say is true,\u201d I said. \u201cI admit that freely . . . but I always seem to come back to the sobering realization that if I hadn\u2019t used the quasi-autobiographical approach I wouldn\u2019t have been able to write anything at all. In other words, I\u2019ve had to maintain this narrow focus out of sheer necessity.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
And while it\u2019s true that there seems to always be a pretty strong basis of fact in even Oe\u2019s early work, anyone who has read said work would know that Oe is capable of some fantastic, bizarre, and unreal stories. The contrast between Kogito\/Oe\u2019s early and late works becomes a major question of Death by Water<\/em>, one that even Oe doesn\u2019t seem to know how to answer. So what is better: youthful expressionism and raw creativity or the maturity, wisdom, and hindsight of experience?<\/p>\nIt\u2019s hard to say what Oe the writer or Kogito the character thinks on the matter. Are the late works, as Adorno says, catastrophes? Or, in the more hopeful interpretation of Edward Said, are the late works: \u201cthrillingly catastrophic work that manages to overturn and surpass all the creations that went before?\u201d<\/p>\n
Oe seems to be hopeful of the latter, but I wouldn\u2019t say that Death by Water<\/em> is a successful example. The novel is overly long, disjointed, and aimless, particularly once the narrative thread suddenly revs up in the last hundred pages, and a more compelling story emerges when Unaiko, Kogito\u2019s main liaison and friend in The Caveman Group, attempts to dramatize her own painful past via an abandoned script of Kogito\u2019s to a conservative audience unwilling to deal with the issues it presents.<\/p>\nOh, Unaiko, the true star of this show! One of the few characters in the novel who feels like a character and not simply a soapbox for Kogito to argue with, Unaiko has a story that needs telling, and a version of Death by Water<\/em> two hundred pages shorter and more evenly split between Kogito and Unaiko\u2019s creative relationship to their respective past histories seems like it would\u2019ve made these questions of life influencing art and art influencing life much more entertaining and thought-provoking. Perhaps a younger writer would\u2019ve dramatized her story directly. But even that raises the question: who gets to tell it; who is allowed<\/em> to tell Unaiko\u2019s story? Is Oe being respectful by not appropriating a woman\u2019s more powerful and engaging story, one that could very well be more or less \u201ctrue\u201d for his own dramatic ends? Or is Oe, with his limitations as a writer, simply incapable of writing the story any other way?<\/p>\nDeath by Water<\/em> raises these interesting questions about mortality, political correctness, art cannibalizing life, and frankly, art cannibalizing itself, but comes up with few satisfactory answers. It is appropriately ambitious for a late work, but by being overly long, digressive, and didactic, Death by Water<\/em> is more the bad catastrophic than the good. This doesn\u2019t make Oe suddenly a bad writer\u2014but a novel addressing your flaws as a novelist does not absolve you of said sins. Maybe just write a different novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Death by Water\u00a0by Kenzaburu Oe translated from the Japanese\u00a0by Deborah Boliver Boehm 432 pgs. | pb | 9781101911914 | $16.00 Grove Atlantic Reviewed by Will Eells Death by Water, Kenzaburo Oe\u2019s latest novel to be translated into English, practically begs you to read it as autobiography. Like The Changeling, as well as many other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":404862,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[64716,30566,21726,1286,30546,1646,28316],"class_list":["post-304716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","tag-death-by-water","tag-deborah-boliver-boehm","tag-grove-press","tag-japanese-literature","tag-kenzaburo-oe","tag-review","tag-will-eells"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304716"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":404932,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304716\/revisions\/404932"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/404862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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