Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness: Four Short Novels (1994) - Plot & Excerpts
What a way to finish up my tour of the great Japanese writers of the 20th century. It’s not often you can call a writer brave. Generally it’s reserved for writers who risked their own lives for their art. Alexander Solzhenitsyn would be a good example. But as I read the tales in Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, I could only stand in awe at how brave Kenzaburō Ōe was as a storyteller.Take the opening tale, “The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears.” It is told entirely from the prospective of an unnamed narrator, who spends his days in a hospital bed, dying from liver cancer, wearing thick underwater goggles covered in cellophane, dictating the story of his youth to a constantly interrupting stenographer who continually questions the motives of the narrator, the veracity of his account, and whether or not he truly has cancer (something the doctors dispute). The reader spends the entire story in the twisted headspace of the narrator, looped into his madness, as he recounts the tale of his sickly dying father accompanying a band of insurrectionists on a mission to restore Japan’s honor. As with his delusions of sickness, the narrator’s story of the insurrection is somewhat distorted, as if the cellophane over his goggles have changed his perception of days past. It is only the arrival of a third party later in the story that we learn the truth. Written as an angry parody in reaction to his friend Yukio Mishima’s grandiose suicide by hara-kiri, “The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears” explores one’s inability to escape the myth and identity of the past. The overall narrative is inventive and challenging for the reader, but the power of Ōe’s writing carries it through.Carrying through that theme of lost innocence and having one’s eyes ripped open to reality is the second story, “Prize Stock.” A black U.S. soldier is captured in a remote Japanese village during World War II. Kept in a dark dungeon, the soldier is viewed as a domestic animal by the local children including the narrator. Slowly, the soldier becomes more integrated into their daily lives, an important part of that particular summer of their youth. But when the local authorities decide to turn the soldier over to the prefecture, the children cannot abide the loss. This unleashes an ugly outcome that ends all innocence for the children. The story, grim and ugly in its portrayal of humanity, leaves one in awe, speechless at the gut punch it delivers.Equally adept at skewering himself, Ōe parodied his own life in the title story and “Aghwee the Sky Monster.” Ōe’s son, who he called “Pooh,” was born with brain damage. In many ways, the child forced Ōe to isolate himself from the rest of the world, both physically and emotionally. In the two lead characters of these stories, we find that same isolation, two fathers whose sons of have caused them to be misfits in society. The title story, in spite of its sadness is quite funny, including the horror show of doctors and nurses attempting to perform and eye exam on the child (named “Eeyore” by his father). But it is also sweet in its portrayal of the bond that forms between the father and son, an enjoyed co-isolation from the world. “Aghwee the Sky Monster” has an eerie sheen to it, rendered mostly in the lead character’s schizophrenia and guilt from a planned infanticide. In the end, there is redemption, but it comes with a steep price.In all these stories, Ōe puts his characters through the wringer. Redemption is hard-won. Innocence and identity are fleeting myths. And his portrayal of humanity’s ugliness is rendered beautifully.
I think I'm done with this book. One of these stories strangled me in my sleep, one of them sort of angrily shouted at me until I had learned my lesson, and one of them made me feel absolutely terrible up until the very end, whereupon, once more, I felt absolutely nothing. I don't want to know what's behind door number 4 for right now. I'm satisfied -- if you can call it that. But, mind you, all of these things I relate as stress on my body were actually... in a weird way... enjoyable? Is that the word?The first story took a long, long time to read. "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe my Tears Away" is probably the sickest thing I've ever read. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but it was just so painfully graphic in the most mentally aggravating way, and written (and translated?) in the most obtuse, indecipherable style. I took a break near the middle, waited two days, and then went back and took the last 60 pages in a sitting of pure terror. This man got a Noble Prize for literature for being the most disturbed Japanese author to ever try to make sense of his universe."Prize Stock" was sort of just annoying, but a lot easier to read and a whole different set of concepts to go with it. Go misguided empathy. Woo!"Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness" was my favorite part. Although that's not exactly hard, it was just so pure, so humble, so unrelentingly sad that I could not help but feel rewarded every time I turned the page. The language erupts in a beautiful overlap of flow and metaphor, and suddenly you have lines like:"Even if I escape all that, I'll probably go mad in thirty seconds of so--if it was madness that drove my father to confine himself for all those years until he died, how can I escape madness myself when his blood runs in me? ...when madness converts the passageway itself into a ruined maze, he'll have to back up into a state of idiocy even darker than before"This is where Oe gets the majority of his praise, I'd hope. While I totally recognize the merits of a piece like "The Day He Himself..." it's just so long, deep, and filled to the brim with everything scholarly fantastic that it deserves to be written in a style that's pleasurable, or at least rewarding, to read. It shouldn't be a chore. It was. I will, however, say that after reading the introduction, I really want to read Homo Sexualis and A Personal Matter, but most importantly I want to read a biography of this man. A portrait would be nice."...can you stand to think of him having nightmares he can't make any sense of?"
What do You think about Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness: Four Short Novels (1994)?
I climbed precariously on a chair to pluck this from the highest shelf. There's no way I could've read the spine from the ground. What was I looking for to start with? Celine? Instead, this title, which sounded at first like a self-help book worth skimming for a laugh.And, instead, the back: "Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness" tells of the close relationship between an outlandishly fat father and his mentally defective son, Eeyore. "Aghwee the Sky Monster" is about a young man's first job-- chaperoning a banker's son who is haunted by the ghost of a baby in a white nightgown. "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away" is the longest piece in this collection and Oe's most disturbing work to date. The narrator lies in a hospital bed eagerly waiting to die of liver cancer that he has probably imagined, wearing a pair of underwater goggles covered in dark cellophane.
—Ariel
I read three of the four novellas in this book, and they were breathtaking. The one remaining section is said in the introduction to be "Oe's most difficult and disturbing work to date." So I'm holding off until I have the time and energy to devote to it, and in the meantime, a student who read Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids wanted to read more by this author. (Always a good sign.)One novella hits starkly upon the irony of rural villagers treating a downed black American pilot like a piece of livestock -- while also revisiting some major themes of Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids. Another just takes your guts out, relaying the relationship between a father and his mentally disabled son -- a recurring theme in Oe's work, as the author's own son is autistic. And the last story, about a composer haunted by the ghost of a dead baby, speaks of just what loss can do to you.Beautiful. Looking forward to reading the fourth novella.
—Nora
(This review is for Prize Stock (Shiiku, 飼育), one of the novellas in Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness: Four Short Novels).Paul Theroux wrote that "the revolting Japanese author Kenzaburō Ōe says [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn] is his favorite book". v. How reliable this statement is I don't know, but the story of Prize Stock could be seen as sort of a dark, messed up retelling of Huckleberry. Trade the idyllic Mississippi River shore for Japan during WWII, make the character Jim a captured pilot and imagine an unhappy ending . Turn up the racism to volume eleven and expect extreme discomfort. At any rate, you won't feel that you've been tricked into accepting a changling for a narrator in the switch from Huckleberry to "Frog", the boy of this story. The first sentence gives sufficient hint of what we're dealing with here,My kid brother and I were digging with pieces of wood in the loose earth that smelled of fat and ashes at the surface of the crematorium, the makeshift crematorium in the valley that was simply a shallow pit in a clearing in the underbrush.And even before that, there's the title. The animal imagery associated with the pilot is relentless throughout. I get it, Mr. Ōe! But some wholesome vegetarian side dishes are also included in this offering,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. And outside the tough, outer skin, near the sea that was visible from the roof as a thin ribbon glittering in the distance, in the city beyond the heaped, rippling mountains, the war, majestic and awkward now like a legend that had survived down the ages, was belching foul air. But to us the war was nothing more than the absence of young men in our village and the announcements the mailman sometimes delivered of soldiers killed in action. The war did not penetrate the tough outer skin and the thick flesh. Even the 'enemy' planes that had begun recently to traverse the sky above the village were nothing more to us than a rare species of bird.Ōe wrote this story while he was a student and only 23 years old. It won the 1958 Akutagawa Prize, a prestigious award for Japanese writers, and he would go on to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1994. Structures of power: Oe Kenzaburo's "Shiiku" (Prize Stock)There are 2 movies based on this work. 1. Shiiku (1961, directed by Nagisa Ôshima)video clip2. Gibier d'élevage (2011, directed by Rithy Panh)
—B0nnie
