Abstract
Ōe Kenzaburō was deeply influenced by Western writers such as William Blake and W. B. Yeats, but he was also an avid reader of Japanese literature, including premodern works as well as the folklorist Yanagita Kunio. In his short story “The Day Another Izumi Shikibu Was Born” (Mō hitori Izumi Shikibu ga umareta hi, 1984) Ōe creates a poetological discourse by inventing a tradition that evolves around the poems of Shikibu-san and is transmitted by the “great women” (ōi naru onna-tachi) of the village where he grew up in the forests of Shikoku. Within the mythical framework of this fictive tradition Japanese poetry is linked to the soul (tama/tamashii) – a topic frequently encountered in Ōe’s works since the 1970s. Another story by Ōe, “The Bird Surrounding Itself with Fire” (Hi o megurasu tori, 1991), discusses Itō Shizuo’s poem “Bush Warbler” (Uguisu, 1934) and its implications for a concept of the soul. The text includes a passage reminiscent of Izumi Shikibu’s poem in which she identifies fireflies with her own soul. While Ōe takes up Izumi Shikibu’s thought, he transforms it: the firefly becomes the narrator gazing upon a swarm of light that is his soul, but also exceeds the individual. According to an essay that Ōe wrote two years later, the story ends with a “bad ambiguity” (ashiki aimaisa), but another essay by Ōe published in 2011 suggests a much more positive interpretation. Although “soul” as a concept, as it figures in the texts discussed, defies a clear definition, it can be shown that Ōe is particularly concerned with how the souls of different persons relate to each other, especially the souls of his son and himself. Based on a comparative analysis of Ōe’s two stories, it is argued that Ōe regarded poetry as a medium of universal experience that creates new meaning in different situations.
Balmes, Sebastian