Death by Water: A Novel

Nobel-prize-winning author Oe is a literary giant. I felt out of my league reading this book, the only one I have read by this author. Upon finishing it I felt a bit lost and that I needed to have read his other books to fully understand this one. Oe's books are also in part based on his life and I knew very little about him before undertaking this reading. I recommend a little pre-reading research to get the most from his writing which is replete with literary references and couched in the literature of his homeland. If you are already a follower of Oe, this will likely be a rewarding read for you.

All of Oe’s books are worth reading, with the mix of biographical tone and fiction — they allow one to understand the tensions in Japanese society in a way that no other author allows.

As described, package well, came in timely manner. Really enjoying the book.

Can't add much to the previous review. Not the place to start reading Oe. Death By Water starts a bit slowly, but I stuck with it because I love Oe. My patience was amply rewarded. Not among his best works, but well worth it for his admirers.

As a first time reader of this author, I was surprised by the free flowing narrative of the main character's life as it unfolds around his "golden years" challenges - very diary-like. A very engaging read and would recommend.

I have now read three books by Oe: the comparatively early NIP THE BUDS, SHOOT THE KIDS (which I greatly enjoyed), this one, and its immediate predecessor, THE CHANGELING. In my review of that, I compared it to a fractal image, in which any one part contains references to every other, not just within the novel itself but seemingly revisiting most of the author's oeuvre. For the first third of this latest novel, I felt I was reading THE CHANGELING all over again. The first-person protagonist may have a different name, Kogito Choko (known as Kogii), but the novels he has written have the same titles as Kenzaburo Oe's, he is the same age, has had precisely the same career, he is obsessed with the death of his father, and he is also the father of a brain-damaged son who is something of a musical genius. Whether Choko or Oe, he gazes obsessively into a mirror as he writes.The self-referential quality is built into the plot premise. Choko goes back to his village in the mountains where he was born, intending to open a red leather trunk containing (he believes) documents that will enable him to complete a long-postponed novel about the death by drowning of his father, who may have been connected with an ultra-right-wing group protesting Japan's surrender after WW2. He goes under the aegis of a theatrical company, the Caveman Group, who have already mounted dramatizations of many of his earlier works, and now want to stage themes from his entire oeuvre, held together by his work on the new "drowning novel," which is to be the summary of all that has gone before. This is déjà vu raised to the level of an art form.Not that Oe is unaware of this. Late in the book, he has a young admirer visit him, who lays it out: "Over the past ten or fifteen years all of Mr. Choko's works of fiction have more or less been cut from the same cloth, most notably in terms of the protagonist […] the author's alter ego. At some point, doesn't it become overkill? I mean, can these serial slices of thinly veiled memoir really be considered genuine novels?" [translation by Deborah Boliver Boehm]. The young man has a point, yet the repeated turning over of the same materials has a curious fascination -- for a while. [I am struck, incidentally, by how many Nobel laureates seem to turn to this autobiographical self-referentiality in their later work: Grass, Coetzee, and Modiano, to name three others. Is this something the Nobel committee goes for, or what writers tend to do after winning the prize?]I am enthralled by this obsessiveness in the short novellas of Modiano, but the trouble with Oe is that he does it at such length. Two dozen pages are spent, for example, analyzing a five-line poem inscribed on the stone celebrating Choko/Oe's prize. And each time, the poem is quoted in full. Whole paragraphs of argument are repeated almost verbatim, with only the smallest changes. There is a scene where the director of the theater company asks if he can pose some questions, but the whole thing is basically a five-page monologue for the director, with the author merely putting in brief answers like "I suppose that's right." Entire chapters consist of letters from Choko's sister Asa, describing the same theatrical performance in excruciating detail, only to repeat much of that detail in the next and the next.About one-third of the way through, fortunately, Choko and the Cavemen abandon this particular project, and the novel begins to address other subjects. Kogito says something unforgivable to his son, causing a breach between them, mirroring perhaps the death of Kojii's father and his rift with his mother. The thirty-something actress Unaiko, who had been Kogii's principal liaison with the Caveman Group, breaks off to start a project of her own, and the novel takes on a quite interesting feminist thrust. This links to a film that Choko had written earlier (film also plays an important role in THE CHANGELING) about a half-mythical heroine from his region. Gradually various linking themes become visible behind the thicket of orbiter dicta: the problem of coercion, whether by the state or personal; the power and victimization of women; the role of suicide; and above all the fact of old age and the handing-over of wisdom and authority from one generation to another. It may well be that even the personal themes have political resonance also. Oe is a major writer with major ideas, no doubt about it, but it takes real effort for a non-Japanese reader to separate his insights from his obsessions. [3.5 stars]

In many of this author’s novels he uses a literary alter ego – an author of his age (early 70’s in this book) who has a brain-damaged son (as does the author). In his older years, looking for a topic for his final novel, the writer returns to his sister’s house in his home village to look through documents. The documents are in a suitcase and supposedly they relate to his father’s last actions prior to his death.Right after the end of WW II his father hosted at his home a group of ex-soldiers who were angry at Japan’s surrender. While they worshiped the Emperor, they also discussed wild plans to kill him by stealing a plane and bombing the palace. Why would a group of emperor-worshipers want to kill the Emperor? In the way of classical myth: that of ‘killing the living God’ as a way of bringing rebirth and prosperity to a country. Death and regeneration are linked.The writer really wants to tell the story of his father’s fatal drowning. Why did he go out in a small boat during a torrential storm and into a raging river?While the writer is examining the contents of the suitcase, he works on play scripts with a group of actors: an avant-garde theater troupe, young men and women. The troupe has dramatized his earlier novels. It seems a bit of a stretch to see how much they revere him and hang on his every spoken and written word. The troupe is gaining fame for its use of theatrical ploys such as ‘tossing dead dogs,’ which involves the audience in pelting the actors with stuffed animals.Since the author in the book constantly dreams the same dream of helping his father push off the boat prior to his drowning, dreams are a big part of the story. “…the big question seems to be whether your dream is based on something you actually experienced, or whether you first dreamed about the scene you described, then came to believe it actually happened and, later on, began to dream about it again in a new and different form.”It’s also a story of family stresses. The writer has had a fragile relationship with his mother and sister for ten years. His mother banned him from seeing the suitcase because she thought he revealed family secrets and disgraced the family in one of his novels.Meanwhile the author in the book has also seen his relationship with his brain-damaged son deteriorate. The son will hardly speak to his father after his father called him an ‘idiot’ – twice over the same minor incident. His son is 45 and while he needs help in physical tasks such as dressing, he is a savant in music and has even had some compositions recorded. His relationship with his wife is also deteriorating because of his unwillingness to patch things up with his son.A good part of the novel is in the form of letters from his sister to him while the author is living in Tokyo.The ending also seems to me to be a stretch. A young woman is going to stage a play about rape and possibly implicate her uncle in her own rape. Her uncle was a high-level national education official, now retired. A group of men kidnap the woman, the writer and his son so that the play can’t be staged. I don’t know anything about Japanese law, but It seems farfetched that the legal difficulties from a rape years ago could outweigh the implications of kidnapping multiple people. Indeed two people end up dead after this escapade.So, a good story although I did find it a bit repetitive in places – we must have read about his dream six or eight times and there seems a bit much on the performances by the troupe. And, as I mentioned some things seem to be a stretch – the adoration with which the troupe holds the author and the near-fantasy ending. And I thought it dragged a bit in places – but all in all a good story with good writing, so I rounded it up to a 4.The author (1935- ) won the Nobel Prize in 1994. I also enjoyed his much shorter book, A Personal Matter, about a Japanese scholar in Paris after WW II.

For my own personal reading. I had already read The Silent Cry and definitely prefer Death by water, which is way more interesting.By the way, there are a lot of Japanese writers that I'm interested in reading. I have also read some novels by Junichiro Tanizaki and I liked them too

Very good condition

Passable... Le dos de la couverture en carton est arrivé écrasé.

Very boring.