Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!

BOOK: Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!
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Praise for
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!:

“Exquisitely sensitive … Notable for [its] piercing emotional honesty … A hopeful book, one that beautifully charts K's evolution from a man ashamed of his son to one capable of celebrating the boy's unusual but complex humanity.”

—John Freeman,
Dallas Morning News

“Wondering how Oe would pull this [book] off, I thought of Ingmar Bergman, who draws so clearly from his own life and produces profound cinema. Oe shares this great ability to grasp his characters’ psychology, supremely assured in his own artistic gifts to allow the inner drama of Eeyore's life to speak for itself.… In this fluent translation by John Nathan, Oe's novel stands out as a dark jewel, its maker, its master ecdysiast, hiding as much about himself as he reveals.”

—Luis H. Francia,
The Village Voice

“There is nothing quite like it in the English language.… Compelling and strange. Oe is repeating no one and nothing.… [In] this story … ordinary events become extraordinary moments of aloneness where the father and the son merge into the same breath. Which is the opposite of loneliness. This is intimacy and art … Oe does what Blake did. He demonstrates time and time again that morality obliges us to oppose the reality or cruelty of injustice with a redeeming vision.”

—Nasdijj,
Raleigh News & Observer

“Oe is cunning in his reliable/unreliable author guise, so that one sometimes doesn't know how ‘true’ to the facts he is being … but far from being an irritation, such tricks only lead one deeper into the poignant picture of the strange, burdensome, loving relationship between father and son. Sometimes hilariously funny, often dramatic, always seductively readable, this is a marvellous book, beautifully translated.”

—Anthony Thwaite,
Sunday Telegraph
(London)

“[A] moving novel … [that] ranks with such triumphs as Oe's
The Silent Cry
and
Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness
… A dazzlingly unconventional fiction, alive on every page with deeply considered ideas and restrained emotion, that's capable of frequently reducing the reader to helpless (albeit grateful) tears. Oe has been afflicted, and blessed, with a great theme that's entirely his own—and has made it the cornerstone of an irresistibly compelling body of work.”


Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

“The novel display[s] Oe's gift for the portrayal of the inevitable emotional blunders of human beings.… Over and over Oe presents examples of how real communication between people is almost impossible, in the end suggesting that maybe simple presence of mind and gentle care are the best we can do. Whether this is a first experience with Oe or not, the reader will be left with questions, many questions, and all good ones.”

—Amy Havel,
Review of Contemporary Fiction

“Writing once again with depth and passion about his relationship with his brain-damaged son, the Nobel laureate transforms his musings into a full-blown narrative that becomes a thoughtful yet provocative study of the nature of human relationships.… A deceptively modest, powerful book by a master at the height of his literary powers. Whether he's expanding on a mystical or philosophical concept or painting an achingly poignant picture of a unique father-and-son relationship, Oe contrives intensely memorable images of these two special characters and their thoughts, insights and loves that will stay with readers.”


Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

“Moving … This novel… ranks with Oe's best work.…
Rouse Up
is conversational in style, concise, full of literary allusions and revelations.… Poignant and memorable.”


The Sunday Star-Ledger
(Newark)

Also by Kcnzaburo Oc:

FICTION

Somersault

A Personal Matter

A Quiet Life

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

The Pinch Runner Memorandum

The Silent Cry

Seventeen and J

The Catch and Other Stories

Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness

An Echo of Heaven

The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the

Atomic Aftermath
(editor)

NONFICTION

Hiroshima Notes

A Healing Family

Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself

Copyright © 1986 by Kenzaburo Oe

English translation copyright © 2002 by John Nathan

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

FIRST GROVE PRESS PAPERBACK EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Oe, Kenzaburo, 1935–

       [Atarashii hito yo mezameyo. English]

       Rouse up o young men of the new age! / Kenzaburo Oe.

          p. cm.

       ISBN 9780802195401

       I. Title.

       PL858.E14 A9313 2002

       895.6'35—dc21                        001051298

Design by Laura Hammond Hough

Grove Press

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

03  04  05  06  07    10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

1: Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience

2: A Cold Babe Stands in the Furious Air

3: Down, Down thro’ the Immense, with Outcry

4: The Ghost of a Flea

5: The Soul Descends as a Falling Star, to the Bone at My Heel

6: Let the Inchained Soul Rise and Look Out

7: Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!

1
: Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience

W
hen I travel out of the country for any length of time, including professional visits, I take one precaution against losing my presence of mind and emotional balance while I am a tumbleweed in an alien landscape: I make certain to take along the books I have been reading prior to my departure. Alone in a foreign country, as I am now, I have been able to encourage myself in the face of fear, aggravation, and despondency by reading on in the books I had been reading in Tokyo before I left. This spring I traveled to Europe, perhaps I should say careened from Vienna to Berlin with a television crew, along a route that was bare of blossoms on the trees and, except for the forsythia that turn riotous yellow before their leaves appear and the crocus buds thrusting above the ground, without flowers. I had taken along four volumes of the Penguin Classics edition of Malcolm Lowry, whom I had been reading continually for several years. I say reading, but I had also written a series of short stories constructed around metaphors that Lowry had inspired in me. My purpose in rereading Lowry while I was traveling was to allow me to say to myself at the end of the trip, Enough! As far as I'm concerned, I'm done with Lowry! And, as part of that process, I would present each of my companions on the road with one of the Lowry volumes. When I was young, my impatience had prevented me from staying with a single author for very long. As I was leaving middle age, the group of writers I would read attentively in my last years and until I died became visible to me. And so from time to time I felt obliged to set out consciously to finish off one writer or another.

This time, in spite of the busiest schedule I have ever experienced, and managing even so to maintain a pleasant relationship with the TV crew, who moved according to the logic of their work, I read, on planes and trains and in my hotel rooms as we moved about, one after another of the Lowry novels I had underlined in red pencil at various times in the past. One day, just at sunset as our train was about to arrive in Frankfurt, I was reading
Forest Path to the Spring,
Lowry's most beautiful novella in my view, and felt myself being newly moved by the prayer the narrator had written down in search of encouragement for his work as a jazz musician.

I say “newly” because I had been moved by this passage before and had even quoted the first lines of the prayer in a novel of my own. This time, it was the continuation of the portion I had thought important previously, at the end of the prayer, that caught my eye. After a failed attempt to create a musical theme to convey the feeling of his own rebirth into a new world, the narrator calls out, “Dear Lord God!,” and prays for help: “I, being full of sin, cannot escape false concepts, but let me be truly Thy servant in making this a great and beautiful thing, and if my motives are obscure, and the notes scattered and often meaningless, please help me to order it,
or I am lost
.…”

BOOK: Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!
10.74Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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