Between Words and Death -- Kenzaburo Oe and Yukio Mishima, Memories of the 1960s

Between Words and Death -- Kenzaburo Oe and Yukio Mishima, Memories of the 1960s

This conversation is a very memorable scene, symbolizing the ideological divide of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It takes place after a lecture at a university. Immediately after Kenzaburo Oe's lecture, the narrator is surrounded by several students who ask him, "Do you enjoy listening to Oe? The students were obviously not pleased to hear him talk about Yukio Mishima. The students, clearly supporters of Yukio Mishima, were hostile and cynical toward Oe's liberal position. This scene clearly illustrates the atmosphere of ideological conflict that existed in the intellectual world at that time.

In Japan at that time, against the backdrop of the Cold War structure and rapid economic growth, violent conflicts between the left and right, progress and conservatism, and democracy and nationalism were erupting in every aspect of society. Kenzaburo Oe, as the embodiment of postwar democracy, confronted issues such as war responsibility, the atomic bomb, the emperor system, and social discrimination, and maintained a stance that emphasized speech and ethics. Yukio Mishima, on the other hand, was a member of the cultural elite, yet he had immersed himself in a conservative spiritual world, pursuing an "aesthetics by action" rooted in the Emperor System and Bushido. He committed suicide in 1970 at the Self-Defense Forces garrison, and his death was a symbolic political drama and a final questioning of the relationship between culture and the state.

The students asked the narrator, "Do you enjoy listening to Oe? has a deeper meaning that goes beyond mere differences in taste in writers. It is a look at Oe as an "intellectual who speaks only in words," and a distrust of and provocation against liberals who do not take action. For them, Mishima was a figure who confronted the nation head-on and put his life on the line to carry out his ideas. The "seriousness" of Mishima as an intellectual was being questioned.

This scene is like a condensed version of the spiritual landscape of postwar intellectuals in Japan. There are those who seek to change the world through words and those who seek to prove their ideas through death. The rupture that developed between them went beyond mere literature and shook the entire value system of postwar Japanese society. The conversation itself was quiet, but behind it, the social fault line was wide open.