Starred review from November 30, 2009
In 1997, Juzo Itami, one of Japan's most successful film directors, jumped to his death in Tokyo. Nobel laureate Oe (Hiroshima Notes
) was Itami's brother-in-law, and he transposes Itami's suicide, under a fictional disguise, into a dazzling and elaborate maze of memories and meditations centering on the suicide of film director Goro Hanawa. Goro has made a series of tapes for Kogito, his world-famous writer brother-in-law, as groundwork for a possible film, which Kogito listens to obsessively after Goro's suicide. To rid himself of Goro's ghost, Kogito travels to Berlin, but even there he runs into pieces of Goro's past. Eventually, the reader is led back to the two men's youthful involvement with a right-wing paramilitary group founded by Kogito's late father. What begins as a weekend spent at the group's camp turns into something sinister from which Goro emerges fundamentally changed. Oe's deft mix of high intellectual reflection and absurd slapstick scenarios is polished to a high gloss, giving this book a tone that may remind American readers of Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift
.
April 1, 2010
One night, as writer Kogito Choko is listening to a tape his brother-in-law, Goro, has given him, he hears Goro say that he is heading over to the Other Side. Just after these words, Kogito hears a loud thud, and then the words continue with Goro's promise that he will not stop communicating with Kogito. After a few moments, Kogito's wife, Chikashi, informs him that Goro has committed suicide. Left with a trunk full of cassette tapes from Goro, Kogito sets off on a quest to recover his own and his brother-in-law's pasta journey that carries him from Japan to Berlin. It is Kogito's wife, however, who discovers Goro's real secrets and that life's meaning is not to be found among the living or the dead but among the unborn, those who can change (a changeling) from a child into a cunning trickster. VERDICT Nobel Prize winner Oe's sometimes turgid, sometimes lyrical novel offers haunting perspectives on the nature of life and death. While Oe's fans comprise the main audience for this new novel, fans of Milan Kundera and Gnter Grass will also appreciate the magical way in which Oe weaves inquiries into the haunting nature of the past with questions about the nature of human identity and memory. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 11/15/09.]Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Evanston, IL
Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from March 1, 2010
Japans greatest living novelist has brought the autobiographical novel and the roman clef to the highest artistic distinction by merging them. His and his family and friends thoughts and doings are nearly always the stuff of his novels. This book opens with Kogito, a distinguished novelist, listening to audiocassettes just sent him by his oldest friend, Goro, a filmmaker. After his pal says hes going to head over to the Other Side now, there is a loud thud on the tape. Goros voice returns, saying he wont stop communicating with Kogito. Then Kogitos wife interrupts to tell him that Goro has committed suicide by jumping off a roof. (Oe and Juzo Itami, whose Tampopo was an international hit, were longtime friends, and the latters 1997 death was identical to Goros.) Communication does continue, first as Kogito vocally responds to the tapes, then in memory while the novelist undertakes a guest lectureship in Berlin, where he meets Goros chaste, last young lover. The ghostly colloquy gradually focuses on an incident the friends shared as late teenagers in the sticks where Kogito grew up. As in previous novels and with comparable mastery, Oe deeply ponders love, sex, art, friendship, family, and death in a rich, psychologically acute rhapsody of narration anchored in personal calamities. This one ends with a willfully upbeat line by Oes fellow Nobelian, Wole Soyinka.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)
Starred review from April 15, 2010
Once again introspection and autobiography are transmuted into compelling fiction in the latest from Japan's 1994 Nobel laureate (Somersault, 2003, etc.).
Protagonist Kogito Choko is a bookish, self-effacing veteran novelist whose oeuvre had frequently influenced, and been influenced by, the accomplishments of his brother-in-law and best friend Goro Hanawa, a celebrated filmmaker. Shortly after Kogito learns that Goro has killed himself by jumping from a rooftop, he receives a number of audiocassettes bearing the message that Goro would cross to"the Other Side" but maintain contact with their recipient. As Kogito listens obsessively, his imagination revisits shared experiences and intellectual passions, including the two men's boyhood experiences, the self-obsessed poetry of Rimbaud and the fiction of Kafka, the abortive wartime experiences of Kogito's late father, violent abusive attacks perpetrated by hired yakuza thugs, and evidence of the filmmaker's affectionate condescension toward the resolutely unglamorous author. This very discursive novel's strengths and weaknesses reside together in the gradual revelation of Goro as Kogito's soulmate, idol, muse, taskmaster—and doppelgänger (as we're told directly when Kogito realizes that"all the scenes Goro had incorporated into…[his screenplays] were things he had actually experienced or observed"). The narrative contains numerous aslant allusions to Oe's own fiction and critical reputation, and to his biography in a moving portrayal of Kogito's long marriage to his devoted wife Chikashi, and yet another portrait (in the figure of their son Akari) of Oe's immensely musically gifted son Hikari. This demanding, fascinating anatomy of the development of a writer's sensibility asks much of the reader but offers several truly affecting sequences—even in an arguably unneeded"Epilogue" focused on Chikashi, which re-emphasizes the past's grip on the present, and climaxes with a luminous benediction linked to another literary touchstone: a famous play written by African Nobel Prize–winning author Wole Soyinka.
Kogito, ergo sum. He thinks and remembers and imagines. Therefore, he is.
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