Content area
Full Text
The man who created the piece of music you in the audience here today have just heard in excerpt ("Nocturnal Capriccio," track 14 from Music of Hikari Oe 2) is Hikari Oe. He is an extraordinary man - a unique man, in fact, not just in the way that every human being or even every creative artist is unique, but in an entirely literal, scientific sense. Hikari also enjoys an extraordinary relationship with his father, Kenzaburo Oe, a creative symbiosis which is unique in a less scientific sense. And while scientists cannot fully explain Hikari's literally unprecedented achievements, it is clear that these would never have been possible if his father had dealt with the problems his son's birth presented as a more conventional and less imaginative parent would have done in the same time and place.
Hikari was born in 1963, when Kenzaburo Oe was twenty-eight years old. The latter was already a famous writer then, chiefly because of his originality. Critics embraced his writing readily, in part because Japan was fairly seething with discontent at that time, and both his voice and his imagination crystallized a pervasively rebellious mood. But at the time of Hikari's birth, Oe was despondent about his writing career, because his rebelliousness had been alienating former friends as well as freshly enraging longstanding enemies.
Oe has described himself as an anarchist. He has been an impassioned and selfless advocate for the many liberal causes he holds dear, but all his life he has been exasperating the politically committed by his refusal to ally himself with any set agenda. He has been accused of stubbornness, and worse; my own belief is that his refusal to compromise is not really a consciously chosen stance but a rather helpless part of his personality.
He likes to describe himself as a meek, dreamy, bookish child, but he also tells stories of his willful behavior as a boy. As an adolescent, prematurely separated from his family for the sake of his studies, he tried to cultivate a tough image. A little later, as a young writer, he not only wrote rebelliously but behaved that way too.
Oe has said that at the time of Hikari's birth, he wished he could abandon writing and that...