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THE LITERARY TALENTS of Oe Kenzaburo, winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature, were recognized in Japan in 1958, when his short story "Shiiku" (Eng. "The Catch" or "Prize Stock")1 won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize.2 Oe, age twenty-three, was then a student at Tokyo University. Drawing in part on childhood memories - memories he acknowledges were preserved as "not factual but mental" (Kaku, 100) - "Shiiku" is set in a remote village in a valley, rather like Oe's hometown on the island of Shikoku, and its main character is a boy who has a younger brother, as Oe did.3
As a child, Oe later explained, he had been taught that people from outside his little village were what Alfred Kurella calls "aliene" (crazy or mad).4 Indeed, there had been few such strangers among the village populace. The quiet homogeneity of the village, however, started to change during the war, when unwelcome evacuees from the cities moved in. Under those circumstances, Oe remembered - correctly or incorrectly -- that a teacher at school had told his class about an enemy plane that had crashed on the southernmost main island of Japan. The teacher told the children that two soldiers were captured, one a white man who was then killed with bamboo spears, the other a black man who became a prisoner of war (0e, 1979, 220). Fear and hatred toward the enemy soldier were aroused in the young Oe's mind upon hearing about the incident, and he imagined the POW appearing in his own secluded community as an aliene - a mad person, a demon.
Incorporating this memory of childhood hostility toward an outsider, Oe's "Shiiku" is a shocking and violent wartime tale in which a black American airman, whose plane has crashed over Japan, is captured and kept in a cellar by the villagers who find him. The prisoner and several of the local children share moments of friendship, but in a sudden and ugly turn of events the captive seizes one of the youngsters as a hostage and locks himself and the boy in the cellar. Villagers break into the cellar, and the captive uses his hostage as a shield. When the child's father smashes the captive's brain with a hatchet, the boy...