Original language:
Japanese Translated from: Russian
Authors: Oe, Kenzaburo
Translated by: Žemaitis, Jonas
Full translated source bibliographical description:
Кэнзабуро Оз. ОПОЗДАВШАЯ МОЛОДЕЖЬ. Москва: «Прогресс», 1973.
Published in: Vilnius
Published on: 1975
Publisher: Vaga
“The late youth” – postwar Japanese generation “late” to the war, which ended in 1945. In the novel, which was first released in 1961, Oe depicts Japanese youth, realistically, without any usual decorations shows bourgeois reality. The novel is written is the first person, allowing the reader to take a deeper look into the main character’s (whose name, in fact, is never revealed throughout the book) inside and allows the character to speak absolutely openly, showing his most secret …life turns.
This book is sort of a confession of the main character. The book is divided in two parts and in the first part, a boy, who lost his brother and father in the war, one day learns that the war with USA is finally over. It seems like this event should be a happy one, but the boy is shocked because he can’t fulfill his duty as a true Japanese and fight for his country. The boy, who’s not so open to others already, isolates himself even more and starts search for any opportunity to get into a military. At last he and his best friend, Korean Kan, from a nearby village tries to flee to another city, where a secret army is being formed to resist the occupation of Americans. However, they both get caught and the main character is placed into a juvenile jail with a lot of violence and abuse. The second part of the book talks about the grown up and matured adult, a Tokyo university student, which the main character has become after leaving the jail and his life choices, sometimes good, but mostly bad.
The book surprises with the fact that there are no good characters – the mother of the main character, although works hard for her family, hates his son, best friend Kan is a traitor, playing instruments in a bar, the girl that the main character likes, Ikuka Sawada is a promiscuous rich girl, who ends up pregnant from a homosexual guy, and her father tries to make the main character work for his dirty political campaign.
In the book the disappointment with postwar regime is depicted, also the indecisiveness while trying to pick between what the heart wants to do and what is “needed” to be done in order not to stand out from the mass. Perhaps it was the not standing out from other people ideal that encouraged the author to end the book with these words: “I’m not a hero and I’m not a representative of the late generation. I’m just like you.” It can be said that in these few sentences author wanted to say that during the postwar period in Japan there were a lot of young people like the main character – who weren’t understood, who didn’t understand themselves, fighting for postwar ideals without knowing if they agree with it, or not.
Kenzaburo Oe (大江 健三郎, Ōe Kenzaburō) – Japanese writer, called one of the main figures in Japanese contemporary literature. Oe was awarded with a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 for creating an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today, or, as the author himself states, for writing about the dignity of a human.