(Whether this would have been good or bad is another question, of course. To have avoided the war that cost so many lives and caused so many horrors, not least the firebombing of Japanese cities and ultimately the use of nuclear weapons for the first and, so far, only time in history, would have been unarguably good; but one must not forget that it was losing that war that brought about the American occupation of Japan and the forcible imposition of democratic ideas and practices, which led to a flowering of Japanese culture and the Japanese economy that might never have been possible under the rule of the military elite. It is fortunate that we do not have the power to replay history, because then we would be forced to choose: Do you knacker the horse to get the glue?)
In any event, I knew then that someone — I thought at first it would be Ender — would have to go from world to world in search of the ultimate source of power in Starways Congress. Whose mind had to be changed in order to transform the culture of Starways Congress in such a way as to stop the Lusitania Fleet? Since this whole issue began for me with a consideration of a history of Japan, I determined that a far-future Japanese culture must play some role in the story. Thus Peter and Wang-mu come to the planet Divine Wind.
Another thought-path also brought me to Japan, however. It happened that I visited with dear friends in Utah, Van and Elizabeth Gessel, at a time shortly after Van, a professor of Japanese language at Brigham Young University, had acquired a CD called Music of Hikari Oe. Van played the CD — powerful, skillful, evocative music of the Western, mathematical tradition — as he told me something of the composer. Hikari Oe, he told me, is brain damaged, mentally retarded; but when it comes to music, he is gifted. His father, Kenzaburo Oe, recently received the Nobel prize for literature; and while Kenzaburo Oe has written many things, the most powerful of his works, and almost certainly the ones for which the prize was given, are those that deal with his relationship to his damaged child, both the pain of having such a child and the transformative joy of discovering the true nature of that child while also discovering the true nature of that parent who stays and loves him.
I at once felt a powerful kinship with Kenzaburo Oe, not because my writing in any way resembles his, but because I also have a brain-damaged child and have followed my own course in dealing with the fact of him in my life. Like Kenzaburo Oe, I could not keep my damaged child out of my writing; he shows up again and again. Yet this very sense of kinship also made me avoid seeking out Oe’s writings, for I feared that either he would have ideas about such children that I could not agree with, and then I would be hurt or angry; or his ideas would be so truthful and powerful that I then would be forced into silence, having nothing to add. (This is not an idle fear. I had a book called Genesis under contract with my publisher when I read Michael Bishop’s novel Ancient of Days. Though the plotlines were not remotely similar except that they dealt with primitive men surviving into modern times, Bishop’s ideas were so powerful and his writing so truthful that I had to cancel that contract; the book was unwritable at that time, and probably will never be writable in that form.)
Then, after I had written the first three chapters of this volume, I was at the checkout stand at the News and Novels bookstore in Greensboro, North Carolina, when I saw on a point-of-purchase display a lone copy of a small book called Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself. The author: Kenzaburo Oe. I had not looked for him, but he had found me. I bought the book; I took it home.
It sat unopened by my bed for two days. Then came the insomniac night when I was about to begin writing chapter four, the chapter in which Wang-mu and Peter first come in contact with the Japanese culture of the planet Divine Wind (primarily in a city I named Nagoya because that was the Japanese city where my brother Russell served his Mormon mission back in the seventies). I saw Oe’s book and picked it up, opened it and began to read the first page. Oe speaks at first of his longtime relationship with Scandinavia, having read, as a child, translations (or, rather, Japanese retellings) of a series of Scandinavian stories about a character named Nils.