The Japanese have made themselves permanent Edge People.
I also speculated about America, which was composed of refugees from the Edge, but which nevertheless behaved like a Center nation, controlling (brutally) its hinterland, but only briefly flirting with empire, content instead to be the center of the world. America had, for a time at least, the same arrogance as the Chinese — the assumption that the rest of the world wants to be like us. And I wondered if, as with Islam, a powerful idea had made an Edge nation into a Center nation. Just as the Arabs themselves lost control of the new Islamic Center, which was ruled by Turks, so also the original English culture of America might be softened or adapted, while the powerful nation of America remains at the Center; this is an idea that I am still playing with and whose truth I am not in a position to evaluate, since so much of it will only be known in the future and can only be guessed at now. But it remains that this idea of Edge and Center nations is an intriguing one that I find myself believing, to the extent that I understand it.
Having written my notes, I then began the next night to write the chapter. I had brought Wang-mu and Peter to the end of their meal at the restaurant, and was ready to have them meet a Japanese character for the first time. But it was four in the morning. My wife, Kristine, awake to take care of our one-year-old baby, Zina, took the chapter fragment out of my hand and read it. As I prepared for sleep, she also dozed off, but then awoke to tell me of a dream she had in that momentary nap. She had dreamed that the Japanese of Divine Wind carried their ancestors’ ashes in tiny lockets or amulets that they wore around their necks; and Peter felt lost because he had only one ancestor, and he would die when that ancestor died. I knew at once that I had to use this idea; then I lay down in bed, picked up Oe’s book again, and began to read.
Imagine my surprise, then, when after that first passage dealing with Oe’s feelings toward Scandinavia, he plunged into analyses of Japanese culture and literature that explicitly developed precisely the idea that had leapt into my mind just from reading those opening, seemingly unrelated paragraphs about Nils. He, a man who has studied and cared about the peripheral (or Edge) peoples of Japan, especially the culture of Okinawa, conceived of Japan as a culture that was in danger of losing its Center. Serious Japanese literature, he said, was decaying precisely because Japanese intellectuals were “accepting” and “discharging” Western ideas, not particularly believing them but caught up in their fashionableness, while ignoring those powerful ideas inherent in the Yamato (native Japanese) culture which would give Japan the power to become a self-standing Center nation. He even used, finally, the words “center” and “edge” in this sentence:
The postwar writers, however, looked for a different path that would lead Japan to a place in the world not at its center but at the edge of it.
His point was not the same as mine, but the world-conception of centers and edges was harmonious.
I took all of Oe’s concerns about literature quite personally, because, like him, I am a part of an “edge” culture which “accepts” and “discharges” ideas from the dominant culture and which is in danger of losing its self-centering impulse. I speak of Mormon culture, which was born at the edge of America and which has long been more American than Mormon. Supposedly “serious” literature in Mormon culture has consisted entirely of imitations, mostly pathetic but occasionally of decent quality, of the “serious” literature of contemporary America, which is itself a decadent, derivative, and hopelessly irrelevant literature, having no audience that believes in or cares about its stories, no audience capable of genuine community transformation. And, like Oe — or let me say that I think I understand Oe correctly in this — I can see the redemption of (or, arguably, the creation of) a true Mormon literature as coming only by the rejection of fashionably “serious” (but, in reality, frivolous) American literature and its replacement by a literature that meets Oe’s criteria for junbungaku: