Death by Water (2015) by Kenzaburo Oe

 Book Review

Death By Water (2015)
by Kenzaburo Oe

Translation by Deborah Boehm

   Nobel Prize in Literature 1994 winner Kenzaburo Oe died in March of this year which spurred me to take a look for any Audiobooks that might be available on the Libby app.  I found an Audiobook version of Death by Water, which was originally published in 2009 in Japanese and published in English translation in 2015.  In many ways, Oe is the prototypical Nobel Prize winner:  A writer who does not write in English, who is politically engaged in a controversial way with his home territory and who writes serious books with both heavy political and personal themes.  In addition to be a controversial pacificist/leftist who authored many books that challenged the militaristic Japan of his childhood, Oe was also a pathbreaker in terms of his depiction of disability via the reoccurring character of his son, who was disabled and frequently appears in fictionalized form in many of his novels.

    Death by Water is a "late work"- a term used within the novel itself by Oe, the fifth in his series of novels about the life of Kogito Choko, who is widely considered a stand in for the author himself.  In that sense, Oe should also be considered an early adopter of auto-fiction, particularly in the treatment of the character of his disabled son.  Death by Water is very much the work of an author who can do whatever he wants.  The book is 450 pages and much of the plot involves the attempts by a group of "underground" theater performers to adapt Choko's books into works of radical theater.   As the plot slowly develops, issues with Choko's disabled son and his own attempts to write a novel about the traumatic death of his father, a right-wing militarist who drowned in the aftermath of World War II after an ill conceived plan to fly a kamikaze plane into the Emperor's palace fails, rise and fall within the context of the main plotline. 

   The action is slow indeed to get started but Oe does provide an action packed finale, hard as that may seem to anyone (like me) who struggled through 13 hours of Audiobook conversations about the vagaries of radical Japanese theater in the early 2000's to get to 2 hours of excitement.