OK, so imagine this, just for a second. You've
reached the very, very top of your game, the
absolute summit of your career. The mountaintop.
The mountaintop. Exactly. You've just been awarded
the Nobel Prize. It's not just a professional
thing, right? The whole world is suddenly looking
at you. They're applauding. Cameras are flashing
everywhere. Your phone is just ringing off the
hook. Total global validation. Right. And then
in the middle of all that noise, your own government.
The leadership of your own country steps forward.
It's the homecoming hero moment, the thing everyone
dreams of. Yes. And the government says, we are
so, so proud. We want to give you the order of
culture. And we should be clear, this is not
just some plaque you hang on the wall. No, this
is the highest honor for an artist in Japan.
It's a huge deal. And it's bestowed personally
by the emperor. For almost anyone else, this
is the storybook ending. It's the dream scenario.
You take the medal, you bow, you cement your
legacy as, you know, a national treasure. Right.
And then imagine looking at that offer, looking
at the government, and in a way looking the emperor
right in the eye and just saying no. And it's
not a polite no either, is it? It's not an, oh,
I'm busy that day kind of no. Not at all. We're
talking about a refusal that... I mean, it must
have struck in the very heart of the Japanese
identity at the time. It was a political statement
of the highest order. His quote was, I do not
recognize any authority, any value higher than
democracy. That was the line he drew in the sand.
And the man who drew that line is the subject
of our deep dive today. We're talking about Kenzo
Bursche. A true giant, a literary titan. And
he just passed away recently in March of 2023.
And his death really felt... I don't know, like
the closing of a major chapter in world literature.
But here's the thing that gets me. When you hear
Nobel Prize winner, you tend to picture someone
a bit detached, right? Yeah, maybe a little stuffy.
Academic? Exactly. Someone writing in a dusty
library, completely removed from the world. His
life was just absolute chaos. It was messy. It
was packed with conflict. He was a figure of
just massive contradiction. And alongside that
massive conviction, he somehow managed to offend
almost everyone at some point in his career.
The right wing, they absolutely hated him. And
the traditionalists. The traditionalists didn't
know what on earth to do with him. So that's
our mission for this deep dive. We're not just
going to, you know, read off his bibliography.
We want to figure out how a boy from a tiny village
in the woods, I mean, a place that sounds like
it's straight out of folklore. How did he become
the moral conscience of post -war Japan? It's
a journey that really requires us to understand
a kind of collision. On one side, you have the
village, the myths, the forest, the deep ancient
history. And on the other? The other side is
the modern world. It's existentialism. It's nuclear
politics. It's the big overwhelming city. And
he's the spark that happens when those two things
just crash right into each other. I've got a
whole stack of sources here. Biographical records,
literary analysis, you know, details on his political
activism. And the more I look at it, the more
I see a story that's fundamentally about betrayal.
Betrayal is absolutely the key. Betrayal by teachers,
betrayal by the government, and how this one
man decided to fight back with the only weapon
he really had, his pen. And if you pull on that
one thread, that theme of betrayal, the whole
tapestry of his life and his work starts to make
perfect sense. Okay, so let's go back to the
source then. Let's go to the forest because it
seems like everything with Shay one way or another
circles right back to this village. It really
does. So Shay was born in 1935. The village was
called Jess. Now, today it's part of a larger
town, Uchiko, in the Ihami Prefecture, but we
need to kind of strip away the modern map for
a second. Get back to the 1930s. Exactly. Back
then, this was deep, deep isolation. Shikoku
is one of the main islands of Japan, but this
village was tucked away in these valleys, surrounded
by these dense, dark forests. It sounds almost
like a setting for a fairy tale, or maybe a horror
movie. It could be both, honestly. And in many
ways, it was like a fairy tale. But that isolation
is so important psychologically. When you are
that deep in the woods, the center, and by that
I mean Tokyo, the government, the emperor, it
all feels very, very far away. And his education
there. It wasn't exactly standard, was it? I
was reading about this idea of his two teachers.
Yes, this is a crucial framework for understanding
his entire childhood. He was raised by two completely
competing influences, two teachers. The first
teacher was his grandmother. The storyteller.
The storyteller, yeah. But she wasn't just telling
him bedtime stories to help him fall asleep.
She was the keeper of the oral history of the
entire region. She raised him on the myths and
legends of the forest. But here's the really
important part. She told him about the local
uprisings. Uprisings. You mean like rebellions
against the government. Exactly. Peasant uprisings.
Stories of farmers fighting against the samurai
clans or later on fighting against the Meiji
government. So she instilled in him this idea
from a very young age that the village was a
place of resistance. So it wasn't just a place.
It was an idea. It was an idea. The village had
its own soul, its own rules, and it often stood
in direct opposition to the power of the center.
She represented. The forest. OK, so that's teacher
number one, the grandmother representing the
forest and rebellion. So who is teacher number
two? Teacher number two was the school system.
And we have to remember the timeline here. He
starts school in 1941. This is the absolute peak
of Japanese militarism. World War Two is just
ramping up into a frenzy. So school wasn't just
school. It was an indoctrination camp. It was
essentially that the curriculum wasn't just,
you know, reading and math. It was loyalty in
class. She was forced to pronounce his absolute
unquestioning loyalty to Emperor Hirohito. And
they didn't just say the emperor is our leader,
right? It was more than that. Oh, much more.
They taught the children that the emperor was
a god, an arhitogami, a living deity walking
the earth. I'm trying to imagine being, what,
six or seven years old. You trust adults implicitly
at that age. And every single adult in the school
is telling you that the man in Tokyo is literally
divine. That has to wire your brain in a very
specific way. It absolutely does. It creates
a reality where your entire purpose in life is
to serve that deity. The teachers would ask the
kids, what would you do if the emperor commanded
it? And the answer was? The answer they were
taught was, I would die. I would cut open my
belly. That is unbelievably heavy stuff for a
first grader. It's terrifying. But here's the
thing. She bought into it completely. He was
a patriotic boy. He believed the teachers. He
believed the emperor was God. But then as the
timeline moves forward into 1944 and 1945, reality
starts to crack. And the first crack is personal.
His father dies. Yes. In 1944. And there's just
one detail about his father that I think is just
really telling. He had a bark stripping business.
Bark stripping. What for? For paper currency.
As the war dragged on, the Japanese economy was
completely collapsing. Metal was scarce. So they
were actually using tree bark to make money.
It just grounds the family in this gritty, desperate
material reality of the war. So. The patriarch
of the family dies. And then a year later in
1945, the ultimate patriarch falls. Japan surrenders.
The defeat. And the emperor goes on the radio,
the famous jewel voice broadcast. And suddenly
the god has a voice. And he sounds. well he sounds
like a human being he sounds weak and kind of
reedy he's renouncing his divinity but for young
kinsabusha the real shock wasn't just that they
lost the war the shock was watching the adults
the teachers the teachers the exact same men
who had you know beaten him for not bowing low
enough to the emperor's portrait overnight and
i mean literally overnight they just pivoted
what did they do the americans arrived the occupation
began and suddenly these same teachers were standing
in front of the class saying democracy is great
we love democracy the americans are our friends
wait so no apology no moment of hey kids sorry
we were wrong about that whole dying for a living
god thing nothing not a word Just a seamless,
totally shameless switch. They just pretended
the previous years hadn't happened. And for Shea,
who is 10 years old, this was a massive foundational
trauma. It's the realization that the people
in charge aren't just wrong, they're liars. They're
hollow. Precisely. He felt so deeply betrayed.
He realized that authority figures would say
whatever they needed to say to survive. They
had no core beliefs. And that raw sense of betrayal
became the engine for his entire literary career.
He decided right then and there that he would
never, ever trust the state or the authority
again. So you've got this disillusioned 10 -year
-old kid in the woods. His dad is dead. The teachers
are hypocrites. The emperor isn't a god. He needs
a new compass, a new North Star. Where does he
find it? He finds it in his mother, Krusecki.
She really stepped in after his father died.
And she did something very specific and very
important. She bought him books. And not the
propaganda books they were getting at school.
No, not at all. She bought him The Wonderful
Adventures of Nils. And even more importantly,
she bought him a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn. Mark Twain. In a tiny village in Shikoku
in the 1940s. It sounds so unlikely, doesn't
it? But just think about Huckleberry Finn for
a second. Why would that specific book resonate
so deeply with him at that specific moment? Well,
Huck is a kid, right? And he's totally on the
fringes of society. Huck is an outcast. He completely
rejects the civilizing influence of the widow
Douglas. He rejects the hypocrisy of a society
that supports slavery while claiming to be Christian.
What does Huck do? He goes to the river. He goes
to the wild to find his own morality. All right,
then I'll go to hell. That's the famous line.
When he decides to help Jim. Exactly. Huck chooses
what society calls hell over the fake morality
of the adults. And she read that and he saw himself.
He saw the village in the woods as his Mississippi
River. Huckleberry Finn became his Bible. It
was a story about how to survive in a world of
lying adults. So he's got his literary armor
on now. He's armed with Mark Twain. But he doesn't
stay in the village forever. He's obviously smart.
He's brilliant. He excels at the local high school
in Matsuyama and then at 18 he makes the big
move. He leaves the forest and he goes to the
ultimate symbol of the center. He goes to Tokyo.
And he gets into the University of Tokyo. I mean
we need to put this in context. That is the Harvard,
the Oxford, the Yale of Japan all rolled into
one. It is the elite factory. It's where the
bureaucrats who run the country are made. But
Shih doesn't go there to become a bureaucrat.
He enrolls to study French literature. Why French?
Why not, you know, classic Japanese literature?
You really have to understand the mood of the
Japanese intellectuals in the 1950s. There was
this feeling that traditional Japanese culture
in some way had led them into the abyss of the
war. So they were looking outward. They were
hungry for new frameworks, new ways to think
about the human condition. So they looked to
Europe for answers. Specifically, they looked
to Jean -Paul Sartre. to existentialism. Okay,
let's unpack that for a second. Existentialism
is one of those big words. What did it actually
mean for a kid like Xie coming to where he came
from? At its core, what Sartre was arguing was
that existence precedes essence. What that means
is you aren't born with a preordained destiny.
You aren't born a servant of the emperor. You're
born as a blank slate and you are radically responsible
for your own actions. You create your own meaning
through the choices you make. That must have
felt incredibly liberating for a generation that
had been told their only destiny was to die for
the state. It was like a blast of fresh air.
It was oxygen. It was freedom. But she didn't
just stop with Sartre. He studied under this
amazing professor named Kazuo Watanabe, who was
an expert on Francois Rabelais. Rabelais, the...
What, 16th century French writer? The very same.
The author of Gargantua and Pantagruel. We're
talking giants, fart jokes, gluttony, grotesque
bodies. It's wild stuff. This seems like such
a weird mix. Sartre is all serious and depressed,
and Rabelais is... He's just gross and funny.
But for Shay, they fit together perfectly. Rabelais
offered him something called grotesque realism.
The idea that the body, the sweating, bleeding,
defecating physical body is the ultimate reality.
And that reality degrades power. Well, you can't
be an aloof divine emperor if you're being described
in Rabelaisian terms. It brings the high and
mighty crashing down to earth. It's a great equalizer.
So he's got this incredible toolkit now. He's
got the folklore from his grandmother, the sense
of betrayal from the war, the radical freedom
of existentialism from Sartre, and the grotesque
physical body from Rabelais. And he starts writing.
And he just explodes onto the scene. He starts
publishing in 1957 while he's still a student
at Today. Talk about an overachiever. He writes
a story called Lavish Are the Dead, which is
set in occupied Tokyo. And then in 1958, he writes
The Catch, which is sometimes translated as prize
stock. And this one wins the Akutagawa Prize.
That is the biggest, most prestigious prize for
a new writer in Japan. So let's dive into The
Catch. Because the plot sounds... Well, it sounds
pretty intense. It is incredibly intense, and
it takes us right back to the village. The story
is set in a remote village during the war. A
black American GI's plane is shot down, and he's
captured by the villagers. So the enemy literally
just falls out of the sky into their world. Exactly.
But the villagers don't turn him over to the
authorities right away. They keep him locked
up in a cellar. And the whole story is told through
the eyes of the village children. Okay, so how
do the kids react to this enemy? Are they scared
of him? That's the fascinating part. At first,
he's this terrifying monster to them. But then,
over time, he becomes something else entirely.
They start to see him almost as a pet or a strange,
powerful beast. They feed him. They watch him.
They start to form this weird, unspoken bond
with him. He uses this concept he calls the child
god. The child god? What's that? It's an archetype
he uses. A figure that is somehow innocent and
powerful, but also abandoned and trapped. The
GI is outside of their society, just like the
kids are. So there's this sense of shared isolation
between them. But knowing Che, I have a feeling
this doesn't end with them all becoming best
friends. No. It ends in betrayal. The adults
intervene. The army comes to collect the catch.
And in the chaos of it all, the adults kill the
GI. The children witness the murder of this being
they had bonded with. So it destroys their innocence.
Completely. It's the 1945 trauma replayed in
fiction. The adults once again. ruin everything.
And he was also wrestling with the American occupation
itself in these early works, right? I read about
this theory of occupation he developed. He used
a triad, X, Y, Z. It sounds like algebra, but
it's actually his political theory. It is. It's
a very cynical, very sharp bit of analysis. He
looked at the power dynamics he saw playing out
in Tokyo, and he broke it down into three parts.
Z is the foreigner, the big power, the American
GI. Z holds all the cards. Okay, so Z is the
conqueror. Right. X is the Japanese. person.
But X is placed in this humiliating, inactive
position. X fails to take initiative. X is passive.
So X represents Japan's helplessness or maybe
it's passivity. Yes. And then you have Y. Y is
the third party. Y is the one who is sandwiched
between them. Y is often an interpreter or very
frequently in his stories, a prostitute, someone
who facilitates the interaction between the conqueror
and the conquered. And he used sexual metaphors
to describe this power dynamic. Oh, explicitly.
He really wanted to shock the Japanese public
out of its complacency. He was criticizing their
passivity. He was basically shouting, you are
behaving like X. You are just accepting your
humiliation. He was definitely earning that angry
young man label at this point. He really was.
He was just relentlessly poking the bruise of
the national ego. But the real explosion, the
one that actually put his life in physical danger,
that came in 1961. With these two novellas, 17
and... The death of a political youth. This is
an absolutely pivotal moment. To understand the
incredible risk he took, we have to look at what
was happening in the real world in 1960. You're
talking about the assassination of Asanuma. Yes.
Inajiro Asanuma was the chairman of the Japan
Socialist Party. In October of 1960, he was giving
a speech in a crowded hall, and a 17 -year -old
boy named Yamaguchi Otoya rushed the stage with
a short sword. and plunge it right into Asanuma's
torso. And it was broadcast on live television.
On live television? The footage is still absolutely
shocking to watch today. The assassin was just
a kid. A right -wing extremist kid. He was arrested,
and then three weeks later he committed suicide
in his prison cell. And for the right -wing in
Japan, this kid, Yamaguchi, became a martyr.
A hero. Exactly. They worshipped him. And then,
just a few months later... And Zabuchi decides
he's going to write about it. He fictionalizes
the assassin. He writes 17, where he tries to
get inside the head of a boy who would do something
like this. But here's the key. He doesn't paint
him as some glorious samurai hero. He paints
him as a lonely, sexually frustrated, deeply
confused teenager who clings to the emperor cult
because he has no self -esteem. Wow. So he took
their god and he made him into a pathetic, lonely
teenager. He completely stripped away the myth.
And the reaction was nuclear. The extreme right
wing went absolutely berserk. They felt he was
blaspheming their sacred martyr. What kind of
backlash are we talking about here? Bad reviews.
We're talking death threats. Constant. Day and
night. For weeks. The publisher, the magazine
Banga Kukai, was besieged. And the publisher
eventually caved. They issued a public apology
to their offended readers. What about Sher? Refused
to apologize. He said, I wrote the truth. But
he absolutely paid a price for it. He was physically
assaulted by a right winger during a speech he
was giving at the University of Tokyo. They actually
attacked him physically. They jumped him. So
he wasn't just fighting with words anymore. He
was in real physical danger. And it connects
right back to his childhood, doesn't it? He saw
the violent, dangerous edge of that unwavering
loyalty to the emperor, and he refused to bow
down to it. So here he is. He's the bad boy of
Japanese letters. He's writing about sex, violence,
political assassination. He's getting death threats.
It's this literary provocateur. But then something
happens in 1963, and the whole story just pivots
completely. The pivot. This is the moment where
the political becomes intensely personal. His
son, Hikari, is born. Yes. In 1963, his eldest
son, Hikari, was born with a brain hernia. A
brain hernia. It was a catastrophic birth defect.
The doctors told Hood that the child would have
permanent severe learning disabilities. They
said surgery was required just to save his life,
but that his quality of life would be, well.
very different and he really struggled with this
i think it's important to say that he didn't
just instantly become this saintly father figure
no not at all and that's what makes him such
a powerful and honest writer He was brutally
honest about his own darkness. He admitted that
he wrestled with the desire to just escape. He
wanted to run away. He even wrestled with the
idea of letting the child die. He stared right
into the abyss. He absolutely did. And instead
of hiding that shame, he wrote about it. He wrote
the novel A Personal Matter in 1964. Which is
probably his most famous book, at least internationally.
I would say so, yeah. The protagonist is this
guy nicknamed Bird. Bird's wife gives birth to
a brain -damaged baby, and Bird spends the entire
novel just trying to run away. He drinks, he
has an affair, he even plots to have the baby
killed by a shady doctor. It is a rough read.
It's so unflinching. It's existentialism in practice.
It's Sartre's philosophy put to the ultimate
most painful test. There's no God to tell Bird
what to do. There's no instruction manual. He
has to choose. Does he escape his responsibility
or does he accept this new reality? And in the
book, and this is a spoiler but it's crucial,
Bird eventually stops running. At the end, he
decides to keep the baby and raise him. And that
choice mirrors She's life. He chose to accept
Hikari, and that single decision changed his
writing forever. How so? What was the shift?
Well, the political assassins, they just disappeared
from his work. The occupation theory stuff faded
into the background. He started writing over
and over again about the idiot boy archetype.
Now that phrase, idiot boy, sounds pretty harsh
to modern ears. It does, but we have to understand
he was using it in a very specific literary sense.
He was referencing Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot
or the Holy Fool tradition in literature. Okay,
so what's the idea behind the Holy Fool? The
idea is that this child, this person who is outside
of normal society, possesses a kind of spiritual
purity. a connection to the forest of the soul
that all the civilized modern intellectuals lack.
So the themes of his work shifted from revolution
to coexistence. Exactly. How do we live with
the other? How do we heal? Hikari became his
muse. He said that he was writing in a way to
give his son a voice. And the most incredible
twist of this whole story is that Hikari didn't
stay silent. No. This is just the most beautiful
part of the whole story. Hikari grew up with
very severe limitations in language, but he had
this incredible, uncanny ear for music. He could
identify bird calls instantly, he responded deeply
to Mozart, and eventually he began to compose
his own music. He became a composer. A professional
one. A successful classical composer, yes. There's
this wonderful image you can picture of the household.
The father in one corner of the room writing
these dense, difficult, complex novels about
his son. And the son in the other corner of the
same room writing pure, beautiful, melodic music.
That is just amazing. The father tries to give
the son a literary voice, and the son finds his
own very real musical voice. It's one of the
great redemption arcs in literary history. Much
later in his life, he wrote a memoir called A
Healing Family. which really showed the warmth
and the humor of their life together. It was
a million miles away from the darkness and despair
of a personal matter. So we've moved from the
angry young man to the dedicated father. And
the world, it really took notice of this transformation.
Let's fast forward to 1994, the Nobel Prize.
The absolute pinnacle. The Swedish Academy awarded
him the Nobel Prize in Literature. And their
citation was fascinating. They said he created
an imagined world where life and myth condensed
to form a disconcerting picture of the human
predicament today. Life and myth condense. That's
it right there. That's the village in the city.
That's the grandmother's stories and the existentialist
philosophy. It's all of it combined into one.
And when he won, he gave an interview to the
New York Times and said that his writing was
focused on one thing, the dignity of human beings.
Which is so poignant, isn't it? Considering his
early work was all about humiliation. He moved
from analyzing humiliation to celebrating dignity.
A perfect way to put it. So he wins the Nobel.
Yeah. Japan is thrilled. This is only the second
Japanese author to win after Kawabata. The government
is popping the champagne corks. And then comes
the scandal we talked about right at the start,
the order of culture. The government steps in.
They want to give him the order of culture. It's
customary. It's what's done for Nobel winners.
But he refuses. He refuses. Flat out. And this
brings us right back to that core conviction.
He hadn't forgotten 1945. He hadn't forgotten
the betrayal of the teachers in that classroom.
So for him, accepting a medal from the emperor
would have been... Well, hypocrisy. It would
have been a betrayal of his own core values.
He saw a very clear distinction between democracy
and the imperial system. And so he made that
famous statement. I do not recognize any authority,
any value higher than democracy. That is such
a bold, unambiguous statement. He's basically
saying the emperor is not above the democratic
will of the people. And in Japan, even in the
90s, that is a loaded controversial statement.
Yeah. The right wing was furious all over again.
He's nearly 60 years old at this point. He's
a Nobel laureate. the most famous writer in the
country. And he's still getting threats. He is
still a lightning rod. But it just goes to show
that his conviction wasn't some phase of his
youth. It wasn't just teenage rebellion. It was
his philosophical core. He would not accept a
badge of honor from a system he felt had lied
to his entire generation. But he wasn't done
fighting. In fact, you could argue his biggest
legal battle was still ahead of him. Let's talk
about the Okinawa lawsuit. This is where he goes
from being writer to defendant. This is a fascinating
and terrifying story. It's a battle over memory
itself. And it stems from a book he wrote way,
way back in 1970 called Okinawa Notes. What was
that book about? It was a collection of essays
about the situation in Okinawa. And in it, he
addressed a very dark chapter of the Battle of
Okinawa in 1945. He stated, based on testimony,
that the Japanese military had coerced Okinawan
civilians into committing mass suicide. This
is the horrific history where entire families
were given grenades by soldiers and told to kill
themselves rather than surrender to the Americans.
Yes. And for decades, this was the widely accepted
historical fact. But by the year 2005, there
was a rising tide of historical revisionism in
Japan. There was this movement to clean up the
history of the war, to make the military look
noble and heroic again. So they came for show.
Two retired military officers sued Kinza Burshev
for libel. They sued him in 2005 for a book he
had written in 1970. 35 years later. Yes. It
was a strategic lawsuit. They claimed his writing
defamed them and the entire military. Their argument
was that the mass suicides were voluntary. that
the Okinawan civilians chose to die out of pure
loyalty. That just sounds like a terrifying attempt
to rewrite history. It was. The stakes were huge.
If they could get a legal judgment against a
Nobel Prize winner, they could use that to force
changes in school textbooks. They could literally
scrub the history books clean. So this wasn't
just about his bank account. This was about the
truth of what happened in 1945. Exactly. And
it took a huge toll on him. He barely wrote any
fiction between 2006 and 2008. He was completely
consumed by this trial. He would sit in the courtroom
in Osaka just listening to the arguments day
after day. But he won in the end. He did. In
2008, the Osaka District Court dismissed all
the charges. And the judge, a man named Toshimasa
Fukami, his ruling was crystal clear. He ruled
that, quote, the military was deeply involved
in the mass suicides. It was a total and complete
vindication for Ray. That must have been a monumental
relief. Pry's response was classic, Ray. He didn't
gloat. He didn't celebrate. He simply said, the
judge accurately read my writing. The judge accurately
read my writing. I love that. It's so powerful
in his understatement. And after the trial, he
felt free to write fiction again. He published
a novel called Death by Water in 2009. And this
book features a character who's based on his
own father. Yeah. Yes. We mentioned his father
died in the war in 1944. In the novel, the protagonist's
father is a staunch supporter of the imperial
system who ends up drowning in a flood. So even
in his late 70s, Shay is still processing that
primary trauma. He's still wrestling with the
ghost of his father and the ghost of the emperor.
And then, just two years later, in 2011, another
disaster strikes Japan. The Fukushima nuclear
disaster. And this woke the activist in him one
last time. You have to remember, Shea had been
writing about Hiroshima and the victims of the
atomic bomb, the Hibakusha, since the 1960s.
He saw it as a profound moral duty. So for him,
nuclear power plants and nuclear bombs are deeply
connected. He sees them as two sides of the same
existential threat. To him, nuclear energy is
an affront to the forest, an affront to life
itself. After the Fukushima disaster, he became
a very vocal anti -nuclear activist. And he wasn't
just, you know, writing letters to the editor
from his study. He was out on the streets. In
2013, he helped organize a mass demonstration
in Tokyo. Thousands and thousands of people showed
up. And there's Sir, this elderly, somewhat frail
intellectual leading the charge. There's a really
interesting story about him and... Noam Chomsky,
the American linguist, isn't there? Yes, they
corresponded. Chomsky sent Chomsky a copy of
his Okinawa notes. And Chomsky replied with this
story from his own childhood. He said that when
he first heard about the bombing of Hiroshima
in August of 1945, he couldn't bear the celebration
he saw all around him in America. Everyone was
cheering because the war was over. Right. But
Chomsky, who was just a teenager, went out into
the woods near his summer camp. And he just sat
there alone until the evening. He couldn't participate
in the collective joy because all he could think
about was the human suffering. That image, a
kid sitting alone in the woods refusing to celebrate,
it sounds just like something out of a no novel.
It resonated so deeply with him. She said later,
I've always respected Chomsky, but I respected
him even more after he told me that. It's that
shared sense of moral isolation, of being the
one person who has to step out of the parade
to ask, wait a minute, is this right? His final
novel was published in 2013. And it was titled
In Late Style. Banan Yoshikishu. It's a direct
reference to Edward Said's concept of late style
in art. And it features his longtime literary
alter ego, a character named Kudito Choko. In
the book, the character finds he's lost interest
in writing fiction after the 2011 earthquake
and tsunami. He decides he has to write directly
about what he calls the age of catastrophe. It
seems so fitting. He started his career writing
about the catastrophe of the war, and he ended
it writing about the catastrophe of the tsunami
and nuclear disaster. He was a witness. From
beginning to end, he was a witness. Ken Zabushit
passed away on March 3, 2023. He was 88 years
old. When you look back at this incredible life,
the village boy, the angry student, the father
of a disabled son, the Nobel winner who said
no to the emperor, the elderly activist, what
is the legacy? What does it all add up to? He
described himself once in an interview he did
with the Paris Review. He said, in principle,
I am an anarchist. Kurt Vonnegut once said he
was an agnostic who respects Jesus Christ. I
am an anarchist who loves democracy. An anarchist
who loves democracy. That's a fantastic contradiction.
I think it sums him up perfectly. He believed
in the people. He believed in the messy, difficult,
frustrating work of democracy. But he never,
ever trusted the state. He never trusted the
system. And you could say he moved Japanese literature
from a focus on a certain kind of aesthetic,
detached beauty to something grotesque and real
and deeply, messily human. He showed that you
could take the most personal, private pain imaginable,
the birth of a child with brain damage, and turn
it into universal art. He showed that you could
take the political anger of a betrayed generation
and turn it into a lifelong fight for truth.
It's a lesson in using your stuff, isn't it?
Your own personal baggage and trauma. Absolutely.
He didn't hide his trauma. He didn't hide his
son. He didn't hide his political views. He put
it all right there on the page for everyone to
see. And that's why this matters to us, to you
listening, even if you're not a Japanese writer
from the 20th century. It's about the refusal
to conform, even when your whole country, your
whole culture, expects you to just play nice
and accept the prize. He could have accepted
that order of culture. He could have been the
grand old man of letters, safe and respected
and beloved. But he chose to be difficult because
for him, being difficult was the only way to
be honest. So here's a thought to leave you with.
created this entire sprawling literary universe,
dozens of books, characters, myths, and a huge
part of it was to give his son, Hikari, a voice.
He amplified the voice of the voiceless. So in
a world that is just full of information overload,
full of noise, whose voice are you trying to
amplify? And maybe more importantly, are you
brave enough to refuse a badge of honor if it
conflicts with your most deeply held core values?
That's the ultimate question, isn't it? The courage
to say no. Rest in peace, Ken Zabrusia. What
a life. Thanks for listening to this deep dive.
We'll catch you on the next one. Goodbye.