The Sade Trial (excerpt)Kenzaburo Oe
English translation of a courtroom transcript excerpt from Sado Saiban (サド裁判, "The Sade Trial"), the record of the Japanese obscenity trial over the translation and publication of Marquis de Sade's Juliette (published in Japanese as 悪徳の栄え, Akutoku no Sakae). Biographical notes on named individuals are provided in shaded boxes at their first appearance.
The excerpt begins mid-testimony, during the questioning of witness Kenzaburō Ōe, and continues through further witness and defendant examinations before the special defense counsel and defense/prosecution attorneys.
The “Sade Trial” (サド裁判) refers to the Japanese criminal prosecution (1961–1969) of translator Ryūtarō Shibusawa (writing as Tatsuhiko Shibusawa) and publisher Kyōji Ishii of Gendai Shichō-sha, over the 1959 Japanese translation and publication of the Marquis de Sade's Juliette (published as 悪徳の栄え, “The Flourishing of Vice”/Akutoku no Sakae), on charges of distributing obscene material under Article 175 of the Japanese Penal Code. The trial drew testimony from many prominent Japanese writers and critics as defense witnesses. The Tokyo District Court acquitted the defendants in 1962; an appellate court convicted them in 1963; and the Supreme Court upheld the conviction (with fines) in a landmark 1969 decision.
[continuing testimony already in progress]
[The transcript opens mid-sentence, apparently continuing remarks by Yutaka Haniya about changing legal or social standards.]
...being treated as a serious and earnest problem — that is how I see it, too.
Haniya: It has been changing in Japan as well, and abroad too.
Yutaka Haniya (埴谷雄高, 1909–1997):
Japanese novelist and political/critical essayist, born in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Best known for the unfinished philosophical novel Shirei (「死靈」, Dead Souls), begun in 1946. A former Communist Party member deeply influenced by Kant and Dostoevsky, he was a central figure of the postwar “Kindai Bungaku” (Modern Literature) coterie. In this trial he served as one of the special defense counsel (tokubetsu bengonin) — literary and intellectual figures permitted to address the court in support of the defense, alongside lawyers.
Nakajima: It has been changing worldwide.
Kenzō Nakajima (中島健蔵, 1903–1979):
Japanese scholar of French literature and literary critic, associate professor and later lecturer at the University of Tokyo. Known for introducing and translating Valéry and Baudelaire, for early recognition of Kenji Miyazawa's work, and postwar for his involvement in the peace movement and in cultural exchange with China. In this trial he appears as a witness (his testimony as such preceding this excerpt in the source volume).
Haniya: We are hoping that this precedent will be overturned, but…
Nakajima: I'm afraid that's really not within the scope of what I, as a witness, should answer.
Kenzaburō Ōe (大江健三郎, b. 1935–d. 2023):
Japanese novelist, later awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (1994). At the time of this trial he was a young but already prominent writer, having graduated from the French Literature Department of the University of Tokyo in 1959. Known for early works such as Shisha no Ogori (「死者の奮り」, “Lavish Are the Dead”), Memushiri Kouchi (「芽むしり仔撫ち」, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids), and Okurete Kita Seinen (「遅れてきた青年」, The Youth Who Arrived Late). He appeared here as a defense witness.
Arai Akira, defense counsel: First, I would like to ask you for a brief outline of your background. What was the last school you attended?
Akira Arai (新井章, b. 1931):
Japanese lawyer and later legal scholar (professor emeritus, Ibaraki University). A graduate of the University of Tokyo Faculty of Law, he was involved in numerous major constitutional-rights cases in Japan, including the Sunagawa Case, the Asahi lawsuit, the Horiki lawsuit, and the Zentei Chūyūbu case, in addition to serving as defense counsel in the Akutoku no Sakae (Sade) obscenity case, which reached the Supreme Court's Grand Bench in 1969.
Witness Ōe: The French Literature Department of the Faculty of Letters, University of Tokyo.
Arai: What year did you graduate?
Ōe: I graduated in the thirty-fourth year [of Shōwa, i.e. 1959].
Arai: While you were a student at the University of Tokyo, what did you mainly study — what was your specialty?
Ōe: In my department's French Literature program, students are given the opportunity to study French literature across a very wide span of periods, but I specialized in particular in contemporary literature. My graduation thesis was on contemporary literature as well.
Arai: By “contemporary literature” you mean contemporary French literature?
Arai: For reference, what was the topic of your graduation thesis…?
Ōe: The theme was something like ‘Considering Sartre's Psychology through Sartre's Novels.’
Arai: By contemporary French literature you mean writers like Sartre, Camus, Malraux, and so on?
Ōe: Yes, that's right. To be precise, I would say writers who emerged after the Second World War — or one could even say writers active from around 1950 onward.
Arai: And as you mentioned earlier, you are now working as a novelist yourself. Could you name two or three of your own works that you consider most important?
Ōe: Among my short-story collections there is Shisha no Ogori (Lavish Are the Dead); among my novellas there is Memushiri Kouchi (Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids); and among my full-length novels there is Okurete Kita Seinen (The Youth Who Arrived Late), among others.
Arai: In the course of your work as a writer, as you were also studying contemporary French literature, did you have occasion to read — to come into contact with — Sade's works?
Ōe: ‘Come into contact with’ may be putting it strangely, but as I studied and read contemporary French literature — Rimbaud, Sartre, and writers of that kind in particular — I found that Sade's influence, whether direct or indirect, runs very deep. For instance, to understand a novel like Sartre's The Roads to Freedom, it is necessary to read Sade's own works quite concretely, and also to read French criticism of Sade. In that sense I would say I had contact with Sade.
Also, through the influence of friends in French literature who read Sade in particular, there were occasions when I read Sade directly myself.
Arai: You say you have read Sade's works. What, up to now, have you mainly read?
Ōe: In translation, I read the short stories translated by Ryūtarō Shibusawa, and also Justine. I believe Justine exists in three somewhat different versions, and what I read was, I think, the translation of the shortest of these. And I read the recent translation of Juliette. As for what I read imperfectly in French myself, it was, as I mentioned, I believe a collection of short stories. I read that. And Juliette — among the other books I read over a long period, I believe there was also a translated volume called Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom. That is about the extent of it.
Ryūtarō Shibusawa / Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (渋沢龍彦 / 澀澤龍彦, 1928–1987):
Japanese essayist, art critic, and translator, born in Tokyo, a graduate of the French Literature Department of the University of Tokyo. He was the principal Japanese translator of the Marquis de Sade (also translating Cocteau, among others), and was co-defendant in this obscenity trial as translator of Akutoku no Sakae (Juliette). His registered legal name was Ryūo Shibusawa (渋沢龍雄); he wrote under the pen name Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (澀澤龍彦). Later in life he wrote acclaimed essays on Western esoterica and the fantastical novel Kouya ŌŌ Kōkaiki (The Prince of the Wilderness's Sea Voyage).
Arai: As for Juliette, or rather Akutoku no Sakae (The Flourishing of Vice) — the work at issue in this case — have you read that?
Arai: On what occasion, and around when, did you read it?
Ōe: I bought it and read it as soon as it was translated and published. To be precise, that means both Akutoku no Sakae and its sequel, translated under the title Zoku Akutoku no Sakae — Juriet no Henreki (“Continued: The Flourishing of Vice — The Wanderings of Juliette”). I received the first volume from Mr. Shibusawa himself and read it; the second volume I bought and read myself.
Arai: Was this before the indictment in this case?
Arai: I would like to ask you a bit more about this book. As you mentioned earlier regarding Sartre and Camus — you said that when studying or reading contemporary French literature with real interest, one inevitably comes into contact with Sade. Could you explain that a little more?
Ōe: To give a concrete example: Sartre's The Roads to Freedom, which I mentioned earlier — in its first part, translated into Japanese as The Age of Reason, two important characters appear. One is the protagonist, Mathieu; the other is a secondary character, Daniel. In Sartre's fictional world, the Mathieu figure represents something very humanistic — a person directly seeking human freedom, humanistic freedom, so to speak. The other, Daniel, is, say, a French stockbroker of some kind, representing, one might say, the anti-humanist side, the non-humanistic side.
There has long been a kind of dualism in French — or European — fiction generally, between a ‘divine’ side and a ‘demonic’ side, and this is intricately bound up with that; bringing in such a divine/demonic dualism risks causing a great deal of confusion, but if, for instance, one takes Mathieu as representing the ‘divine’ side, then Daniel stands opposed to him like a demon, while also depending on him — that is the kind of figure Daniel is. Daniel is a very important character, and I believe two literary figures are present in the background of Daniel's thought: one is Arthur Rimbaud, who appears quite concretely; the other side is one where Sade exerts a very deep influence.
For example, in understanding how this character Daniel, while embodying a very ‘bad,’ anti-humanist form, is nonetheless connected to humanism, I think referring to the thought of a thinker like Sade makes it much easier to understand. That was actually one of the themes of my graduation thesis, and in that sense I think one can say that contemporary literature and Sade are very deeply intertwined.
And, for instance, reading the memoirs of Simone de Beauvoir, a novelist and friend of Sartre's, one sees how French students who had been very constrained gradually became free through various kinds of reading; and in that process too, I have the sense that reading Sade — directly or indirectly — played a very effective role for both Beauvoir and Sartre himself.
Arai: You say you have read Akutoku no Sakae. What was your motive for reading, or taking up, this book? I imagine you also have various impressions and reflections after reading it — could you explain what you sought to take from this book, or what you were able to take from it?
Ōe: [I don't write and publish novels merely as such — rather, there is a sense in which, by writing novels, I am also building myself up as a person. In that sense, writing novels and reading excellent books are very importantly linked for me.] For that reason, when something excellent appears on a subject I am very interested in, reading it becomes very important to me — and I think that was true of Sade as well.
Sade's collected writings — that is, the texts Sade himself wrote — are not so easy to obtain, and are also very difficult to read; so when a translation of such high quality as Mr. Shibusawa's appeared, I felt I wanted to read it before anything else. So I read it. And why did I want to read it? As I said earlier, I think I can say I read it because I judged it very necessary for understanding contemporary French literature. The specific reason I bought and read Akutoku no Sakae right away was that Mr. Shibusawa had previously translated a collection of short stories, and had translated Justine, and that book already had a very good reputation among people I know, and I myself think it is an excellent translation.
In that sense, whenever Sade appeared in a Shibusawa translation, I wanted to read it right away, and that is concretely how I came to read this one.
As for my impressions after reading it — well, it was that a certain faith I hold regarding Sade — a faith I myself hold — felt very much satisfied. What I mean by my own ‘faith’ is that Sade,] as a French thinker, and also as a thinker of world stature who has influenced Japanese thought as well, has a very important aspect. What aspect is that? [I believe he is a thinker whose work functions to liberate the human spirit. Reading Akutoku no Sakae, one does not necessarily feel oneself liberated from one's own present constraints, but one can concretely understand how the spirit of the French Revolutionary era, which was extremely constrained, was liberated by Sade, and how modern thought came to take shape as a result. When one tries to understand, say, the contemporary French intellectual world, it is rather like being on the second floor of a building without knowing which staircase one clmbed up by, or which staircase one might descend by —
in the present case, discovering that a thinker as remarkable and free as Sade constitutes a very important link with the whole of French thought — or, one might say, with human thought as a whole — is something I find very illuminating; it feels deeply relevant, and gives me the sense that my own present thinking is coming together. In that sense reading Sade is very valuable, and indeed in this instance too I would say it is where I gained the most.
Arai: What do you feel was the main issue, or theme, that Sade sought to appeal to — to convey to — readers through this book?
Ōe: As to what Sade was trying to appeal to, I think that is a very difficult question. The reason is this: recently, when I have gone to France, French writers — when I met Sartre, for instance — Sartre has said that in the thirty years around the time of the French Revolution, almost nothing worth calling French literature was produced; that is what Sartre says about that era. I think that remark is highly suggestive with regard to Sade as well. Sade's work was written in a very peculiar environment — an era from which French literature could gain almost nothing, an era in which nothing could be expected of readers. Considering directly what Sade himself was trying to appeal to is, I think, very difficult, and I believe it may even be impossible to infer. What I can say is that it remains a very good book — consciously a good book — surviving into the present; and I think I can answer, more or less, on the question of what Sade's book appeals to in today's readers, and what today's readers can take from Sade. In that sense, as to how Sade appeals, and what one might expect from Sade — my answer is that I believe Sade's work functions to liberate the human spirit. To repeat what I said earlier —
simply put, I think that is the function it performs. Now, if one considers, say, the work of contemporary writers, writers active after the Second World War like Sartre — what do they appeal to through their novels? It is that we believe ourselves to be free, and yet are in fact very constrained — constrained by convention, for instance, and by national and social forces, historical forces especially. There are historians too, of course, but there are all these various constraints. And so, in order to discover the truly human — the purely human — one must separate oneself from those constraints and truly confront oneself.
Such self-reflection has emerged as a particular tendency in French literature since the Second World War, I think; and in that sense, although Sade was a writer who lived in the era of the French Revolution, he offers us today a very great intimation toward liberating and freeing ourselves from the various constraints that surround us. That, I think, is the biggest reason — and the biggest need — behind Sade's contemporary reevaluation,
and what I myself take from Sade, what I expect from Sade, is in part what has been fulfilled through Mr. Shibusawa's translation. Put the other way around, that is, I think, what one could call what Sade is trying to appeal to us.
A novel, from the myths and legends of two thousand years ago down to contemporary literature, has a very particular kind of ‘appeal’ on the part of its author. A singer performing on stage, for instance, has a direct intention to appeal to the people before him; but in the case of a book, the finished book stands independent, and the relationship of ‘appeal’ only comes into being through how the person reading it understands it. So I don't think what I have just answered is at all off the mark from your question — I think it demonstrates Sade's particular quality, so to speak, from the other side.
Arai: In this work, Akutoku no Sakae, there recur repeatedly, by any ordinary standard, acts of what would be seen as deranged cruelty, or extremely immoral matters — expressions that, judged by ordinary moral sensibility, cannot fail to leave an extremely strong impression. Is this connected — as you have just described — to liberating the reader's spirit, breaking various socially prescribed constraints and freeing people's minds, and thereby prompting further reflection? Is that, in the witness's sense, related to the theme or the appeal of this work?
Ōe: I think I must answer that essentially, yes, it is. I myself believe that the point at which these two things essentially overlap is one of the elements that constitutes Sade's greatness.
There are several things in your question just now that I find very interesting. You said the work contains elements that shock the ordinary person. Sade's work does indeed do that — although I don't myself believe there is such a thing as an ‘ordinary person’ — but it does shock the general, ordinary run of people. For anyone else — at least for someone who has the will to understand Sade, or to seek Sade out — I think it delivers a shock. I myself feel I was shocked. What kind of shock was it? That,
as I said earlier, is the shock of being made to question whether what one has taken to be constraining oneself — the society one looks out on, the human relationships one looks out on — are in fact merely secondary things that human beings have built up over the past two thousand years, and whether the truly human is not something more free, more liberated. In that sense one receives a very essential shock. The distinguishing feature of this novel of Sade's is that it takes the form of a narrative told by a single French woman, Juliette; and this form of narration — essentially, of speaking — recounts a concrete event while at the same time being deeply overlaid with the thought of the person telling it. I take that to be a characteristic of the narrative-style novel. French literature itself has long had that tradition, and so, for instance, even when Juliette narrates scenes that deliver a very concrete shock — sexual scenes, say — she is not attempting to depict something sexual, not attempting to depict a sexual event as such, but is narrating such scenes in order to show how such things become the root of human thought, how they stimulate human thought. In that sense, I believe that the various parts of this novel
Juliette — every part of it — has parts that perform a truly important function toward the ideational understanding of human freedom, of the liberation from a sense of constraint.
Arai: Was there, then, some necessity that compelled Sade to write those cruel scenes you mentioned earlier?
Ōe: I would like to answer that yes, it was necessary.
The ‘necessity’ involved when a writer writes a long novel is a very difficult thing, and I have my doubts as to whether the word ‘necessity’ can be used in a general sense at all; and indeed, take Japan, where there are a great many writers alive today, all trying to appeal to the same theme, say, of love: for one writer it may be a necessity to write of a very pure, innocent love, while for another writer it may be a necessity to depict a situation that is more cruel, more erotic — that, too, can be called ‘necessity’ in the same
sense. So I think of ‘necessity,’ in a writer's case, with the qualification that it is something rooted very deeply in that individual person.
In Sade's case, given his thought, and given that the era of the French Revolution was an extremely chaotic time — an era in which very old things still remained, in which very rigid chains still bound human beings — I think there was a necessity, in order to originally express a way of thinking that had not existed anywhere around him, to choose the elements most faithful to his own thought, as far as possible. In that sense, I think Sade made the right choice in order to convey his thought accurately, and on that basis alone I think his originality is something that remains in literary history.
Arai: For instance, as you said earlier, regarding awakening the reader's spiritual self-awareness — one can read Sade as having considered that in this work. Is what you are saying, then, that this basic theme and the extremely cruel or immoral elements are closely connected — necessarily connected, if I may use that word again?
Ōe: Yes, concretely, I believe so.
Arai: For instance, one might grant that this theme is fine, but when publishing that theme as a literary work, could not the cruel or immoral elements have been somewhat toned down? I imagine that is something those who brought this prosecution may be thinking. What is your view on that opinion?
Ōe: I find that opinion a very interesting one, but as an opinion about literary figures, about writers, I feel it contains a certain carelessness of thought — an incompleteness, if you will. For a writer to publish his own work is, concretely speaking, very similar to the question of what face one wears while living one's life.]For instance, when I myself publish my own work, the idea of ‘toning it down’ for some particular audience is simply not something I could do. Why not? Because it would be like trying to adjust, in my own mind, what shape my own ears are — it is very similar to that. It is
that for the writer, it is not a matter of expressing things while calculating, objectively, what will be denounced by judges, or condemned, or criticized by adults — rather, the most concrete desire is to express, as much as possible, the truly human as one conceives it, to bring forth in the work an image as close as possible to the true human being as one conceives it.
In such a case, the writer devotes himself entirely to the task of writing up the image of the human being he is creating — that alone fully occupies the writer's activity; it is not something that can, unreasonably, be reined in by considerations of what censure it might receive hundreds of years later. That would be something of a wholly different order from the writer's creative activity itself; to put it in the extreme, I consider such a view to be simply a mistaken opinion about the activity of writing.
Arai: Now, regarding what I asked earlier — a rather unusual point — among the opinions and scenes I asked about, was your view that each depiction, each expressive passage, ought to be given equal weight when seen in light of the basic theme Sade was trying to convey?
Arai: This work, viewed formally and conventionally, contains both expressions of cruel or immoral scenes on the one hand, and, one might say, somewhat metaphysical, highly theoretical passages on the other. If one were to divide it that way — that is, concretely speaking, the sexual expressive passages versus the more theory-heavy passages — am I right to understand that, from the standpoint of the basic theme, it would be wrong to see these two as having different importance or significance, and that they should be regarded as of equal importance?
Ōe: Yes. I think that is a very precise way of putting it. Let me add to what I said at the very beginning: the fact that this work is narrated — told in the voice of a single protagonist — carries, I think, the greatest significance.
That is the first point. Second, I would like to add a bit more about the function of language, of the words used in fiction, in expression. Words do not have meaning simply because they exist; rather, the meaning of a word within a work arises from what it evokes, what it calls up, in the mind of the person reading it. So, for instance, when I read Sade, and you speak of the ‘theoretical’ passages — certain theoretical lines evoke something in my mind; and then, in another instance, certain lines of sexual description evoke something in my mind as well. The sentences written are different in each case, but the evocative function — that is, what Sade becomes within my own mind — must be said to be equal between the two. For example, if one takes it very simply that the theme narrated in this novel is ‘to restore human freedom,’ then that involves making the reader recognize human freedom, making the reader aware that human beings are constrained — and in that sense, what the theoretical aspect evokes in my mind
and what the words narrating actual events evoke in my mind are, I think, never really different things. If it were otherwise, one would have to say that the critic and the writer are entirely different kinds of people. But that is not so — the critic and the writer are doing the same thing. Both are trying, with their own words, to evoke in the minds of others the same thing, the same elements, regarding what a human being is; and in that sense the theoretical portions of this work and its concrete portions are, I think, the same.
This is especially emphasized by the fact that the novel is narrated by a single figure, Juliette — that is precisely where what I have just said is reinforced.
For example, when one's own grandmother tells an old story, her tale contains very concrete elements — for instance, the concrete fact that [the Meiji-era general] Ōmura Masujirō advanced with his troops — mixed together, quite haphazardly, with more theoretical, imagistic reflections on how things were different back then. Yet what these evoke in my mind is not the same. In that sense, the fact that this novel is written in narrative form — in French literature this hardly differs from ordinary prose style, if read carefully it should make no difference — but especially in something like Japanese, where the spoken, narrative register differs from the descriptive register, that distinction is very much emphasized, and I believe it is rendered clearly in translation. In that sense I don't feel this translation misled me in any way.
Arai: As I also mentioned in part of my question, I believe that in depicting the various aims or themes Sade sought to convey through this work, he did not develop them through a general treatment of issues at large, but rather made the basic expressive theme, in effect, matters relating to sex — that is, expression concerning sexual matters. Why did Sade use the theme of sex in particular — not only in this work — as his principal expressive device? Please explain the significance of that.
Ōe: Well, various opinions about sex have been expressed by many writers up to recent times, and I believe such testimony has already been given in this court as well. So
in that sense, I believe a very good understanding of this has already been reached in this court, but let me state my own view, quite personally: in fiction, the question of how to grasp and express the human being, and how to draw out new human hope, is, I think, the fundamental problem; and in an age such as the present, where the human is especially liable to be lost sight of amid the inhuman, it becomes very important to pursue the human being through whatever is as fundamentally, as concretely, directly tied to the human as possible. In that sense, the depiction of sex in literature is, I think, grounded in a very concrete and urgent demand.
In Japanese too, the word for ‘sex’ (sei) is bound up with very concrete words for grasping the human — man and woman — and the French word sexe, likewise, is one of the most widely used words in the world, of course including in the sense of distinguishing male and female; and in that way, to think about sex is bound up, in an extremely fundamental, concretely primary way, with the human question — for it was through this that human beings came to know, upon being born, that men and women differ,
and, further, came to conceive of a god who is neither male nor female. That is the sense in which I think it is tied, in an extremely fundamental way, to the human question.
In that sense, taking up sex in order to grasp the human concretely is not a mistake. In Sade's case in particular: if Sade had developed his work around some other subject instead of sex — the aristocracy or the bureaucracy of the pre-Revolutionary era, say — I don't think today's readers would derive any direct teaching from it at all.
But the reason Sade still has meaning today is that sex is a problem that never changed, before his time, in his time, or since, down to the present — a problem that has always overlapped with the human, one I would say is fundamental enough to be called, effectively, the human problem itself. Taking that on directly, in order to appeal to what was for him the most fundamentally ideational thing — freedom — Sade's choice of sex as his subject was, I think, extremely effective in human history, something to be grateful for, something fortunate,
a very important choice, I believe.
That problem continues, of course, into the present as well — for instance, in writing my own novels, I grasp the human through the question of sex, its sexual dimension. I think that has been, for me, one of the most important elements bearing on the present.
There is a book by the American novelist Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, and in an interview included in it — broadcast on one of America's largest networks, a broadcast fully accepted by the public — Mailer was asked why
Norman Mailer (1923–2007):
American novelist and essayist, author of works including The Naked and the Dead and Advertisements for Myself (1959), and later of The Deer Park (1955), mentioned further below. Known for frank treatment of sexuality and violence and for his combative public persona.
he deals with sex, and he answered that the various methods of literature, the various ways of approaching human beings, seem not to have been achieved by nineteenth-century literature, or by the literature of the first half of the twentieth century, and that what remains most important, indeed the one essential thing remaining, is depicting the human being through sex. I believe that is something Sade himself was thinking in his own era, and that it holds true across the whole of human history.
Arai: This relates to that as well. Isn't the way this work takes up the sexual question different from, say, the earlier controversy over Lady Chatterley's Lover, by Lawrence? Here we find, rather, things like incest, parricide, infanticide, or collective debauchery — forms of sexual depiction that stand out, in the ordinary sense, for their abnormality. Is this connected to some theme of Sade's, some attitude Sade himself brought to this work, or is it connected to what you spoke of earlier — the shock meant to break through the reader's shell?
Lady Chatterley's Lover / D. H. Lawrence:
D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), English novelist, author of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), a novel whose explicit depiction of an adulterous relationship was itself the subject of a landmark Japanese obscenity trial (the 1950 Chatarei Case), the standard from which later emerged. Its Japanese translator, Sei Ito, and the publisher were prosecuted, and the case established the earlier legal test for obscenity referenced repeatedly in this transcript.
Ōe: Yes, I believe there is a concrete connection there. You have just compared Lady Chatterley's Lover with Akutoku no Sakae, and I think that is, in fact, an apt comparison.
Lady Chatterley's Lover is written in a very descriptive style — it is not written in a narrative style like Sade's. It is highly descriptive; and so, through Lawrence's description, the human being within sexual love can be depicted directly before the reader's eyes, and reading Lawrence
causes two people in love to rise vividly before one's eyes.
That is the kind of effect it has — I think that is the effect of the descriptive style. Akutoku no Sakae, by contrast, is not like that: a single character narrates her own experience. Experience is always bound up with one's own thought — thought, so to speak, is born through experience — and so she narrates experience as intertwined with her own thought; in effect, she calls up experience from the past in order to narrate her thought, and uses it for that purpose.
I think one can understand it that way. So, in the case of Sade's Akutoku no Sakae, why, in the terms you used earlier, is the ‘abnormal within the ordinary’ given such emphasis? It is because the aim is not to depict the concrete before everyone's eyes as such, but rather to evoke, in the reader's mind, something very pure, very important in thought, by way of the abnormal; and for that purpose it is more effective to narrate an event that is as non-concrete, as abnormal, and as
shocking as possible — in effect, extreme in the proper sense of that word.
In that sense, I think one can say that such abnormal events have been chosen.
Arai: This point has come up repeatedly already, but I would like to ask specifically about the problem of description — the concrete problem of description. In today's testimony you said that one of the great things Sade is concerned with in this work is delivering a spiritual shock in order to break the various established conventions and constraints that bind, and in some cases distort, the reader's spirit.
And you also spoke of Sade's reason for choosing sex as the most basic theme for expressing his thought. Given that, it might well be received — taking, say, the sexual passages of this work — that they possess a very concrete, raw vividness capable of arousing sexual excitement in the reader. I would like you to speak to the concreteness of that description — the significance, which has come up repeatedly, of the fact that this is written as narrative…
Arai: In what you have just said — in the way I put it — you took it that I meant the sexual scenes depicted here give a very vivid impression, is that right?
Arai: No — not that I take it that way myself, but that there may be people who receive it that way…
Ōe: Ah, I see. I think answering that point amounts to answering the whole of your question. As for whether sexual intercourse of a kind is depicted vividly in the reader's mind in a very negative sense — the effect is best when it is as if peering, for instance, through a window at people actually having intercourse on the other side. I am not myself especially well versed in erotica, but there is a book, My Life and Loves, by a writer named Frank Harris, which, as it happens, I read — out of boredom, over the course of a recent trip — all four volumes.
Frank Harris (1855–1931):
Irish-American writer, editor, and journalist, author of the sexually explicit multi-volume memoir My Life and Loves, published in installments from 1922 onward and long banned or restricted in many countries for its frank content.
In that book — which, compared with Sade, I would say belongs in the category of erotica — the sexual intercourse depicted is that of an entirely ordinary man having intercourse with a lover; it is depicted very concretely, as normally as possible.
And so, in my own mind, an image of sexual intercourse rises up, visually, before me. In such a case, my mind goes, as it were, to sleep, and I find myself simply taking in as much of the sexual sensation as possible — so that reading Frank Harris's book was, for me, much like watching intercourse actually taking place through a window — quite ordinary intercourse — the same kind of effect.
But I think what someone feels reading Sade's book is, if anything, the opposite.
Reading Sade's book, one's spirit certainly does not simply fall asleep — far from feeling drowsy, it awakens the sleeping spirit and makes one truly think in terms of ideas; that is the effect Sade produces,
and that is the substance of what I meant earlier by ‘shock’ — description, narrative, meant to give real stimulation, to deliver a shock. And in Sade's case, in particular, scenes of murder, or of group sexual acts, recur repeatedly — but these are by no means meant to call up, to entice forth, concrete images as such; and if someone, reading such extremely complex and grotesque scenes of sexual intercourse, were to conjure a similar image in his own mind and derive sexual excitement from it, that person would hardly be a normal person. I would even say such a person ought to be apprehended — but that being so, for an ordinary, normal human being, this kind of depiction never connects at all to one's everyday sexual feelings. It absolutely cannot connect to one's own everyday sexual sensations; rather, in a sense, what is truly sexual here is redirected toward what is truly ideational — something existing purely in the human mind, something originating in the human spirit — and the reader's attention is turned in that direction, awakened from its sleeping state.
That, I think, is the effect, and that is the sense in which I say it is very vivid.
Arai: On this point, I think we have more or less covered it, but the witness has said very clearly, as his own view, that the novel takes the form of narrative told by the heroine Juliette, rather than being written in a descriptive style like Harris's, as you mentioned earlier. How is that narrative form related to what you just said about the description's lack of concreteness? Could you explain that a little more, in simpler terms — whether narrative form takes concreteness away from the description or expression?
Ōe: For example — to address that directly — what would happen if the same scene of sexual intercourse were written in both styles? I could simply read it out, but let me explain in words instead. If, on the one hand, one describes a scene of intercourse in the descriptive style — two people having intercourse, and, say, the sun shining in through the window — one lays this out quite objectively, so that as accurately as possible, the room, the light, the sounds, the human voices, the facial expressions — all of it —
rise up vividly in the reader's mind — that is a matter of whether the descriptive style is skillfully done or not. So, in the best descriptive style, the scene — the scene of intercourse, for instance — rises up as concretely as possible in the reader's mind; that, I think, is how one writes in a descriptive style. In postwar France, quite recently, there has been a school known as the anti-roman [nouveau roman], which, avoiding subjectivity as much as possible, avoiding mixing in one's own ideas as much as possible, tries to make a scene, a real situation, rise up in the reader's mind — in that sense it is written in an almost extreme descriptive mode.
The anti-roman / nouveau roman:
Ōe refers here to the French “new novel” movement of the 1950s–60s (writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor), known for objective, highly descriptive prose that minimized authorial subjectivity and psychological interiority.
Narrative style, by contrast — to take a better example — is like the scholar of Zen, Daisetz Suzuki, who has published a number of volumes of Lectures. Daisetz Suzuki narrates a particular incident in order to make the reader understand the philosophical, thoughtful meaning breathed into it.
D. T. Suzuki (鈴木大拙, 1870–1966):
Japanese Buddhist scholar and author, chiefly responsible for introducing Zen Buddhism to a Western audience through his English-language writings and lectures; also published extensively in Japanese, including collections of lectures (kōwashū).
Such books exist for that purpose. Ordinarily, Daisetz Suzuki himself would give such talks before an audience of believers, but even though a concrete fact, a concrete incident, is being narrated, sexual scenes never rise up before the reader's eyes; instead, one is made to want to reflect further, in Suzuki's spirit, on his thought — that is the effect it has. For instance, in the recent film Shaka [The Buddha], there is a scene in which female demons come to tempt the Buddha, and I understand that Buddhist circles were angered that Daiei Studios had filmed such a scene; the reason for the anger, I believe, is that having the interplay or conflict between the Buddha and the woman appear on screen conceals the ideational content and instead impresses upon the viewer's own mind an erotic image of the scene as such — that is, I think, why they were angered.
But the relationship between the Buddha and the woman as found in sutras, in Buddhist texts, is not like that at all; it does not give an erotic image that would corrupt the Buddhist faithful, but rather has as its sole aim to evoke, in the mind of the reader, thought-provoking questions — about the doctrine that form is emptiness, about the meaning of living as a human being, about eroticism, sex, love, and also death. Narrative style, writing in the form of storytelling, does not aim to raise concrete facts as images before the reader's mind, but rather aims solely to evoke, in the reader's mind, what meaning such facts carry, what thought they narrate — that is a role that narrative style carries very strongly, a spiritual, one might say ideational, philosophical role, is what I meant to say.
And concretely, Sade's Akutoku no Sakae is a work that makes extreme use of precisely the strengths of that narrative style. In that sense it is a deeply philosophical book — whatever concrete events it narrates, and however much it dwells on philosophical discourse, it is, in the same sense, of the same value, fulfilling the role of appealing to something ideational; that, I believe, is the characteristic of this narrative style.
Arai: Finally, I would like to ask two more, somewhat general, questions. There is a view according to which one part of a literary work can be extracted from the rest, or from the whole, and independently evaluated on its own. How do you, as a novelist, regard that kind of approach…
Ōe: Speaking as a writer myself, I find it very unsatisfactory to have my own work evaluated by a part taken in isolation, reading only that part and judging it on that basis — and I believe that method signifies nothing correct whatsoever. Especially with a book that seeks to convey something ideational — a novel like Akutoku no Sakae, say — to extract only a part of it is a truly reckless thing to do, something I would very much rather people did not do. Words — if one isolates the words of a single sentence — have no meaning at all, exactly like an entry in a dictionary; they carry no human meaning whatsoever on their own. In just the same way, it is only once such small units gather into sentences that a literary work first begins to make its claim as a unified whole — and in just the same way, the book as a whole possesses
a single ideational meaning. When it carries a very tightly woven philosophical significance, extracting one part of it is exactly like taking a single word — say, ‘arbitrary murder’ or ‘sexual intercourse’ — out of the root of a sentence, out of the underlying thought, and speculating about the meaning of the sentence from that word alone; it is very dangerous, and it is meaningless. I think this danger, and this meaninglessness, are especially pronounced in Sade's case.
Arai: One more question — again drawing on your own experience as a writer. When writing a book, creating a work, is it accurate to posit an abstract ‘general reader’? Or, granting that one can posit such a general reader, what do you think of the view that takes such a reader as the basis for the final social evaluation of a work or a book's value?
Ōe: When considering literature, considering a book, positing a certain readership can allow one to classify the book, to distinguish its character. For instance, one can distinguish a category such as ‘books for children’ or ‘books for schoolgirls’ — that kind of classification, that kind of characterization, is possible.
But of course, that cannot determine the value of the book. There are good children's books, good books for schoolgirls, and good books for general readers. So such distinctions apply only in a very narrow sense — one can distinguish, say, children's books from books for schoolgirls in that narrow sense. [But when one wants to consider the truly human question, when one has a book that speaks to the human being as such, then if one were to posit a reader for it at all, that reader would simply have to be ‘the human being’ — or, to put it more clearly, a human being like oneself — for it is to that human being that the book speaks;] and so to adjust one's own book, considering a readership in the same way one would in writing a children's book, is simply not something one can do for a book written for the fully mature human being. In Sade's case, for instance — a book that truly makes known, at the most fundamental level, the human problem — I think one can only say that its readers are, simply, human beings.
And, fortunately, such books are, for instance, not read by children. Nor are they read by schoolgirls not yet of age. It has traditionally worked out that only those who are, so to speak, worthy of the name ‘human being’ come to read them — and I think that is a happiness belonging to those of us engaged in literature.
Ōōno: There is just one further point I would like to ask the witness about, regarding what you have just said.
Ōōno (大野), defense counsel:
Almost certainly Ōno Masao (大野正男), one of the defense lawyers in the Sade Trial, who is recorded elsewhere in the trial record as delivering the closing argument on behalf of the defense. He appears in this excerpt questioning witness Ōe and, later, witness Shibusawa. (Rendered here as “Ōōno” following the transcript's furigana; the surname is elsewhere given as Ōno.)
You spoke of having read this book of Sade's, and, from your own stance as a novelist, about the reason for writing things like incest — that it is meant to deliver a shock to the human being, a kind of spiritual revolution; you placed a great deal of emphasis on that point of ‘shock.’ But among readers, there may be some who read literature or art hoping simply to feel good, to enjoy themselves — people who are, in fact, looking for that. For such people, do contemporary art, or Sade, have any point of contact at all? Or are they simply unrelated — something that such people, or contemporary art of that kind, would have no part of?
Ōe: I see. Since you seem to be focused on the word ‘shock’ that I used — well…
Ōōno: I am asking only in order to clarify its meaning.
Ōe: I was hoping to clarify what I meant by that word ‘shock’ myself. By shock, I meant something like the shock of an alarm clock — a shock meant to wake a sleeping spirit. So, to address your question just now — even for the ordinary reader, even for the reader who wants simply to enjoy himself, there is, I think, a kind of shock given precisely for the sake of that enjoyment; one could rephrase that as something that lets one savor one's enjoyment more deeply.
In Sade's case, what I meant by ‘shock’ is deeply bound up with this actual society — it is a shock given in order to offer an opportunity for someone who does not know where he is unfree, where he is constrained — someone who is, so to speak, constrained and asleep, an ordinary person — to awaken, and to be made to consider what freedom is. That is the shock I meant.
And I don't think that word ‘shock’ should be understood in any other sense. As you asked earlier, is such a reader different from the reader who receives a spiritual shock from Sade? I think they are different. Because the number of people who read Sade's book, are spiritually shocked by it, and begin to consider the problem of themselves and freedom, is, I think, never very large, either in France or in Japan.
That would be limited, I imagine, to the sort of Japanese intellectual capable of reading a book like Akutoku no Sakae in the first place; and while there may be a great many people who, reading newspaper accounts of this trial, would want to read Sade's Akutoku no Sakae purely for its erotic content, such people, I think, cannot even be given a shock by it — they cannot even have their erotic feelings stirred by it.
So I think it is quite certainly a very structured kind of book in that sense.
Shirai, special defense counsel: The witness said earlier that Sade delivers a shock, and that it is significant that he evokes the theoretical and the sexual equally in the reader's mind. In that connection, take, for instance — not simply a man and a woman having sexual relations — but a situation in which a third party enters, or there are alternates, or victims — that kind of relationship, a certain abnormal, inhuman kind of relationship. What do you think of the way that, through this, Sade seems to regard the sexual dimension as an extremely important problem?
Kenzaburō Shirai (白井健三郎, 1917–1998):
Japanese scholar of French literature and literary critic, professor and later professor emeritus at Gakushuin University, known for translating and introducing Sartre and Camus (and later Foucault and Derrida). A founding member of the wartime literary group Matinée Poétique. He served, together with Yutaka Haniya and Shūsaku Endō, as special defense counsel in this trial, and was also known for supporting the student movement.
Ōe: I believe that is exactly as you say, but what is your question…
Shirai: What I am asking is that you explain what this choice of an abnormal combination shows about how Sade was trying to pursue the human problem through the dimension of sex.
Ōe: As I have already said, I believe that Sade wanted to make use of as abnormal a set of circumstances as possible, precisely in order to make it clear to the reader, apart from any dull book that merely writes out ordinary sexual relations concretely, that what he is dealing with belongs to a very spiritual realm — and, further, to emphasize that it shows the true human reality, new and unbound by the moral norms of the present, and it is precisely for the sake of stressing this that he adopted, conversely, an abnormal set of circumstances.At the same time, one might ask whether Sade failed, in the sense that ordinary one-on-one sexual relations do appear here and there in his work — that may indeed be so — but on that point, I would want people to read Sade's book as a whole: within a book depicting such extremely abnormal sexual relations, even the ordinary sexual relations that appear are made to be recognized by the reader as carrying an abnormality of the same kind as the abnormal relations around them. That, I think, is the significance given to them, and I think what I have just said applies to the work as a whole.
Shirai: In many such cases, is it not true that a third party, or several people beyond the third party, are watching? The fact of being watched — that is, whether the human subject of the sexual act becomes, or does not become, mere sexual flesh, mere matter, so to speak — is that not the very fundamental question Sade is pursuing here? In that sense, would it be right to regard these depictions as extremely metaphysical in character?
Ōe: I believe that is exactly as you say, sir.
Shirai: So such depictions cannot be separated from a very metaphysical problem, I take it. Now, earlier you mentioned that there might be books for children, and perhaps books for schoolgirls — but is that a distinction that belongs to the book itself, as an object — something inherent in the book as such, that marks it ‘for children’ or otherwise?
Ōe: I don't think it belongs to the book itself as such. But from the reader's side, in the sense of which kind of person chooses which kind of book, I think there is such a thing as a book proper to a particular reader.
What a child chooses will be the children's book the child finds most interesting; what a person who genuinely, responsibly, wants to consider the human problem chooses will be something like Akutoku no Sakae — in that sense, I think there is a distinction.
Shirai: I take your point that the book itself has no inherent ‘for children’ or ‘for adults’ marking — but concretely speaking, a primary-school reader may be necessary for a first-grader, and yet the same book might also be needed by a fifty-year-old adult; so whether something is ‘for children’ or ‘for adults’ doesn't have much to do with the book itself… There is a view that this Akutoku no Sakae is particularly bad for young people. What do you think about that?
Ōe: Speaking from my own experience: a book that has a bad influence on children or young people is, I think, one that puts a child's spirit, or a young person's spirit, to sleep, that immerses them as much as possible in mere concrete pleasure, mere concrete sensation, and that makes them forget any evaluation of the ideational dimension — that is what I think of as a bad book.
Erotica, for instance, is written for exactly that purpose, I think; but Akutoku no Sakae, on the contrary, is a book meant to awaken the spirit as much as possible, to open the eyes to what is abstract and ideational — metaphysical, in other words — rather than to what is merely concrete; it was written for that purpose, and every one of its functions is devoted to that end. This novel, I do not think, harms young people in any way — children, I don't think, will read it at all, since the translation is very difficult and I doubt they could read it — and I don't think it does harm even to young adults.
Shirai: If, then, the meaning of the book is to liberate the human spirit freely, and if that is a fundamental problem of the present age, would you say this book may be read by anyone at all without harm?
Ōe: Yes. For anyone who wishes to read this book, I think it is a good thing for it to be read as widely as possible.
Ōōno, defense counsel: Earlier the witness said he had read Juliette in the original — though I understand there are different editions — is that correct?
Ōe: It was Justine that I read.
Ōōno: Having read this Akutoku no Sakae — which, as you know, is an abridged translation — do you feel, as a witness, that this abridged translation is very inadequate for considering Sade's thought, or the kinds of problems written about in Akutoku no Sakae?
Ōe: No, I don't think it is inadequate. In my view, this abridged translation makes a real effort to capture, as fully as possible, what I take to be Sade's outstanding qualities and the problems he raises — especially the metaphysical problems — as thoroughly as possible; that is the impression I get.
[Defendant Ryūtarō/Tatsuhiko Shibusawa questions the witness]
Defendant Ryūtarō Shibusawa: Are you aware that Sade opposed capital punishment?
Ōe: Yes, I am aware of that.
Shibusawa: How is Sade's opposition to capital punishment connected to the cruelty found in Sade's own writing — the cruelty that appears within his literary works — and to the idea of opposing capital punishment that Sade held?
Ōe: It may seem strange for me to answer a specialist like Mr. Shibusawa on this, but here is how I see it. I think that Sade's opposition to capital punishment, and the fact that extremely cruel things are depicted in Sade's novels, are really speaking of one and the same thing. That is: human beings must refuse whatever is inhuman, whatever is not human — Sade, I think, is always speaking of that. For instance, capital punishment in that era was, as much as possible, an attempt to deprive human beings of their freedom — an execution meant to protect the position [of the state], and capital punishment itself, considered apart from Sade altogether, is I think never something humane; in that sense, I am fairly certain that Sade opposed capital punishment as a protest against the inhuman. And I think the cruel acts depicted in Sade's books are not there to crush what is human, but rather, conversely, are adopted in order to make clear what a truly human being really is — as cruel a scene as possible is chosen for exactly that purpose, I think. On that point — the wish to protect what is human, to protest what is inhuman — I think Sade's two sides are clearly one and the same; and in understanding what the inhuman is, what is not human, I think one can gain a very deep understanding by grasping that Sade, even while depicting extremely cruel acts such as murder, is nonetheless defending the human being.
Shibusawa: As for what is ‘inhuman’ in Sade — does Sade identify that, quite directly, with law? That argument comes up often — Sade seems to write, from beginning to end, about the opposition between law and human freedom. In that connection, what exactly is ‘law,’ for Sade?
Ōe: I am fond of the law myself, and I always want to respect it — which is why I came here today without being late — but I think of it this way: law has two aspects. There are of course cases where law elevates human freedom,
human truth — that is what law is for, in such cases. But conversely there are also cases where law violates human freedom, where it infringes on human dignity.
In Sade's case, I think it was an era in which the law was severely violating human dignity — in which law, if anything, showed its bad side, functioning as something inhuman. In that sense, I think Sade's claim can be taken quite directly at face value. But for someone reading Sade today, I think Sade's writing is, on the contrary, playing a role that strengthens and confirms law in the true sense — law that protects the human being, law that protects human freedom. It is a bit like the French Resistance during the German occupation: German law occupied France at that time, but the French resisters — those who truly wanted to protect the dignity of the French people — were resisting fiercely, and I think they possessed a law of their own. In such a case, someone like Sade, who resisted as much as possible against the established law while still thinking about a truly human law, gave courage to the truly French people. And I think he became a very great force for tearing down the mistaken German law, the law that violated human freedom, at that time — so, on this point, rather than asking what law itself is, if one divides it into these two aspects, and considers the aspect that guarantees human freedom, then Sade, I think, holds a very important significance for us who are trying to uphold the law.
The French Resistance / German occupation:
Ōe refers here to the French resistance movement against Nazi Germany's occupation of France (1940–1944) during the Second World War, as an analogy for lawbreaking undertaken in defense of a higher, truly human law.
Shibusawa: But then, was what was in the hearts of the fighters of the French Resistance the very opposite of law?
Ōe: Yes, that's right. I think of law as something that, as much as possible, connects people horizontally — and in that sense, in the sense of connecting horizontally, I think one could call what the French Resistance fighters held in their thought a kind of ‘law’ as well.
Shibusawa: But in reality, didn't they break a great many actual statutes?
Ōe: Yes — but that is precisely because those actual statutes — that is, the laws of the occupying German military authority — were the very things that had to be torn down; and doing so was, I think, the true human law, not what the occupation regarded as ‘law’ at all. Giving people a human conviction of that kind is, I think, something at which Sade
Defendant Kyōji Ishii questions the witness
Defendant Kyōji Ishii: I would like to ask you a bit about the ‘shock’ you mentioned earlier. As far as I understand the term, there is the concept of communication — that is, transmission. There seems to be some thinker recently talking about something like the ‘circulation and production’ of ideas — ‘circulation’ meaning that thought moves without resistance, that when someone speaks, the listener or reader receives it without resistance; and the reception that stands opposite to that would be ‘shock’ — is that an accurate way of understanding it?
Kyōji Ishii (石井恭二, 1928–2011):
Japanese publisher, founder in 1957 of Gendai Shichō-sha (現代思潮社), the press that published Akutoku no Sakae and many other pioneering works by Yutaka Haniya, Shigeharu Nakano, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida, among others. As company president he was co-defendant with Shibusawa in this trial, and was ultimately convicted and fined. Later in life he devoted himself to Buddhist studies, including annotated editions of Dōgen, publishing under the pen name Amane Kangori.
Ōe: I think that is quite correct.
Ishii: So, as opposed to circulation — by ‘circulation’ I mean, say, being fitted together in different words and entering, so to speak, as it stands: from the standpoint of ‘circulation,’ when someone speaks, or when a certain book exists, there is a nearly precise understanding of its content — an understanding of the content of what someone has said, in a universal, absolutely fixed sense, such that this is what he is saying, and no other interpretation is permitted — that person is saying this, or is writing this — and there exists only that one understanding. Whereas on the other side, the mode of reception you call ‘shock’ would presumably be the opposite: for a given book, or a given thinker, there would be many different ways of receiving it. Is that right?
Ōe: I see. I think the way one receives thought — truly receiving thought — means that it becomes one's own thought. In that sense, of course, it should differ from person to person, receiver to receiver. But even so, while it differs, it can, of course, still be given a single direction; for instance, would anyone ever be permitted to receive something as, say, obscene, when it is in fact something profoundly ideational? Surely not. So, while it is of course something separate for each individual receiver, once all who have received it gather together and discuss that thought, a single, coherent image does form. In that sense, I think it is possible, in a universal sense, for there to be a fixed, settled transmission of a single thought even in the case of ‘shock.’ What I mean is…
Ishii: So there are cases in which something like a shared understanding does come to be established?
Ōe: Yes. ‘Shared understanding’ — though that too is a very difficult thing, a very difficult matter to define — but I think it is true that, while what each receiver receives is entirely his own, the various individually received understandings do not, I think, actually contradict one another.
Haniya, special defense counsel: We have heard a very earnest discussion up to now, but let me ask something rather less earnest. The witness, too, has written on the subject of sex in his own fiction, and Sade has written on it as well. How do you feel about the fact that you have not been prosecuted for obscenity, while Sade has been?
Ōe: Let me begin with a slightly less serious example before turning to something more serious. About two years ago I wrote a novel called Warera no Jidai (Our Era). Afterward, a certain other novelist's work was banned for obscenity, and, it seems, was not prosecuted. At the time, the writer of that book and his publisher went to the officials who had banned it and said, ‘Why is our book alone being banned — isn't Ōe's novel more obscene than this?’
Warera no Jidai (「われらの時代」, Our Era):
A 1959 novel by Kenzaburō Ōe, known for its frank sexual content.
As it happened, the official was, I believe, from a prosecutorial office of some kind, and this official — who was, I should say, someone who reinforced my own respect for the law all the more — apparently answered like this: ‘It's true there is plenty of sexual content in Ōe's writing, but unfortunately Ōe's prose is so poor that the sexual content never quite coheres, and so it doesn't rise to the level of grounds for prosecution.’ I found that point extremely interesting. What I mean is: when I write, and depict sexual matters — of course I am trying to express, through that, a human problem of my own — but it seems it has not yet reached the point of giving today's readers such a shock as to discover something truly new about the human being, something about the true relationship between sex and the human being. So
it naturally isn't banned, and I am not prosecuted either. And yet a thinker like Sade — who suffered the fate of living in the era of the French Revolution — a writer who truly discovered something revolutionary and true about sex and the human being, remains, forever, subject to criticism from what one might call conventional morality. That, I think, is a kind of unhappiness that one could almost call a glory.
Haniya: Is there no part of you that, having become more elevated in thought, might actually wish to be prosecuted yourself? Wishing to become even less earnest…
Ōe: I certainly don't wish to be prosecuted myself, but there is a novelist I greatly admire, the American Norman Mailer, who wrote a novel called The Deer Park, containing sexual material. He was not prosecuted for it; but afterward, as research on the relationship between the sexual and the ideational advanced further, according to Mailer's more recent writing, he says he wants to distribute his own book through a membership system, since he is certain it would be prosecuted. So perhaps I myself, if my descriptive powers advance further and my thinking becomes more elevated, might one day be prosecuted — but in that case, I think, I would never feel it a disgrace; I think I would feel it a source of pride.
The Sade Trial (Volume 1)
First edition: August 20, 1963. New format, 1st printing: October 30, 1972. Compiled by the Editorial Department of Gendai Shichō-sha. Publisher: Kyōji Ishii. Published by Gendai Shichō-sha Co., Ltd., 1-24-8 Kohinata, Bunkyō-ku, Tokyo.
Research, translation, drafting, and assistance provided by Claude
