Hannah Greer

Professor Shuang Shen

CM Lit 4-001

27 October 2016

Secrecy in Teach us to Outgrow our Madness and Aghwee the Sky Monster

Kenzaburo Oes short stories and novellas are notorious for carrying themes of unpleasant

situations or stories, grotesque images, and the nature of secrecy. In his stories Teach us to

Outgrow our Madness and Aghwee the Sky Monster, Oe chronicles two fathers faced with

difficult decisions to make with sons they believe to be disabled, who both, eventually, retreat

from reality after suffering traumatizing experiences. Both stories carry the weight of secrets

between generations - in the former story, between the narrator and his mother; in the latter story,

between the narrator and his employer, and those secrets cause great pain. By depicting themes

of secrets, abandonment, and ugly truths, Oe confronts Japan for its denial of its tragic past,

offering healing to his Japanese audience through forcing them to face and accept the truth.

Teach us to Outgrow our Madness is riddled with secrets from its beginning. The story starts

with the narrator accusing his silent mother over the phone of stealing a manuscript he crafted in

memory of his late father, only to be hung up on, his suspicions never confirmed nor denied. In

addition to refusing to acknowledge her sons allegations, the narrators mother withholds the

source of her husbands inexplicable insanity and ultimate death in her sons early childhood. It

is only after the narrators life is threatened by hoodlums attempting to throw him into a polar

bears pool while visiting the zoo with his retarded son that his mother reveals his fathers past.

The narrator learns that his father went mad after learning of a failed coup detat in World War II

and believing his Emperor was going to be assassinated, locking himself in a storehouse and later
dying of heart failure. Several things then happen that lead to the narrators own decline in

mental health: for one, his son is found and taken care of by police until the narrator is released

from the hospital after his near-death experience, planting doubt that his son does not need him.

In addition to this emotional detachment from his son, the narrator is scarred by the incident by

the polar bears pool and, after convincing himself he was destined go mad simply because it was

in his blood, he does just that. His own insanity differs from his fathers in that it is private,

revealed only in letters the narrator composes addressed to the Man in which he states, I

begin my retreat from the world because. . . (Oe, 219). The narrator locks these letters away,

never to be shown to anyone - this is the sole difference between his madness and his fathers.

While his father physically retreated from reality, the narrator does so psychologically, in secret.

The story described in Oes Aghwee the Sky Monster does not depict inherited madness but the

effects of an earth-shattering tragedy. The protagonist of this story, D, loses his mind after

choosing to kill his son, born with a brain hernia doctors believed would leave him retarded, only

discover the brain hernia was actually a benign tumor. Ds father secures the storys narrator for

Ds employment, his job is simply to accompany D wherever he wishes to travel. The narrator is

interested by the fat baby D sees in the sky and initially learns about it from Ds father and

nurse, both of whom fail to understand the source of Ds pain and insanity and thus fail to inform

the narrator. D himself never directly reveals what prompts his hallucinations, forcing the

narrator to rely on information of the past from his bosss ex-wife. D eventually throws himself

in front of a train while out with the narrator, causing him to believe D might have created

Aghwee, the fat baby in the sky, as a means of executing his suicide, hiring the narrator to

accompany him to various places around Tokyo so that he may say his set his affairs in order and

say his goodbyes. Kept in the dark, the narrator is heartbroken by this; he has grown close to
both D and Aghwee. Because of the secrets D kept from him, the narrator is left crushed,

betrayed, and hopeless.

Both stories bear multiple similiarities. For instance, both stories feature anonymous narrators

and children abandoned for reasons they do not understand. In Teach us to Outgrow our

Madness, the narrator does not understand why his father abandoned him until he is a father

abandoning his own son who will never comprehend his fathers detachment from him. In

Aghwee the Sky Monster, Ds son is only a baby, one who understands nothing, much less why

his father allows him to starve to death. Both fathers in Teach us to Outgrow our Madness and D

retreat from reality after enduring pain they cannot bear. The former narrators father physically

isolates himself from reality while his son psychologically retreats. After D starves his son out

and learns there was no need to do so, he stops living in present time and refuses to make any

new memories or leave another mark on the world so that he will not suffer another loss.

In light of these events, we understand that an older generations secrets detrimentally affect

the succeeding generation. Because the narrator in Teach us to Outgrow our Madness understood

the truth about his fathers madness too late, he lives in anxiety that he will succumb to the same

mysterious forces because insanity runs in his blood. Though his mother keeps his fathers past a

secret to protect the narrator, he ends up following in his footsteps anyway, retreating from

reality just like his father did. Ds leading the narrator on in Aghwee the Sky Monster crushes

some part of him. The pain and betrayal the narrator feels is evident when he accuses D of

stringing him along to carry out his own suicide, yelling, I was about to believe in Aghwee!

(Oe, 260). Because both narrators are kept in the dark, they suffer.

This seems an ongoing allegory in many of Oes works; his own childhood plays an important

role in his writing. Growing up during World War II, Oe recalls a grade school teacher asking
every day if he would die for Emperor Hirohito. He later realized that he was fed propaganda in

school and garnered a deep sense of betrayal, one that dictates many elements of his writings,

apparent in both Teach us to Outgrow our Madness and Aghwee the Sky Monster (Western, 299).

As both stories exemplify, the younger generations suffer because of the older generations

mistakes. Though they have suffered a great deal, it is the preceding generations failure to be

honest with their younger counterparts that prevent the next generation from healing. Oe seems

to relate this to Japan in urging the domineering World War II generation to be share the truth

with succeeding generations. It is a recurring theme in Oes short stories that each generation is

doomed to relive the fate of the older generation due to lies that keep them from grasping reality

before the delusions perpetuated by Japans older people cause damage. Thus, no progress is

made, no wounds healed. The same can be said for Japan, according to Oe, for recovery from the

tragedy that struck during the war plagues generations that were not even alive for it, trapped in a

cycle of pain, suffering, and secrets.

In both short stories, Oe paints imagery with which the average audience is uncomfortable. He

frequently describes the fat man and fat son in Teach us to Outgrow our Madness, even

detailing when Eeyores buttocks eventually grew too fat to sit in the medal seat [of the

narrators bike] (Oe, 182). In Aghwee the Sky Monster, Aghwee is a fat baby and the story of

how the Ds son died turns ones stomach, the nonchalance with which his ex-wife explains, I

think [D and the doctor] only gave it sugar water instead of milk no matter how loud it

screamed rattles the audience (Oe, 240). At the same time she is relaying her babys death to the

narrator, an ugly, corrosive odor reached [the narrator] from her mouth, later identified as

pyorrhea (Oe, 241). These grotesque, unpleasant images make a point: Oe is essentially trying

wake Japan up and make them see themselves from an outside perspective. Essayist Eve
Kushner asserts that, Using the Western literary technique of grotesque realism, [Oe] shakes

readers out of their complacencies to force them to examine unpleasant realities (Kushner,

2000). Oe himself has stated, I want to show [the Japanese] how we look. I hope they will say,

after reading my books, this is us, this is what we look like and how we experience our society

(Oe, 1995). In his Nobel prize acceptance speech, Oe declared, I can think of no people or

nation as much in need of a clue for self-recovery as the Japanese (Oe, 1994). Ergo, in Teach us

to Outgrow our Madness and Aghwee the Sky Monster, Oe offers the stepping stone to healing:

acceptance. He presents the ugly truths to Japanese readers - he describes retarded children,

horrible mistakes, ugly people and their ugly pasts, insanity, suicide.

Oe explores the role of secrets and their negative impacts in both Teach us to Outgrow our

Madness and Aghwee the Sky Monster, as well as in many other short stories and novellas. This

theme, in addition to frequent motifs of abandonment and unpleasant images, illustrates Oes

vision of Japan. He stresses the importance of the Japanese confronting painful past through

creating fictional lineages that succumb to the same madness after failing to be enlightened to the

truth and therefore failing to learn from their predecessors sufferings.

 Works Cited

Kushner, Eve. "The Diagnosis: Japan Through the Eyes of Kenzaburo Oe." Japanophile (2000):

n. pag. Web. 26 Oct. 2016.

"Oe, Kenzaburo." Encyclopedia of World Bibliography (2004): n. pag. Web. 26 Oct. 2016.

Weston, Mark. Giants of Japan: The Lives of Japan's Most Influential Men and Women. New

York City: Kodansha International, 1999. Print.