Seventeen (セヴンティーン) and The Death of a Political Youth (政治少年死す) are two parts of a novella by Kenzaburo Oe, published in the literary magazine Bungakukai in 1961. Inspired by Otoya Yamaguchi and his assassination of Socialist Politician Inejiro Asanuma, Oe portrays the teenage assassin as a craven, obsessive, masturbation addict who, unable to reconcile his narcissism and self-hatred, turns to equally-masturbatory political action in a futile effort to galvanize himself. The story, naturally, was extraordinarily controversial, particularly among the political right which sought to lionize Yamaguchi, leading to numerous threats against Oe and his publishers. Such threats occurred nearly simultaneously with the Shimanaka incident - another case of rightists attacking a publisher because of the content of a short story, that time fatally - and an assault on Oe during a university talk. Fearing for their safety, Bungakukai published a formal apology for Oe's story, although the author himself was unrepentant. Regardless, he declined to republish Death of a Political Youth in his lifetime.
For many years, the novella was something of a quasi-mythical curiosity in the west, particularly after Oe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Even in Japan, Death of a Poetical Youth was extremely scarce (reportedly, the issue of Bungakukai containing it was printed in extremely small quantities in a failed effort to avoid scrutiny). While a professional translation of Seventeen by Luk Van Haut is available in the west (my edition is from the same book-of-the-month-club who put out Irene's Cunt), a translation of its sequel failed to appear.
Thankfully, some years ago the proprietor of the website Tokyo Damage Report (www.hellodamage.com, once upon a time) produced his own translation of both Seventeen and Death of a Political Youth which he released for free. I'd read these years and computers ago, and while they're inelegant in places (Van Haut's is, too, so maybe it's something Oe that I can't comment on) they're both still wonderful and extraordinarily funny reads. I went looking for them again recently, however, and unfortunately the Tokyo Damage Report website seems to be defunct (or at least not obviously operational), making these translations difficult to procure. Thankfully, I was able to find the appropriate Mediafire links to each of them (still working!) and salvage the files. Each is a .rtf document, replete with Wikipedia citations that offer a lot of context which might not be obvious to a casual reader in the 21st century. They're very valuable documents, and highly recommended to anyone with an interest in postwar Japanese literature and political culture.
If you're the translator, you're the best. Terroristic threats by 1960s rightists and imperial sympathizers, as ever, may be directed to this address.
No, not the girls' magazine. The Japanese novella that was banned after the first printing, on pain of death!
The novella I just translated into english for your reading-and-or-Emperor-disrespecting pleasure.
The novella you can download here for free! All in one place.
Let me back up a second:
Last year, I posted my translation of Furyuu Mutan (The Dream Of An Elegant Family), a Japanese short-story from 1960 that it set off a huge shit-storm of political controversy and real-world violence. But it turns out, Furyuu Mutan was just the beginning!
It depicted the execution of the Emperor’s whole family by Japanese revolutionaries, and had the Queen Mother cursing like a sailor. Needless to say, this story was never allowed to be re-published in Japan, but you can read it in English right here (if you don’t mind my amateurish translation, that is!). Anyway, it turns out that Furyuu Mutan was just the first shot in an epic cultural battle! The attacks flew back and forth – not only between left and right wingers, but it went back and forth between reality and art. It was basically like the American East/West coast rap wars of the ‘90s, but THIRTY YEARS EARLIER.
Which is amazing if you think about it.
Here is a partial chronology: The government didn’t ban Furyuu Mutan, but the Imperial Household Grand Vizer said the story was just awful, which caused the right-wing militia groups to send a seventeen-year-old assassin to kill the story’s publisher. Read more about the assassination here. And here - in Section Three, no less!
Meanwhile, the right wing counter-attacked in the realm of fiction, too: authors like Yukio Mishima wrote novels with anti-commie themes.
So then what happened? Future Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe steps into the ring to hit back at the right, with a savage fictional satire making fun of the real-life assassin : a short novel called SEVENTEEN. Along the way, Oe delivers knockout punches to right-wing politicians, liberal Japanese parents, and teenagers. That’s right, teenagers: this dead-serious political satire – so dangerous that it, too, is banned in Japan – is written in the form of a Young Adult Coming Of Age story. How fucked is that?
The right then counter-counter-counter attacked by threatening mass destruction if Oe’s ‘seventeen part two’ was ever published. (how did they know Part Two makes Part One look like a Hardy Boys novel?). The publisher got all crafty and changed the title to ‘Death of a Political Youth’ and instead of publishing it in their flagship literary magazine, published it as a tiny, one-shot fanzine, distributed under cover of deepest night, hidden inside a copy of Shonen Jump.
OK, I made that last part up, but shit was hectic back in the ‘60s, and people got hurt over art. You might think, “Well that doesn’t happen anymore so things must have calmed down.” But you’d be wrong: the reason people don’t get hurt anymore is people are still intimidated by the rightist violence from 50 years ago, and don’t even try to break the rules anymore. To be fair, Japanese communists did terrorism and violence too, but nobody is scared of them anymore. If you want to do a doujinshi of Lenin getting raped by Doraemon, nobody is going to hassle you. Just saying.
Anyway, there IS an English translation of Seventeen part one floating around Amazon. For about two dollars. But there is – far as I know – NO English version of the much more bad-ass part two, so I decided to fuck around and translate BOTH of them. Anyway, I’ll post excerpts of SEVENTEEN weekly.
Much props to TOGYO NO KATAMI (紙魚 の 筺) , an anonymously-run website, a sort of WIkileaks for banned books. They post the text of banned books as .html files in Japanese. If you guys are fluent in the ol’ Nihongo, check that shit out.
Things to think about when you read it:
1 - The author doesn’t like any of the characters at all. This is one of the hallmarks of great fiction: Confederacy of Dunces, Barrel Fever, the Bible, etc.
2 – The main character, Mr. Seventeen, is always wrong about everything. Every social situation he mistakes the motivations of people he deals with. Every bad thing that happens to him, he learns exactly the wrong lesson from it. So you’re basically reading a bunch of delusions. And yet, Oe always gives you, the reader, just enough clues to see how Seventeen SHOULD have reacted – and lets you know just how badly Seventeen is blundering THIS time. That is a big feat, because the book is written in the first person. Oe doesn’t have an omnipotent narrator to say, “OK, well here’s what’s really going on.” That must have been hard to do!
3 – This story is all about teenagers, delving into every aspect of their lives, but the main teen totally talks like an older intellectual – like, for instance, Oe! I have no fucking idea if Oe is deliberately doing this juxtaposition for comic effect, or if Oe was so into his little intellectual-writer world he didn’t even realize how ridiculous his main character sounds. But trying to answer that question adds to the fun of reading it (especially during the more repetitive parts).
4 – Repetitive parts? Yeah! Boring parts! The endless self-pity and narcissism is SUPPOSED to be boring. Oe is deliberately lampooning the obsessive way that teens think.
5 – In America (also England? Anyone?), anyone who tries to write about teenagers is basically pre-pwned by Catcher In The Rye. They know everyone will judge their novel relative to Catcher. Even if they didn’t like Catcher, they are reacting to it in some way. But Oe doesn't care Catcher at all, which is liberating. It’s fun to see what parts are similar to Catcher ANYWAY, and what parts are totally different, because it teaches you about how Japanese teens are different than / the same as Western teens.
Those of you who want to buy more books by Oe can click here.
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What is DEATH OF A POLITICAL YOUTH? A book, dummy. A banned book. Who's it by? Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe. Download the whole thing here as an .rtf file.
Last year I translated Kenzaburo Oe's novella SEVENTEEN. You can read it here.
Seventeen – besides being funny – is important because it got banned for making fun of the uyoku (the black van militia right-wing guys). It was translated into English. But what the English version doesn't say, is that the SEVENTEEN novella is just the FIRST part of a full-sized novel. The second part ("Death of a Political Youth") is even more banned: the original Japanese publishers were warned not to publish it in their literary magazine, so they changed the title and put it out as a super-limited-edition pamphlet – almost a zine. And Part Two was not at all available in English.
Until now, bitches!
I'm in your corner. I hooked this up. It's not a pro-quality translation, but this is the shit that the japanese right-wingers don't want you to read!!!
How is part two stylistically different from part one?
Part two is based on Otoya Yamaguchi, the real-life assassin of the Socialist Party Chairman (Japanese wiki here). Even though it picks up right where Part One left off, the tone is quite different. Part One was really funny, full of dick jokes, and comical misunderstandings. Part Two is really serious and political, full of long ideological discussions - almost as if Kenzaburo pulled a Tom Wolfe and hung out with right-wingers all ahthropology-style so he could write about them more accurately . Death of a Political Youth moves slower than Seventeen Part One, and even gets kind of boring, but that's deliberate. The book is structured as a slow drift from fanaticism into full-blown schizophrenic madness. A gradual grinding descent from political ideology into gibbering hallucinations. And that's not always an easy thing to pull, as a writer.
And yes, it DOES end with the main character hanging himself while jerking off and screaming LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR.
Download the whole thing here as an .rtf file.
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