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Kenzaburo Oe’s debut work Kimyo na Shigoto and dogs

October 25, 2024

Canine research at UTokyo

Canine research at UTokyo

Veterinary surgery, ethology, robotics, archaeology, chronological dating, law and animal assisted intervention, veterinary epidemiology, classic literature, and contemporary literature – specialists in these nine fields introduce their canine-related research activities.

Dogs and contemporary Japanese literature

Kenzaburo Oe’s debut work “Kimyo na Shigoto” and dogs

Contributed by Katsunao Murakami

Associate Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Katsunao Murakami

Kenzaburo Oe passed away in March 2023. Before his first commercial publication, Shisha no Ogori (Lavish are the Dead), he published the novella Kimyo na Shigoto (The Strange Work), which explores similar themes to Lavish are the Dead as well as to the author’s subsequent works. In the following, Associate Professor Murakami, who has been conducting research into the depiction of animals in postwar Japanese literature, explains the short novel.

Part-time job beating 150 dogs to death at a university hospital

In the winter of 1956, a student is walking on the wide paved road outside the hospital of UTokyo’s Faculty of Medicine. Exhausted from his work as a private tutor on top of his own arduous studies, his shoulders droop with tiredness. Like every day with a strong north wind, from the road he can hear the barking of numerous dogs. Noticing this, the student thinks about the dogs kept for experimental purposes at the hospital. The following spring, having extra time to spare and having regained his health, the student makes a plan to write a short novel, a strange story about three students who take a part-time job that involves beating to death 150 dogs kept at a university hospital under the instructions of a man who specializes in killing animals.

Needless to say, the above is the story told in The Strange Work, which is the debut work of author Kenzaburo Oe, who later received the Nobel Prize. The Strange Work was awarded the May Festival prize and published in The University of Tokyo Newspaper in 1957. It then attracted the attention of critic Ken Hirano, which led to Oe making a stunning commercial debut as a student author.

But why dogs? The novella’s main character looked at the dogs and thought, “We might become just like them. They have no fighting spirit and have let themselves be chained up. They are like us Japanese students, a homogeneous group with no individual personalities.” The dogs appearing in the novel have been interpreted as symbolizing the Japanese people under the control of the GHQ as well as the negativity of youth in an age of stagnancy. Why then were the students, who the dogs are meant to resemble, trying to beat the dogs to death?

Handwritten manuscript of Lavish are the Dead
The handwritten manuscript of Lavish are the Dead, which was published in the literary journal Bungakukai (August 1957 issue). In the original manuscript, the story begins with a sentence that has “Karera” (“They”) as its subject. In the final manuscript, this word is replaced with “Shisha tachi” (“The dead”). (From the collection of the Kenzaburo Oe Library)
The University of Tokyo Newspaper (May 22, 1957)
The Strange Work was published in an edition of The University of Tokyo Newspaper dated May 22, 1957. Accompanying the novella were a profile picture of the young Mr. Oe and his comments about the prize he had received for it.

Insulting others by calling them “animals” for miserable self-affirmation

At the time, Oe was eagerly devouring records of Nazi concentration camps and in fact used the word “fascism” in a written piece in which he revealed the “imagery and logic” of the short novel. Based on these two facts, as I suggested in my book Dobutsu no Koe, Tasha no Koe, the students in the short novel may have beaten the dogs to negate their own animalistic similitude and prove that they were in fact human beings. There are those who seek to dehumanize others by calling them “animals” for miserable self-affirmation and use violence against them to avoid facing their own feelings of confinement, including the offender who killed and injured a number of residents at a facility for people with disabilities in Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture. The man had sent a letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives in which he referred to people with disabilities as “animals” and warned that he would commit a crime as proof of his own utility to society. But as Oe shows in his short novel of 1957, which marked his debut as a writer, it is the young people inflicting the violence who are actually losing their humanity under the watchful gaze of the dogs.

In 2021, the Oe family donated as many as 18,000 manuscript pages, including the author’s own proofs, to the University of Tokyo. As a result, the University announced its intention to open the Kenzaburo Oe Library. Unfortunately, the manuscript of The Strange Work is not included in the donated materials. Visitors to the library will nevertheless find not only the past but also their own present and future depicted in each of Oe’s manuscripts.

The voice of the animal, the voice of the other: the ethics of postwar Japanese literature (Shinyosha, 2017)

Dobutsu no Koe, Tasha no Koe (“The voice of the animal, the voice of the other: the ethics of postwar Japanese literature”) (Shinyosha, 2017)

This book discusses the ethics of postwar Japanese literature with a focus on how animals are depicted.

For a video in which Associate Professor Murakami talks about the book in detail at the AY2021 Friday Special Lecture for High School and University Students, see below (lecture in Japanese language only):
Reading Kenzaburo Oe’s First Work “Kimyo na Shigoto (The Strange Work)” (UTokyo TV)

The Kenzaburo Oe Library is now open!

On January 21, 2021, UTokyo concluded an agreement with the family of Kenzaburo Oe. According to the agreement, the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology and Faculty of Letters would take custody of Mr. Oe’s papers, including handwritten manuscripts and other materials. UTokyo thus became the first public institute to be entrusted with a substantial collection of Mr. Oe’s manuscripts, including those of Dojidai Gemu (The Game of Contemporaneity) (1979) and Moeagaru Midori no Ki (The Burning Green Tree) (1993). On September 1, 2023, the Kenzaburo Oe Library was opened at the Yayoi Campus. This library gives researchers access to the Digital Manuscript Archive comprising more than 18,000 pages, as well as over 3,500 other materials. The library will share information about related research results through its website and seminars.


* This article was originally printed in Tansei 47 (Japanese language only). All information in this article is as of September 2023.

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