PERSPECTIVE ON THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE : Kenzaburo Oe: The Man Who Talks With the Trees : An author who gave voice to his impaired son in his books deserves to have more readers in his own country.

The award of the Nobel Prize in literature to Japanese author Kenzaburo Oe is extremely timely, coinciding with two major events in this extraordinary writer’s life.

A brief background: Anyone who has ever read him knows that Oe the writer is inseparable from Oe the father. His son Hikari, now 31, was born with severe brain damage and remained mute until he was 6. And ever since Oe decided to bring him up as a normal human being, Hikari has been in every page of his work as in every minute of his life.

For Oe, speaking on his silent son’s behalf by turning him into an ever-present character as his double has been his most important reason for writing fiction. The son has been studying music for many years, and some time ago he began to compose, although his speech and movement have been limited throughout. Only a few weeks ago, Hikari completed his second CD of pieces for piano and flute. This recording, like his first one, promises to be a great success among music lovers of Japan, answering Oe’s lifelong hope for finding a voice for his voiceless son.

As a writer, Oe has just finished the first draft of his huge trilogy, “Moeagaru midori no ki” (“A Green Tree in Flames,” named after Yeats’ poem), which he insists on calling his last novel. As he tells it, now that Hikari can express sadness and happiness in his own full “voice,” Oe’s ventriloquist role for his son is ending. As Hikari gradually gains independence, Oe feels his presence receding from the pages of his narratives. The time has come for him to quit his fiction, as Oe describes it. As if to celebrate this moment of fulfillment, the English word “ Rejoice! “ concludes the first draft of the last part of his “last” work. This event--the completion of the novel and the public renunciation of fiction--occurred a mere several weeks before the Nobel award was announced.

The award is also timely because Oe’s recognition abroad will reawaken the Japanese readers who have lately been, though thoroughly respectful, neglecting Oe’s intellectual and literary achievements. Oe is too difficult, they complain. Their fascination has been with vacuous manufacturers of disposable entertainment, including the “new voices of Japan,” like Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto.

Actually, the malaise of Japan may be more critical. There has been little probing of contemporary Japan’s cultural life. The kabuki and flower arrangement continue, of course, but neither new novelists nor social analysts are emerging who seriously question Japan’s preoccupation with buying and selling, except among some women writers. By emphasizing Japan’s homogeneity and proclaiming the “spirit of harmony,” mainstream critics and scholars refrain from self-analysis. Convinced of Japan’s “uniqueness,” commentators often fail to articulate Japan’s position in the world.

The Japanese government curiously--and shamefully--has yet to honor its native son Oe in any form. The Ministry of Education is hastily forming a committee, according to the Asahi newspaper, to consider the possibility of conferring the imperial Order of Culture on this “controversial” author, now honored by a Nobel. When a quiet inquiry was made, Oe firmly expressed his intent to decline the offer. His reason was that the state-initiated Order of Culture was against his idea of democracy. Oe’s decision may encourage those in Japan who are still grappling with life’s big questions and the world’s lasting problems.

Oe is a formidable scholar. He reads Dante in Italian, Confucius in Chinese, Faulkner in English, Rabelais and Sartre in French, the formalists in Russian and “The Tale of Genji” in the original. And he remembers everything. Once, I was with him visiting a university rare-book collection. Visibly excited over the discovery of a rare facsimile edition of William Blake’s long poem, “Jerusalem,” he began to recite it from memory. I left him alone with an astonished librarian, and the recitation was still going when I returned. Of course, learning by itself does little good to anyone. Oe, however, never leaves knowledge distant from the opinions he forms and actions he takes in thought and in his everyday life. He is a thoroughly engaged man, regularly speaking up for Japan’s minorities and protesting its political system.

There are few translations into English and other Western languages of this remarkably prolific writer. His language and style are said to be complex and difficult, nearly untranslatable, and potential translators seem frightened away. Those who do read him will find his mythological cycle not just sober and speculative, but saturated with cosmic laughter and grotesque humor.

Many of his short stories are as funny as they are accessible. There is no reason why there can’t be many more translations of his works. There are indeed very few writers now in the world who can compare with him in candid description, complex ideas, bold imagery and sudden illuminations and a probing sense of history and justice.

Oe has long had the habit of spending hours literally talking to trees. When he visits a new place, for example, he often walks along in the woods and groves, stopping to gaze from time to time and bending down to pick up a fallen leaf and guessing the tree’s identity, origin and history. He can cite the names of almost all the trees in the world in Japanese, English and Latin. Oe calls trees his friends. I wonder if this prize will place him among the men and women of Asia and other parts of the world outside Japan so that the world may know him as closely as Oe knows it.