The Game of Contemporaneity

The novel was originally inspired on Diego Rivera’s mural 'Dream on a Sunday Afternoon in the Central Alameda'. Oe's approach to history and story-telling, like in the mural, exposes the themes of simultaneity, ambiguity and thus complexity. The story centres itself around the alternative world of the dissident samurai, as opposed to that of the Emperor. The samurai turn into demons after being chased into the forest. The story of the village serves as a microcosmic representation of the history of the nation as a whole. It has its own creation myth and fertility goddess, as well as having a composite healer/trickster called: The One Who Destroys. Although the novel exposes the themes of marginalisation and outsiderhood, it also provides hope for a new beginning. This emphasizes the central theme of the novel: simultaneous ambiguity, in the amalgamation of past and present, fact and dream, as well as history and myth. Oe uses satire, parody and black humour to describe the many deeds and events of the samurai. This culminates in the Fifty-Day War, in which the samurai and the imperial army battle one another, with The One Who Destroys leading the battle against The No-Name Captain of the imperial guard. It ends in the samurai surrendering to avoid the destruction of the forest (mori). The word 'mori' in itself is ambivalent in that in Japanese it conjures an image of regeneration or rebirth and in Latin that of death.

This novel has been considered as a main example of the current of magic realism in Japanese literature. Other Japanese authors with considerable literary contributions to this genre are: Abe Kobo, Yasunari Kawabata and Yasushi Inoue.

The novel is known for its difficult, complex style. Japanese literary critic Hideo Kobayashi jokingly wrote that he "stopped on page 2."[1]