Paper short abstract:

The "political human being" of Ōe's A Political Youth Dies will be considered with the term, "sexual human being" in other works written in the era of the Cold War. Ōe's efforts to imagine the "inner life" of the terrorist contrasts with the monolithic image of the terrorist in the 21st century.

Paper long abstract:

Ōe Kenzaburō's A Political Youth Dies depicts the inner life of a "political human being" as he commits an act of terror. Ōe defines such a political being as one who "confronts and contests others in a firm, unsympathetic manner; he either vanquishes them or disperses them into his own organization." At the time, Ōe counterposed the "political human being" with the sexual human being. In the 1959 essay, "The World of Our Sex" (Warera no Sei no Sekai), Ōe defines the "sexual human being" as one who neither "opposes nor challenges others, whoever they may be."

The "political human being" and the "sexual human being." Around 1960, Ōe began to consider Japan society and his contemporary era in terms of the struggle between, and inseparability of, the two.

We should also note that the backdrop of A Political Youth Dies is the Cold War system. For this reason, the protagonist "I" wavers between left-wing and right-wing politics. With the demise of the Cold War system and the events of 9/11, however, people's views of terror have changed drastically. Today terrorists are lumped together as "fundamentalists," and under that category turned into the Other. And we do not see any attempt to understand their interiority.

I believe that by re-reading a Political Youth Dies in the twenty-first century, with a focus on the imagination with which Ōe elaborated the inner life of a "political human being" who carries out terror, we can both gain a new perspective on the question of terror and illuminate its current context.