, variously translated as ''The Game of Contemporaneity'', ''Coeval Games'' or ''Contemporary Games'', is a 1979 novel by the Japanese writer

Kenzaburō Ōe is a Japanese writer and a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature. His novels, short stories and essays, strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory, deal with political, social and philosophical issues, i ...

. The novel has not yet received an English translation.

Background

The novel was originally inspired by

Diego Rivera Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez, known as Diego Rivera (; December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957), was a prominent Mexican painter. His large frescoes helped establish the ...

's mural "Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Central Alameda Park". Oe's approach to history and story-telling expounds the themes of simultaneity, ambiguity and complexity. The story centres around the alternative world of dissident

samurai were the hereditary military nobility and officer caste of medieval and early-modern Japan from the late 12th century until their abolition in 1876. They were the well-paid retainers of the '' daimyo'' (the great feudal landholders). They h ...

, as opposed to that of the

Emperor An emperor (from la, imperator, via fro, empereor) is a monarch, and usually the sovereignty, sovereign ruler of an empire or another type of imperial realm. Empress, the female equivalent, may indicate an emperor's wife (empress consort), ...

. The samurai turn into demons after being chased into the forest. The story of the village serves as a microcosm of the history of Japan as a whole. It has its own creation myth and fertility goddess, as well as a composite healer/trickster called The One Who Destroys. Although the novel expounds 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 Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of shaming ...

parody A parody, also known as a spoof, a satire, a send-up, a take-off, a lampoon, a play on (something), or a caricature, is a creative work designed to imitate, comment on, and/or mock its subject by means of satiric or ironic imitation. Often its subj ...

and black

humour Humour (English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English) or humor (American English) is the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. The term derives from the humorism, humoral medicine of the ancient Gre ...

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 with the samurai surrendering to avoid the destruction of the forest (''mori''). The word ''mori'' is ambivalent in that in Japanese it conjures an image of regeneration or rebirth, but in Latin (an entirely unrelated language) it stands for death.

Style

This novel has been considered as a main example of the current of magic realism in

Japanese literature Japanese literature throughout most of its history has been influenced by cultural contact with neighboring Asian literatures, most notably China and its literature. Early texts were often written in pure Classical Chinese or , a Chinese-Japanes ...

. Other Japanese authors with considerable literary contributions to this genre are:

Abe Kobo Abe or ABE may refer to: People and fictional characters * Shinzo Abe (1954–2022), former Prime Minister of Japan * Abe (given name), a list of people and fictional characters with the given name or nickname * Abe (surname), a list of people and ...

Yasunari Kawabata was a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose spare, lyrical, subtly shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award. His works have enjoyed broad international appeal an ...

and

Yasushi Inoue was a Japanese writer of novels, short stories, poetry and essays, noted for his historical and autobiographical fiction. His most acclaimed works include '' The Bullfight'' (''Tōgyū'', 1949), ''The Roof Tile of Tempyō'' (''Tenpyō no iraka' ...

. The novel is known for its difficult, complex style. Japanese literary critic

Hideo Kobayashi was a Japanese author, who established literary criticism as an independent art form in Japan. Early life Kobayashi was born in the Kanda district of Tokyo, where his father was a noted engineer who introduced European diamond polishing techno ...

wrote that he "stopped on page 2."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Game of Contemporaneity, The 1979 Japanese novels Japanese magic realism novels 20th-century Japanese novels Novels by Kenzaburō Ōe Epistolary novels