Kenzaburo Oe

Kenzaburō Ōe

A group of delinquent boys are abandoned in a remote village during the Korean war and manage to survive by stealing food and hunting, only to face the possibility of death when the villagers return

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

Kenzaburō Ōe was ten when American soldiers entered his mountain village during World War II, and his writing "reveals the tension and ambiguity forged by the collapse of the values of his childhood on the one hand and the confrontation with American writers on the other ... [His] heroes have been expelled from the certainty of childhood, into a world that bears no relation to their past"--Back cover.

Four Short Novels

Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness

"[Kogito Choko] returns to his hometown village in search of a red suitcase rumored to hold documents revealing the details of his father's death during World War II, details that will serve as the foundation for his new, and final, novel. Since his youth, renowned novelist Kogito Choko planned to fictionalize his father's fatal drowning in order to fully process the loss. Stricken with guilt and regret over his failure to rescue his father, Choko has long been driven to discover why his father was boating on the river in a torrential storm. Though he remembers overhearing his father and a group of soldiers discussing an insurgent scheme to stage a suicide attack on Emperor Mikado, Choko cannot separate his memories from imagination and his family is hesitant to reveal the entire story. When the contents of the trunk turn out to offer little clarity, Choko abandons the novel in creative despair. Floundering as an artist, he's haunted by fear that he may never write his tour de force. But when he collaborates with an avant-garde theater troupe dramatizing his early novels, Choko is revitalized by revisiting his formative work and he finds the will to continue investigating his father's demise" --

Death by Water

Late in his life, writer Kogito Choko reconnects with his estranged friend, the filmmaker Goro Hanawa. Goro's subsequent suicide causes Kogito to examine and reexamine Goro's life for clues that will lead him to understand his friend's path.

The changeling

A study of the Hiroshima bombing and its aftermath provides an account of the victims, the efforts of caregivers, and the struggle to come to terms with the tragedy

Hiroshima Notes

Kenzaburō Ōe was ten when American soldiers entered his mountain village during World War II, and his writing "reveals the tension and ambiguity forged by the collapse of the values of his childhood on the one hand and the confrontation with American writers on the other...[His] heroes have been expelled from the certainty of childhood, into a world that bears no relation to their past"--Back cover.

The Changeling

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, among many other awards. K lives in Tokyo with his wife and three children. Eeyore, his eldest, is mentally ill and during one dramatic outburst brandishes a knife at his mother. Rather than confront the situation, K's reaction is to sit and read in his study. Eventually Eeyore's problems force K back into family life, where his sympathetic readings of William Blake are no longer an escape route, but a vital way-in to understanding his own son.

Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!

In his first new novel since winning the Nobel, Oe makes an immense departure from the autobiographical fiction he is most famous for, in a magnificent story about the charisma of leaders, the danger of zealotry, and the mystery of faith.

Somersault

An anthology of stories about Japan after the atom bomb is edited by an acclaimed writer and surveys Japan's best storytellers on the bomb's impact on the daily lives of peasants, artists, and children

The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath

In Seventeen the story of a lonely seventeen year old who turns to a right-wing group for self-esteem and J the story of a spoiled, young, drifter son of a Japanese executive Oe shows us a world where the values that had regulated life had been blown to smithereens along with Hiroshima and Nagasaki: what confronts his heroes now is a gaping emptiness. Seventeen's lost young man is in the throes of becoming a right wing activist and assassin. He feels his identity for the first time in the enervating rush of murderous violence. The story has enormous topicality and vibrancy for today. In J. our protagonist's erotic excitement comes as a "chikan" one who rubs himself against women on crowded trains rather than participating in the drab everyday world, which he feels would only be self-deception. He can only feel complete while attaining "the absolute ecstasy of total action." Of course this action of sexual assault can bring arrest, disgrace, and imprisonment. As always, Oe treats his subjects not with pity or disdain, but with sympathy. Kenzaburo Oe is without a doubt the first truly modern Japanese writer. He has managed a feat which even his talented and prolific elder contemporary, the late Yukio Mishima, was unable to accomplish: he has wrenched Japanese literature free of its deeply rooted, inbred tradition and moved it into the mainstream of world literature. Oe's influences and literary heroes are less Japanese than American and European. Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean-Paul Sartre rank high among them, and Oe's favorite novel, he confesses, is Huckleberry Finn. Oe grew up on the western island of Shikoku, a place steeped in Japanese rural traditions and wartime propaganda. His early works are regarded as classics of the disillusionment his nation felt on seeing what Japan's leadership had done to the country. His heroes have been expelled from the certainty of childhood into a world that bears no relation to their past.

Seventeen, J

Two Novels

In eindrucksvoller Differenziertheit schildert der japanische Autor Lebensgefühl und psychische Situation zweier Brüder im Japan der 60er Jahre.

Roman

Der stumme Schrei

The Silent Cry traces the uneasy relationship between two brothers who return to their ancestral home, a village in densely forested western Japan. While one brother tries to sort out the after-effects of a friend's suicide and the birth of a retarded son, the other embarks on a quixoticmission to incite an uprising among the local youth. Oe's description of this brother's messianic struggle to save a disintegrating local culture and economy from the depredations of a Korean wheeler-dealer called "The Emperor of the Supermarkets" is as chillingly pertinent today as it was whenfirst published in 1967. Powerful and daring, The Silent Cry is a thoroughly compelling classic of world literature.

Kenzaburō Ōe

About

Books

Join the club