Kenzaburo Oe

Em 1964, o romancista japonês Kenzaburo Oe recebia a notícia de que seu primeiro filho nascera com uma anomalia cerebral. É a mesma situação enfrentada pelo protagonista de Uma questão pessoal , o professor Bird. Aos 27 anos, ele leva uma vida mediana, bebendo pelos bares de Tóquio e sonhando com aventuras no …

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids recounts the exploits of 15 teenage reformatory boys evacuated in wartime to a remote mountain village where they are feared and detested by the local peasants. When plague breaks out, the villagers flee, blocking the boys inside the deserted town. Their brief attempt to build autonomous …

Two brothers, Takashi and Mitsu, return from Tokyo to the village of their childhood. Selling their family home leads them to an inescapable confrontation with their family history. Their attempt to escape the influence of the city ends in failure as they realize that its tentacles extend to everything in the …

These four novels display Oe’s passionate and original vision. Oe was ten when American jeeps first drove into the mountain village where he lived, and his literary work reveals the tension and ambiguity forged by the collapse of values of his childhood on the one hand and the confrontation with American writers on …

A Quiet Life is an uncanny blend of the real with the imagined, of memoir with fiction. A Quiet Life is narrated by Ma-chan, a twenty-year-old woman. Her father is a famous and fascinating novelist; her older brother, though severely brain damaged, possesses an almost magical gift for musical composition; and her …

Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age! is a 1983 semi-autobiographical novel by Japanese author Kenzaburō Ōe, about his day-to-day life with his mentally handicapped son, Hikari and the effect that William Blake's poetry has had on both his life and work.