by Kenzaburo Oe
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Product Description
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 the other. The earliest of his novels included here, Prize Stock, reveals the strange relationship between a Japanese boy and a captured black American pilot in a Japanese village. Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness tells of the close relationship between an outlandishly fat father and his mentally defective son, Eeyore. Aghwee the Sky Monster is about a young man’s first job — chaperoning a banker’s son who is haunted by the ghost of a baby in a white nightgown. The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away is the longest piece in this collection and Oe’s most disturbing work to date. The narrator lies in a hospital bed waiting to die of a liver cancer that he has probably imagined, wearing a pair of underwater goggles covered with dark cellophane.
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Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A continuum of themes: fathers, mothers, children, madness, 2008-11-14
"Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness" collects four stories--novellas, really--from the first 15 years of Oe's career. Each is unique in narrative style, in tone, and in pace, but all four deal with similar themes that matured over the years.
"Prize Stock" (1957), one of Oe's very first stories and perhaps his most famous, is about a black American airman captured during the war by the residents of a remote village, who take him prisoner but hide him from the authorities in a cellar, where he seemingly manages to befriend the local children. In "Aghwee the Sky Monster" (1964), a narrator recalls a friend haunted by the spirit of a son born with serious brain damage. It is one of the earliest of many works (including the masterpiece, "A Personal Matter") featuring such a child, inspired by Oe's own son Hikari, who in fact eventually overcame serious disabilities to become a respected composer of music.
An "idiot child" is also at the center of the title story (1969), which is my favorite of the collection--and may well be the best short work Oe ever wrote. "A fat man" takes his beloved son for a pleasant day at the zoo. Assaulted by hoodlums and tossed into the polar bear pond, he regains consciousness to discover that the child is missing. The trauma serves as a catalyst for coming to terms with the man's relationship with his own father, whose death had been a mystery to him.
Similar themes and characters populate the longest and most complex selection, "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away" (1972). A hospital patient believes he has cancer--although his doctors insist he does not. Much of the man's first-person, non-linear rant is told to the "the acting executor of the will," that is, his wife. Bedridden, he lives in his past, brooding over his estrangement from his mother and recounting his father's suicidal mission to save Japan from defeat at the end of World War II--an event the narrator distorts in memory. Oe apparently intended this as an anguished parody of Yukio Mashima's suicide. While eerily compelling, the story can be difficult and baffling. It strongly echoes Oe's earlier novel "The Silent Cry," which (I think) deals with these themes much more successfully--at least for readers unfamiliar with Japanese history and traditions.
What is most notable about Oe's work is that the same characters, ideas, subjects, and even certain scenes appear repeatedly in his many works--yet each story or novel is utterly distinctive. And his offbeat, sometimes morbid humor often catches readers unawares. His fiction translates remarkably well to English, and I never feel like I've read the same work twice.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
This is why he won the Nobel Prize, 2008-05-19
Oe's giant stature as a writer is demonstrated here more than in any other of his books. All these stories are wonderful, but "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away" is one of the greatest works of fiction I've ever read. I mean that. Buy this book and read it. You won't be sorry.
0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Needed it for a class..., 2007-01-08
The longest stories ever... But they were alright, I found them more interesting to talk about than to actually read...
6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
seminal!!, 2004-08-12
I adore this book... I read it all at once, woke up my parents in the middle of the night talking about its descriptions of the sky, talked about it at my college interviews, which were about three years ago... Loved it. But Discovered that some of Oe's other work isn't as good. But wow! The language, plot, the strangeness, the beauty, inventiveness, and reach of the book is tremendous. :)
5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
One of the best writers from Japan, 2001-09-03
If you haven't bought this book, then you should get it now. Kenzaburo Oe is one of the few left wing writers in Japan who has made a great impact world wide. His style is original, his themes often poignant. His own personal suffering and the suffering of his own brain-damaged child often feature in his novels in subtle and not so subtle forms. You will not find any cliches in this novel and Oe is never nauseatingly sentimental. A true gem.
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