SOURCE: "Circles of Shame: 'Sheep' by Ōe Kenzaburō," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. XI, No. 4, Fall, 1974, pp. 409-15.

In the following essay, Richter examines the role of shame in the short story "Sheep. "

On the surface it is paradoxical that Ōe Kenzaburō (b. 1935), a spokesman for the Japanese New Left, admirer of Mao, and student of Sartrean Existentialism, should give thematic treatment to anything quite so traditional as the notion of "shame," a complex emotional response to a variety of situations in Japanese society. Although very much the modern writer and liberated from many of the complexes that burdened older literary figures such as Tanizaki Jun'ichirō and Mishima Yukio, Ōe, in the short story "Sheep," directly confronts the experience of shame with power, subtlety, and insight. Whereas other major Japanese writers generally deal with shame as incidental to their primary thematic concerns, only as part of the...