SOURCE: "Günter Grass's The Tin Drum and Ōe Kenzaburô's My Tears: A Study in Convergence," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 34, No. 4, Winter, 1993, pp. 740-66.

In this essay, Nemoto compares Ōe's "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away" to Günter Grass's The Tin Drum, arguing that the two works use similar techniques to critique the actions of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany in World War II.

The German novelist Günter Grass (b. 1927) and the Japanese novelist Ōe Kenzaburö (b. 1935) are equally well known for their political activism and their writing. They met each other in Japan in 1978, for an interview conducted through the interpreter Iwabuchi Tatsuji, and they met again in Germany in 1990, for an interview conducted through the interpreter Mishima Ken'ichi. Prior to these personal encounters, however, in Grass's The Tin Drum and Ōe's "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away...