SOURCE: "Kenzaburo Ōe: A New World of Imagination," in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring, 1985, pp. 80-95.

[In the following essay, Yoshida argues for the universality of Ōe's fiction, citing its strong affinities with the "grotesque realism" of the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais.]

In the modern history of Japan the most significant event was the defeat of Japan in the Second World War. It totally undermined the social and value system developed since the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The experience in Hiroshima and Nagasaki makes clear that one single bomb may mean instantaneous and simultaneous death for everybody on earth. And the real meaning of the nuclear age and its imminent danger is fully examined for the first time in the works of Kenzaburo Ōe. Even though the situations, characters, and incidents in his fiction are clearly Japanese, his unparalleled literary imagination makes his provocative and disturbing...