SOURCE: Wood, Michael. “Like Apollinaire.” London Review of Books 18, no. 7 (4 April 1996): 24-5.

In the following review, Wood underscores the importance that Ōe places on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, A Personal Matter, and Hiroshima Notes.

Perhaps all books are messages from other times and places, even the ones written yesterday and just down the road. But these three works by Kenzaburo Oë, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, have an unusual flavour of missives cast into the sea long ago, only now arriving on our island beach. Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids was published in Japan in 1958, and is now translated for the first time. A Personal Matter was published in Japan in 1964, and in an American translation, here reprinted, in 1969. Hiroshima Notes was published in Japan in 1965 and first translated, in this version, in 1981. So the youngest...