SOURCE: Dalglish, James. “An Author in Search of a Story.” Japan Quarterly 43, no. 3 (July-September 1996): 90-2.

In the following review, Dalglish asserts that An Echo of Heaven can be viewed as a wholly original novel within the context of modern Japanese literature, labelling it as “a work riven with postmodern uncertainty.”

An Echo of Heaven, the English translation of Nobel laureate Ōe Kenzaburō's 1989 Jinsei no shinseki, is an intriguing work that evades definition. It is sprinkled with diversely engaging themes—sexuality, religion, literature and (possibly) saintliness. There are handicapped children (no surprise), suicide pacts, cults, whiffs of millenarianism and abrupt shifts of scene among Japan, the United States and Mexico. It also features an author (Ōe) in search of a story.

What kind of book is it? It might be a novel, as the publisher implies, but it reads more like a memoir. At times, it plods like...