SOURCE: Ryan, Marleigh Grayer. Review of An Echo of Heaven, by Kenzaburō Ōe. World Literature Today 71, no. 1 (winter 1997): 229.

In the following positive review, Ryan finds parallels between Ōe's narrative voice in An Echo of Heaven and the Nō theater of Japan.

In An Echo of Heaven, a lively, intelligent translation of Ōe Kenzaburō's 1989 novel Jinsei no shinseki (see WLT 67:3, p. 678), the author assumes a narrative voice resonating the chorus in the traditional Nō theater of Japan. As in the theater, Ōe moves deftly from direct accounts of events in which he is a participant to observations and analyses provided by others through letters and diary entries.

Like the Nō chorus, the K. of the novel, himself a prominent writer with a profoundly handicapped son named (like the author's own son) Hikari, expresses the horror and pain of the leading character. An American-educated Japanese intellectual named—not surely...