SOURCE: Ward, Elizabeth. “Innocence and Experience.” Washington Post Book World 32, no. 23 (9 June 2002): 7.

In the following review, Ward asserts that, despite Ōe's dense narrative style, Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age is ultimately a rewarding novel.

Considering that Kenzaburo Oe won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1994, he still isn't very widely read in English. But then he still isn't very widely read in Japanese. Oe's work is difficult, obsessive and rambling—and that's as true of his fiction as it is of his nonfiction, which are hard to tell apart anyway. Even his admirers concede that you don't read Oe for anything as shallow as pleasure; you read him to experience what he calls “layers of sorrow and pain.” Obviously an acquired taste—and yet, for the few, it does offer rewards. This book is a good example.

Oe's temperament is such that most things...