SOURCE: Picone, Jason. Review of Somersault, by Kenzaburō Ōe. Review of Contemporary Fiction 23, no. 2 (summer 2003): 131-32.

In the following review, Picone lauds Ōe's “disquieting” world view in Somersault and argues that the novel broadens “the scope and form that the author's future fiction might take.”

In his first new novel since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Kenzaburo Oe offers an examination of the nature of faith when it is balanced against the potential for human self-annihilation in the twenty-first century. A complete departure from Oe's fiction concerning his retarded son, Somersault is a conventional narrative about a fictional religious cult, partly influenced by Aum Shinrikyo and their 1995 sarin attack on the Tokyo subway. Ten years before the novel begins, a religious group's two founding leaders, Patron and Guide, betray their own movement because a radical faction within the group threatens large-scale terrorism. The leaders contact the authorities...