by Kenzaburo Oe

Considered Japan’s leading contemporary novelist, Kenzaburo Oe (pronounced OH-ay) was born in 1935 in a small village on the western Japanese island of Shikoku. In 1957 Oe graduated from Tokyo University with a degree in French literature, and the following year he won Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize for his short story Shiiku (1958; The Catch, 1958). Oe married Yukari Ikeuchi in 1960, and three years later had a son, Hikari, who was born suffering from severe brain damage. Much of Oe’s subsequent writing reflects his experience as a father of a mentally disabled son. The motif appears not only in his best known novel, Kojinteki na taiken (1964; A Personal Matter, 1968), but also in later works such as Pinchi ranna chosho (1976; The Pinch Runner Memorandum, 1995) and Shizuka na seikatsu (1990; A Quiet Life, 1996). In general, Oe’s fiction exhibits an elusive...