Kenzaburō Ōe

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935-2023) is a major figure in contemporary Japanese
literature. His works, strongly influenced by French and American literature
and literary theory, engage with political, social and philosophical issues
including nuclear weapons, social non-conformism and existentialism.

Ōe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 for
creating "an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a
disconcerting picture of the human predicament today."

Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness

The book was first published in 1966. It comprised four novels.

These four novels display Oe’s passionate and original vision. Oe was
ten when American jeeps first drove into the mountain village where he lived,
and his literary work reveals the tension and ambiguity forged by the collapse
of values of his childhood on the one hand and the confrontation with American
writers on the other. The earliest of his novels included here, Prize Stock,
reveals the strange relationship between a Japanese boy and a captured black
American pilot in a Japanese village. Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness tells of
the close relationship between an outlandishly fat father and his mentally
defective son, Eeyore. Aghwee the Sky Monster is about a young man’s first job
— chaperoning a banker’s son who is haunted by the ghost of a baby in a white
nightgown. The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away is the longest piece in
this collection and Oe’s most disturbing work to date. The narrator lies in a
hospital bed waiting to die of a liver cancer that he has probably imagined,
wearing a pair of underwater goggles covered with dark cellophane.