Oe Kenzaburo was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994. This critical study examines Oe's entire career from 1957 - 2006 and includes chapters on Oe's later novels not published in English. Through close readings at different points in Oe's career Yasuko Claremont establishes the spiritual path that he has taken in its three major phrases of nihilism, atonement, and salvation, all highlighted against a background of violence and suicidal despair that saturate his pages. Oe uses myth in two distinct ways: to link mankind to the archetypal past, and as a critique of contemporary...

When we look in detail at the various peripheral groups of disenfranchised people emerging from the aftermath of the Asia-Pacific War the list is startling: Koreans in Japan (migrants or forced labourers), Burakumin, Hibakusha, Okinawans, Asian minorities, comfort women and many others. Many of these groups have been discussed in a large corpus of what we may call 'disenfranchised literature', and the research presented in this book intends to add an additional and particularly controversial example to the long list of the voice- and powerless. The presence of members of what is known as...