Criticism

"Reading Japan Through Its Writers: Abe Kobo and Oe Kenzaburo: The Problem of Selfhood in Contemporary Japan." Book Forum VII, No. 1 (1984): 30-1.

Comments on how contemporary Japanese culture is reflected in the works of Ōe and Abe Kōbō.

Enright, D. J. "Days of Marvelous Lays." New York Review of Books XI, No. 6 (10 October 1968): 35-7.

Negative review of A Personal Matter which considers the novel's ending to be contrived.

Gamerman, Amy. "Kenzaburo Oe Wins Nobel in Literature." The Wall Street Journal (14 October 1994): A9.

Reports on Ōe's selection as the Nobel Prize winner and offers a concise overview of his life and career.

Napier, Susan J. "Death and the Emperor: Mishima, Oe, and the Politics of Betrayal." Journal of Asian Studies 48, No. 1 (February 1989): 71-89.

Analyzes the "role of the Emperor" in the works of Ōe and Yukio Mishima. While Ōe is severely critical of the Emperor system, Mishima, who came of age during the 1930s, supported the Emperor for patriotic reasons.

――――――――. Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the Fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991, 258 p.

Critical study of selected works by Ōe and Yukio Mishima. Napier argues that Ōe and Mishima both "set up alternative fictional worlds of 'closed circles,' even of 'fairy tales,' which are 'outside the influence of time,' to contrast with the reality of modern Japan."

Nemoto, Reiko Tachibana. "Günter Grass's The Tin Drum and Oe Kenzaburo's My Tears." Contemporary Literature 34, No. 4 (Winter 1993): 740-66.

Elucidates what Nemoto calls "a striking parallelism" between two novels by Ōe and Günter Grass. Nemoto argues that both "Grass and Oe insist that after Auschwitz and Hiroshima political neutrality in literature is unacceptable."

Remnick, David. "Reading Japan." The New Yorker LXX, No. 48 (6 February 1995): 38-44.

Discusses the facts of Ōe's personal life which account for his surprise announcement at the Nobel Prize ceremony that he would no longer write fiction.

Treat, John Whittier. "Hiroshima Nōto and Ōe Kenzaburō's Existentialist Other." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47, No. 1 (June 1987): 97-136.

Negative assessment of Ōe's Hiroshima Notes which is described as the ingenuous philosophizing of an author who is "a naive reader of history inversely attempting to comprehend a situation directly accessible only to its immediate victims."

Wilson, Michiko N. The Marginal World of Oe Kenzaburo: A Study in Themes and Techniques. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1986, 160 p.

Discusses Ōe's fiction as a radical departure from traditional Japanese literature.