[In the following review of the English publication of Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, Sakurai hails Ōe as a major international talent.]

Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness [translated by John Nathan] is the third publication in English of the extraordinary works of Kenzaburo Ōé, the most talented writer to emerge in Japan after World War II. Like his previous publications (A Personal Matter, 1968, also translated by John Nathan, and The Silent Cry, 1975), this book is certain to surprise some Western readers who have come to expect delicate prose and exquisite imagery from a Japanese novelist. Having learned his craft from postwar American authors such as Norman Mailer and French existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, rather than from The Tale of Genji, Ōé writes fiction that is more brutal and savage than exquisite or quaint. He was a twenty-two-year-old French major at Tokyo University when he won his first literary prize. Since then he has won virtually every literary award offered in Japan, including the coveted Akutagawa Prize in 1958 for Prize Stock, the earliest composition among the four short novels contained in the present book.

Prize Stock is a tightly knit tale of a black American flier's captivity in a mountain village during the War. Ōé referred to it as a "pastoral." But what a pastoral! Ōé superimposes a mythic, primeval society on the village and reveals the nature of man and conditions of human existence through a densely woven pattern of animal images. "Chilly, sweating stones" jut "like the swollen belly of a pupa," and "skin flush[es] hot as the innards of a freshly killed chicken." Symbolism is apparent as little boys in the opening scene "collect" well-shaped bones at a makeshift crematorium to use as medals and the black captive with a boar trap around his ankles is "reared" in the cellar. It is a powerful story that exploits all the elements of fiction.

The imagery of The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away is just as striking. The narrator lies in a hospital wearing a pair of underwater goggles covered in dark cellophane and singing the song "Happy Days Are Here Again" in anticipation of death from liver cancer and return to an event in 1945 that ended his happy days. It is a technical as well as imagistic triumph. Aghwee the Sky Monster tells of a young composer haunted by the phantom of a kangaroo-sized baby in a white nightgown. Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness is a tragicomic story of a fat man's obsession with his mentally defective son and the imagined madness of his own dead father. Both are original, well-plotted tales with vivid, if not likable characters and memorable scenes.

The four novellas vary in technique and style as well as subject matter but are alike in the theme of alienation (apparent in the images of the chained captive and the cancer patient waiting for liberation), in their absurdist, ironic, black-comic view of life and the use of anti-heroes. Artistic excellence characterizes all four. The translation is accurate and conveys the essence of the original, although some readers may prefer a more Anglicized, smooth-flowing rendition to Nathan's faithful-to-the-last-comma approach. Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness is a book that should be read by everyone interested in contemporary fiction, for Ōé is as important a writer as Mailer or Updike.