[In the following review, Yoshida commends Ōe's Chiryō-tō as an imaginative and beautifully composed piece of science fiction.]

In Chiryō-tō (Towers of Healing) the novelist Ōe Kenzaburō is concerned with the effect of a worldwide nuclear disaster, particularly its impact on the human race. He had previously developed this theme in Kōzui wa waga tamashii ni oyobi (Flood onto My Soul; 1973), but here his earlier cataclysmic view has been replaced by a more optimistic outlook.

In the new novel, which was first serialized in Hermes (July 1989–March 1990), Ōe predicts a Persian Gulf crisis. The story is set at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and the use of nuclear weapons in the gulf has made the earth apparently uninhabitable. This has inspired an international project for immigration to a new earth, and at the beginning of the story the exodus of about a million people to that new earth in the spaceship Star Ship has already occurred. After ten years of scientific research and experiments on the new earth, the Star Ship returns to the old earth. This creates tension between the returnees and those who had been left behind.

The Star Ship Corporation, a government agency, serves as a secret police force over the people in what is now an Orwellian society. Intermarriage between the two groups is strongly discouraged, since the corporation is determined to protect the "pure blood" of the elite from possible AIDS contamination through contact with the other group. Passing a government-administered AIDS test has become a requirement in order for an old-earth person to marry a returnee. If the result of the test is positive, a thorough investigation is made to identify all persons with whom the applicant has had sexual contact. These persons are then ostracized.

The novel focuses on an extended family of several generations, which includes both old-earth residents and returnees. One male is the head of the Star Ship project, and a brother is an underground activist who protests the project. Ōe's narrator, a young girl, belongs to the old-earth part of the family. She wants to marry a returnee but suspects she may have AIDS, having been repeatedly raped while held captive by a European terrorist group. Her family is thus a microcosm of the old-earth returnee society with all its problems and stigmas.

Eventually the narrator musters her courage and takes the AIDS test. The results are negative, and she is liberated from the spell of the disease. She learns from her future husband that the Star Ship crew discovered several towerlike buildings on the new earth. They were called "chiryō-tō" or "towers of healing," since whoever lies down in their coffinlike beds is irradiated and cured of all wounds and disease. The towers are also trees of life. As her future husband tells her this story, she becomes rejuvenated by the new life that is forming within her.

Chiryō-tō is Ōe's first venture into science fiction, but it contains all the characteristics of his earlier works: the "great departure" from a difficult reality, the frequently existential impasse, the breakthrough, and the final advent of new hope. As usual, Ōe is concerned with the social and political situation of the world, with the freedom and happiness of individuals, and with an ecologically healthy environment in which no one is ostracized. Instead of the intensity, urgency, shocking images, and difficult linguistic contrivances of his earlier works, however, here Ōe writes more in a vein of verisimilitude. In quiet colors he provides us with an example of how not to lose hope in our difficult days. More of Ōe's books should be translated into English so that a wider audience can listen to what this important writer from contemporary Japan has to say.