[In the following positive review, Ryan finds parallels between Ōe's narrative voice in An Echo of Heaven and the Nō theater of Japan.]

In An Echo of Heaven, a lively, intelligent translation of Ōe Kenzaburō's 1989 novel Jinsei no shinseki (see WLT 67:3, p. 678), the author assumes a narrative voice resonating the chorus in the traditional Nō theater of Japan. As in the theater, Ōe moves deftly from direct accounts of events in which he is a participant to observations and analyses provided by others through letters and diary entries.

Like the Nō chorus, the K. of the novel, himself a prominent writer with a profoundly handicapped son named (like the author's own son) Hikari, expresses the horror and pain of the leading character. An American-educated Japanese intellectual named—not surely coincidentally—Marie, she speaks to us through her own words in direct discourse and through personal records. Marie too has a profoundly disabled son, and it is this connection that brings her into K.'s life. Her son, together with a “normal” brother who is disabled in a school-bus accident, dies in a suicide pact, in what is surely the novel's most devastating passage. This pact too resonates Japan's literary past, here most markedly the classic Bunraku puppet theater, where lovers' suicides so vividly reflected historical events that eighteenth-century authorities were forced to ban their performance.

However, Marie is no creature of Japan's past. At the time of her first encounter with K. she is teaching Western literature at a women's university and supporting—but not leading—protests against governmental behavior. Her intelligence leads her to recognize the hypocrisies surrounding the treatment of the disabled in Japan, but does not appear to help her avoid unfortunate liaisons from which K. is asked to rescue her. Ultimately, her despair over the death of her two sons—their father is an alcoholic whom Marie both supports and rejects—leads her to a guru and his commune inhabited by young and seemingly disingenuous women. She goes with them from Japan to California—while disagreeing with the guru's reading of Christianity and never herself becoming formally a Christian—and on a tour by van all over the United States, distributing the guru's bones, until she and the young women end up at the Canadian falls.

Her strength keeps the girls from following the guru in death. After deftly shipping them back to Japan, Marie is drawn to Mexico, where K. has lived, and a commune run by a second-generation Japanese-Mexican. This personality is part dedicated Christian, part businessman, and he needs a saint to hold his peasant workers on the commune. He finds that person in Marie, and the frame of the entire text is the making of a film designed to sanctify Marie's life as a perpetual inspiration to his workers.

Marie dies of cancer in a hospital in Guadalajara. To her last moment she maintains the sexuality that K. observed in her from the first. As the book closes, K. is reporting on the raw footage taken by three Japanese who have long served as her retinue. The Japanese authorities have confiscated a reel of videotape showing Marie naked on her deathbed, one hand at her breast forming a V, another fingering her public hair. In the last lines of the text K. is possessed by fear of some unknown force. What that force might be is as mysterious to the reader as similar feelings aroused in viewers of the Nō. However, the resolution provided by the Buddhistic philosophy pervading the Nō is, as Ōe well knows, unavailable to modern Japanese.