[In the following review, Iwamoto commends Ōe's sensitive and poignant exploration of his relationship with his mentally and physically handicapped son, Hiraki, in A Healing Family.]

The relationship between Kenzaburo Ōe and his mentally and physically handicapped son Hikari has furnished the author with the materials and inspiration for countless works—short stories, novels, lectures, commentaries, and essays. From the novel A Personal Matter (1964; Eng. 1968) to the collection of nonfiction short pieces A Healing Family (orig. 1995) under review here, the subject matter has been treated with an astonishing variety of perspectives. Another recently translated Ōe novel, A Quiet Life (1990; Eng. 1996), for example, is narrated by the author's daughter, who is left to care for her brother when their parents spend an extended period at the University of California in Berkeley.

In A Healing Family, a considerably more reduced version than the original Kaifuku suru kazoku that was written over a span of years, Ōe speaks in his own unmediated voice to draw sketches of incidents that illustrate, directly or indirectly, how Hikari's presence has enriched his family's life. Hikari's birth in 1963, with a large lump on his head, precipitated an ethical crisis in Ōe's young life: should he allow the infant to die, or should he approve surgery that might save the boy's life but would, at worst, result in a vegetative existence? This personal holocaust became inextricably linked with the Hiroshima holocaust when Ōe, on an assignment to that city shortly after his son's birth to cover the activities of the peace movement, observed firsthand and drew strength from the dignity and courage with which the survivors confronted their fate. The decision in favor of surgery, Ōe notes, occasioned a rebirth in his spiritual outlook, and Hikari and Hiroshima have taught him about what it means to be human.

The humanity of both handicapped and caretaker has been enlarged through music. Notwithstanding the mental retardation and a multitude of physical disabilities that erupted in periodic epileptic fits, Hikari evinced from an early age an extraordinarily acute ear for music, and with the tireless encouragement of family members and teachers, he has developed into a recognized composer of classical music with two CD's to his credit. It is through music, Ōe writes, that Hikari expresses the most human things in his character and the richness of his inner life, “the delicate existence that was locked away deep inside him.” Furthermore, “It is in Hikari's music that I most often get a premonition of a world beyond our own.”

Befitting a writer, Ōe is especially sensitive to the meanings and resonances of words, in particular those that touch on ministering to the handicapped: for instance, the word compassion, which Ōe elucidates in part by reference to the Meiji poet Shiki Masaoka's diary entries expressing irritability and displeasure at his sister's apparent inability to intuit his needs while nursing him bedridden with tuberculosis. Ōe interprets Shiki's “compassion” to mean “an active yet almost automatic ability to enter into the feelings of another person.” The ability to imagine the patient's suffering and to respond creatively is a quality that Ōe values greatly in a caretaker, while candidly admitting its lack on specific occasions in his own personality. Some other words that he takes up at some length are humanism, acceptance, perseverance, and yujo (gentle humanity). Curiously, love, a word that would surely fill a Western book on the same subject, figures hardly at all in Ōe's work, no doubt underscoring the difference in the way similar concerns are communicated in the two cultures.

Ōe pays ample homage to those who have enhanced Hikari's humanity—to his wife Yukari, who provides watercolor illustrations of mostly flowers and family life, and their two other children, as well as to Hikari's doctors and teachers. Also referred to are writers like Flannery O'Connor and William Blake, whose eloquent artistic works on the sanctity of the human spirit have encouraged and inspired Ōe in his creative response to living with a disabled family member. We come to know despair, he says, but “by actually giving it expression we can be healed and know the joy of recovering.”