A single event soars up, a sheer, jagged, snow-covered peak, from the otherwise temperate landscape of Kenzaburo Oe's life. This was the birth, in 1963, of a first child with a cerebral defect which, over the years, has had increasingly tragic consequences for the boy's physical and mental development. From this event, an avalanche of short stories, novels and essays has swept down. The latest in what Oe himself has, chillingly, called the ‘idiot son narratives’, this book [A Quiet Life] is a fictionalised account of further episodes in the life of this boy, now seen not, as in the past, through the eyes of Oe himself but of the boy's 20-year-old sister.

Many novelists have fed to bloated satiety off the experiences of those nearest to them; but there is something particularly disturbing in the way in which, making no attempt at concealing their identities, Oe has appropriated his wife's and his three children's existences. Might not his daughter prefer to produce her own narrative, rather than have her father use her as his ventriloquist's doll? And how does his son react to being called an idiot and to have revealed—as in this novel—that his epileptic seizures produce violent diarrhoea and that, incontinent at night, he must, even as an adult, put on nappies when retiring?

The young Ma-chan is left in charge of the family home and her two brothers when, suffering from what the translation terms ‘a pinch’ (a period of stress and depression), her brilliant and famous father departs with her mother for an academic post in the States. Much of her narrative is taken up with looking after the young man—tending him during his fits, cooking and caring for him, and taking him to his music lessons, his swimming lessons, and a workshop for people handicapped like himself. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to believe that this is the narrative of a young girl, exhausted and bewildered by her responsibilities, and not of a highly sophisticated, knowledgeable and celebrated professional author in his mid-fifties. Embedded in the narrative are what are in effect critical essays—on Tarkovsky's strange, disturbing film Stalker, on Céline's last book Rigadoon, on Michael Ende's cult The Neverending Story—such as Oe has often produced but which would, in their intellectual rigour and scope, surely be beyond someone as young and naive as Ma-chan.

Oe gave the name Hikari (in Japanese ‘Light’) to his severely disabled son; but the boy soon acquired the nickname Eeyore, and it is as Eeyore that he appears in this book. Here, as in all Oe's writings about him, Eeyore's otherwise tragic life is redeemed by an outstanding gift for musical composition. Whether his compositions do, in fact, have any value is something that has been often debated in Japan. It is, after all, natural that a father should console himself that his idiot son is also an idiot savant.

In this book, Eeyore's tragedy is redeemed not merely by his musical ability but by an act of singular courage. After having dawdled along for lethargic page after page, the narrative quickens melodramatically when Eeyore's sinister, muscle-bound swimming instructor makes a crude attempt on Ma-chan's virtue. Eeyore then takes on the formidable brute and rescues his sister. This, one suspects, is one of the rare occasions when the novel veers decisively away from fact.

Oe's writings, like Philip Roth's, are endlessly and intricately self-referential. On a major level, he has told the story of Eeyore over and over again, with subtle and not so subtle variations. On a minor level, there is (to take but one example) the cartoon character Betty Boop. The central female character, Marie Kuraki, in Oe's Mexican novel An Echo of Heaven is described as having a smile like Betty Boop's. In this novel there is a further reference to Betty Boop during the discussion of Tarkovsky's film.

The translation does Oe no favours. Such oddities as ‘refrain from privileging yourself’, ‘father has the habit of obsessing over things like this’, and ‘the topographical overlooks of the delicately undulating countryside’ are frequent. In Japanese it is impossible to split an infinitive, but if there is ever an opportunity to do so in English Kunioki Yanagishita and William Wether-all pounce on it.

But even if the translation more accurately reproduced Oe's dense, highly poetic style, this book could still not be accounted a success. Despite his ardent immersion in most of the fashionable left-wing causes of his times and his constant travelling and lecturing, Oe has published more than a score of books in the last 20 years. Inevitably, a writer so prolific will from time to time come up with a dud. This book must be so accounted. Not since Pearl Buck has a Nobel Prize winner produced anything so unworthy of that singular honour.