Ōe has been accused, with some justice, of writing Japanese that reads like a translation from a Western language. His long and complex sentences have neither elegant simplicity nor effortless flow, but are knotty challenges for the mind to unravel. Crammed with adjectives and similes, they consciously—occasionally almost self-consciously—prod the reader along, constantly forcing him to make unexpected associations, or emphasizing the author's analytical self-awareness.

In a sense, perhaps, the Japanese language is being made to do something for which it was never intended; one can well imagine some Japanese readers finding the style overladen or self-assertive. But though it is obviously to the literatures of the Western languages—their syntax, vocabulary, analytical approach—rather than to the Sino-Japanese heritage that Ōe looks to enrich the expressiveness of modern Japanese, what is still more important is that the ideas and, even more, the imagery are consistently...