Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness is the best of [Ōe's] novels. Among those who will highly value it are parents, especially parents of retarded or autistic children. For doctors and other health-care personnel, it is prescribed as part of continuing education. The I-Thou experience, and beyond it the feeling for what Philip Berrigan calls Equal Jeopardy … are here exquisitely clear. As the courtroom scene in Wilder's Heaven's My Destination is a classic short comedy, the ophthalmological consultation in Teach Us is a drama of classic power.

The existential problem of stigma is met by Ōe as it is met by John Gardner, Bellow, Maxine Kingston: met, recognized, and then transcended. A man is fat to the point of disgust, blind, hypochondriacal. A child is moronic or autistic or blind or all three. The man is beautiful. The child is beautiful….

Ōe is a sophisticated and unerring writer...