SOURCE: A review of Chiryō-tō, in World Literature Today, Vol. 65, No. 2, Spring, 1991, p. 368.

[In the following review, Yoshida commends Ōe's Chiryō-tō as an imaginative and beautifully composed piece of science fiction.]

In Chiryō-tō (Towers of Healing) the novelist Ōe Kenzaburō is concerned with the effect of a worldwide nuclear disaster, particularly its impact on the human race. He had previously developed this theme in Kōzui wa waga tamashii ni oyobi (Flood onto My Soul; 1973), but here his earlier cataclysmic view has been replaced by a more optimistic outlook.

In the new novel, which was first serialized in Hermes (July 1989–March 1990), Ōe predicts a Persian Gulf crisis. The story is set at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and the use of nuclear weapons in the gulf has made the earth apparently uninhabitable. This has inspired an international project for immigration to a new earth...