SOURCE: Swain, David. “Something Akin to Grace: The Journey of Kenzaburo Oe.” Christian Century 114, no. 37 (24 December 1997): 1226-31.

In the following essay, Swain investigates the major influences on Ōe's fiction and nonfiction, particularly the impact of the birth of his mentally and physically handicapped son.

On the occasion of receiving the 1994 Nobel Prize in literature, novelist Kenzaburo Oe explained that “the fundamental method of my writing has always been to start from personal matters and then link them with society, the state, and the world in general.” Oe's personal starting point was a heavily wooded mountain area on Japan's Shikoku Island, where he was born in 1935. Oe (pronounced Oh-eh) loves trees and has a lifelong habit of talking to them on long walks. According to critic Masao Miyoshi, Oe “remembers everything” and can cite the names of almost all the trees in the world in Japanese, English and Latin...