Kenzaburo Oe Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Michiko N. Wilson

Critical Essay by Michiko N. Wilson

SOURCE: Wilson, Michiko N. “Occupied Japan: Tales of a Gigolo.” In The Marginal World of Oe Kenzaburo: A Study in Themes and Techniques, pp. 22-32. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1986.

In the following essay, Wilson discusses Ōe's preoccupation with sexual “submission and liberation” in Our Times, noting that most Japanese critics responded negatively to the work's avant-garde subject matter.

In 1934 Henry Miller wrote Tropic of Cancer, which became available to the American public for the first time in 1960. He wrote Sexus in 1949, but it was not published in the United States until 1965. Norman Mailer's The Deer Park appeared in 1955, “The Time of Her Time” in 1959, by which time both American novelists were already causes célèbres in Japan. An avid reader of both writers' work, Ōe published in July 1959 Our Times (Warera no jidai), his best-known sexually “repulsive” work, which annoyed almost...
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