Kenzaburo Oe Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Susan J. Napier

Critical Essay by Susan J. Napier

SOURCE: Napier, Susan J. “The Lost Garden: Beginnings of a Mythic Alternative.” In Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the Fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo, pp. 17-42. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Napier examines how the early works of Ōe and Mishima Yukio—particularly Ōe's “Prize Stock” and Pluck the Buds, Shoot the Kids and Yukio's Sound of Waves—represent a rejection of traditional Japanese narratives by focusing heavily on pastoral and dream-like themes.

Memushiri was a dream world, emphatically separated from the wretched smell of reality that filled so many Japanese novels, reeking as they did with wormy Naturalism.

—Matsubara Shinichi¹

Among the writings of Oe and Mishima are three works that consciously separate themselves from the reality of postwar Japan. These narratives offer some of the most all-encompassing and appealing alternatives to the wasteland of modern Japanese society that either writer...
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