SOURCE: Harris, Michael. “Born of Anger.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (2 July 1995): 3, 5.

In the following review, Harris praises Ōe's unique narrative style and vivid use of detail in Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids.

Only a pinch of suspicion is needed to theorize that Kenzaburo Oe was a substitute winner of the Nobel Prize in 1994, just as Yasunari Kawabata was in 1968.

The achievements of postwar Japanese literature surely merited one or more Nobels, but the leading contender was Yukio Mishima, and Mishima wasn't about to win one, for some of the same reasons the Swedish Academy has never given the nod to Norman Mailer.

Mishima's works, like Mailer's, were influential, often brilliant, but uneven in quality. They were overshadowed, in any case, by the flamboyance of his public persona—the weightlifting, the sexual ambiguity, the right-wing melodramatics that ended with his suicide by beheading at the hands of...