SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “Dynamite Dangling on a Thread.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (11 August 1996): 2.

In the following review, Eder discusses the recurring themes of anger and shame in Ōe's early novellas Seventeen and J.

Splitting doesn't always weaken; it can transform and empower. Think of the atom, or the Japanese novelist and Nobelist Kenzaburo Oe. The vision that torments and lights him up emanates from a brutal divide.

Born in 1935, Oe was churned in the tide and riptide of a history that had him pledging, as a child, to slash open his belly whenever the emperor required it. As a youth in the 1950s, it carried him into the combative left, repudiating both the old warrior mystique and the new national accommodation with the United States.

Finally, after a personal tragedy beyond such dialectics—for three decades he has nurtured the life and talents of a brain-impaired son...