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“... times and places, even the ones written yesterday and just down the road. But these three works by Kenzaburo Oë, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, have an unusual flavour of missives cast into the sea long ago, only now arriving on our island beach. Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids was published in Japan in 1958, and is now translated for the first ...”

“... who proved unexpectedly to be the greatest novelist in the world. Such also, I believe, is Kenzaburo Oe, whose latest novel shows how mistaken American stereotypes of him were (and perhaps how mistaken his own stereotype of himself was). At least two things were thought to have been known about this writer when Grove gradually began to introduce ...”

“... news in a literary culture not known for its light-heartedness). From the Olympian perspective of Kenzaburo Oe – Japan’s last Nobel literature laureate – Murakami’s fictions are ‘mere reflections of the vast consumer culture of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large’. They ‘convey the experience of a youth politically uninvolved or ...”

“... Amit Chaudhuri​ visited Europe for the first time at the age of eleven. In 1973 the world felt steady; it had ‘a kind of wholeness to it’. The co-existence of capitalism and communism seemed permanent. Forty years later, visiting Berlin, he felt the need ‘to grasp fleetingly, what one had lost’. He had grown up in non-aligned India, which balanced democratic commitment with a sympathy for the Soviet Union, and his sense of ‘what it meant to be human’ was formed by the Cold War’s antitheses ...”

“... whether Murakami and his fellows should be considered Japanese writers at all. The older novelist Kenzaburo Oe has voiced the suspicion that Japanese literature is ‘decaying’. In an essay entitled ‘Japan’s Dual Identity’, he singled out Murakami as emblematic of the decline in junbungaku, or serious writing, arguing that ‘there is nothing ...”

“... political disenchantment that saturates Murakami’s writing. Off Centre is dedicated to Kenzaburo Oe, and Miyoshi clearly admires this senior writer’s consistently radical stance: ‘There are moments when it looks as though Japan’s critical consciousness lives in Oe’s work alone.’ However, it is hard ...”

“... to ‘appeal to intellectuals in the broad sense with models for Japan’s present and future’ (Kenzaburo Oe). The novel was written in the US, where Murakami, hiding out from the fan attention occasioned by Norwegian Wood, reconsidered his earlier wish ‘to run as far as I could from the “Japanese Condition”’. After the Kobe earthquake and the ...”