Kenzaburo Oe

It is the 1960s, and the Nedokoro brothers have long-since left their family home in a remote forested valley on Shikoku, in the south of Japan: Mitsusaburo for Tokyo to work as a translator and English professor; his younger brother Takashi for the United States, to atone for his part in anti-American student protests. Takashi's return to Japan coincides with...

For the first time in his long life, Nobel-laureate Kogito Choko is suffering from writer's block. The book that he wishes to write would examine the turbulent relationship he had with his father, and the guilt he feels about being absent the night his father drowned in a storm-swollen river; but how to write about a man he never really...