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()(Translated by Stephen Snyder)(Titulo original : ø·éÆ° (Kaifuku suru kazoku)^@LA Healing FamilyL, Kenzaburo OeLs first book since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, is an intimate portrait of the people closest to him. Above all, it is about his son Hikari. Hikari was born in 1963 with a growth on his brain so large it made him look as if he had two heads. His parents were told he might never be more than a Lhuman vegetableL requiring constant care ; but they took the decision to raise him. Today, despite autism, poor vision, and a tendency to seizures, their son is an established composer with two successful CDs to his credit. Oe has often written about the sorrows and satisfactions of being the parent of a handicapped child, most memorably in LA Personal MatterL, but nowhere has his writing been more personal, more buoyant, more revealing than in this non-fiction work.^@Without diminishing the suffering that Hikari and his family have been through, he celebrates the victories that can be won, especially his sonLs gift for music --his own LlanguageL. Friends make an appearance along the way --doctors, musicians, other writers-- as do the themes that have preoccupied Oe all his life : the rights of the underprivileged ; the moral authority of the survivors of the atomic bombing ; the mystery of language. But his thoughts keep circling back to his family --to the healing power of the family, and the unwitting courage we can all find in ourselves. The book is illustrated with sketches of family life painted by his wife.^@Kenzaburo Oe was born in 1935 in a remote village in Shikoku, the smallest of JapanLs four main islands. After studying French literature at the University of Tokyo, he won his first literary award for a short story,LThe CatchL, about the capture and killing of a black American pilot by a group of Japanese villagers. Involved politically in efforts to protect his countryLs postwar pacifism during the 1960s, he traveled to Peking and, soon afterward, to Russia and Western Europe, where he came to know Sartre, whom he acknowledges as a major influence at the time. OeLs first novel to be translated into English (in 1968),LA Personal MatterL, was about the cruel decision faced by a young parent on the birth of a severely brain-damaged child, and this theme --based on circumstances in his own life-- has been the major stimulus in much of his later fiction. Other English translations of his novels include :LThe Silent Cry (1974)L,LTeach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (1977)L,LThe Pinch Runner Memorandum (1994)L,LNip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (1995)L, and LAn Echo of Heaven (1996)L. His preoccupation with Hiroshima and the dangers of power politics in the nuclear age has also been a recurrent theme, as shown in works like LHiroshima Notes (1981)L. OeLs achievements as a writer committed to both literary and humanitarian causes were recognized in 1994 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Oe lives in a suburb of Tokyo with his wife, his son Hikari, his mother-in-law, and a younger son and daughter. He has been invited to be a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University from the fall of 1996.) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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