A Personal Matter The Silent Cry Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness (omnibus)

About this book

Oe and Yukari live in the house with their forty-four-year-old mentally disabled son Hikari. The writers job is the job of a clown Oe has said the clown who also talks about sorrow. He describes most of his fiction as an extrapolation of the themes explored in two A Personal Matter (1964) which recounts a fathers attempt to come to terms with the birth of his handicapped child; and The Silent Cry (1967) which depicts the clash between village life and modern culture in postwar Japan. The first category includes such novels as Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (1969). They are rooted in Oes personal experience of Hikaris birth (the narrator is usually a writer and the son is named Mori Eeyore or Hikari) but the narrators often make decisions very different than the one Oe and his wife made.