Oe, Kenzaburo

New York. 1968. Grove Press. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. Translated from the Japanese by John Nathan. 214 pages. hardcover. Jacket photo: Design Photographers International. Cover design: Kuhlman Associates . keywords: Literature Translated Japan Asia . FROM THE PUBLISHER - At thirty-three, Kenzaburo Oe is acknowledged to be the most dynamic and revolutionary writer to have emerged in Japan since the end of the War. Last year, to mark his first decade as a writer, Oe's collected works-to-date were published in a six-volume edition, which consisted of two volumes of essays, primarily political (Oe is an uncompromising spokesman for Japan's New Left), dozens of short stories, and no less than eight novels. To date, this Complete Works has sold an astonishing nine hundred thousand copies, which gives a good indication of his popularity. The key to Oe's unprecedented popularity lies in the fact that he is without doubt the first truly modern Japanese writer. In the brief span of ten years Oe has managed a feat which even his talented and prolific elder contemporary, Yukio Mishima, was unable to accomplish: he has wrenched Japanese literature free of its deeply rooted, inbred tradition and moved it into the mainstream of world literature. Oe's influences and literary heroes are less Japanese than American and European - Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean- Paul Sartre rank high among them, and Oe's favorite novel, he confesses, is Huckleberry Finn. inventory #5927