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3.
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"A Quiet Life" is narrated by Ma-chan, a young woman who at the age of 20 gets caught up in an unusual family situation. Her father is a famous novelist; her older brother is brain-damaged but possesses a gift for music; and her mother's life is devoted to caring for them both. When her father is offered a visiting professorship in an American university, Ma-chan finds herself at the center of family relationships that she must begin to redefine....
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Oe’s most important novel, A Personal Matter, has been called by The New York Times “close to a perfect novel.” In A Personal Matter, Oe has chosen a difficult, complex though universal subject: how does one face and react to the birth of an abnormal child? Bird, the protagonist, is a young man of 27 with antisocial tendencies who more than once in his life, when confronted with a critical problem, has “cast himself adrift on a sea of whisky like a besotted Robinson Crusoe.” But he has never faced a crisis as personal or grave as the prospect of life imprisonment in the cage of his newborn infant-monster. Should he keep it? Dare he kill it? Before he makes his final decision, Bird’s entire past seems to rise up before him, revealing itself to be a nightmare of self-deceit. The relentless honesty with which Oe portrays his hero — or antihero — makes Bird one of the most unforgettable characters in recent fiction. ...
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7.
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Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! is a virtuoso novel from one of today’s finest authors. K is a famous writer living in Tokyo with his wife and three children, one of whom is mentally disabled. This child, Eeyore, has been doing disturbing things—behaving aggressively, asserting that he’s dead, even brandishing a knife at his mother—and K, given to retreat from reality into abstraction, looks for answers in his lifelong love of William Blake’s poetry. As K struggles to understand his family and his place in it, he must also reevaluate his relationship with his own father and the duty of artists and writers in society. A remarkable portrait of the inexpressible bond between a father and his damaged son, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! is the work of an unparalleled writer at his sparkling best....
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