Oe and Yukari live in the house with their forty-four-year-old mentally disabled son Hikari. “The writer’s 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 father’s 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 Oe’s personal experience of Hikari’s 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.
