Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness: Four Short Novels: The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, Prize Stock, Teach Us to Outgrow Our

Overview: KENZABURO OE (b. 1935) is a Japanese author and a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature. He received the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature for "creat[ing] an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today."

The Nobel Prize–winning “master of the bizarre plunges the reader into a world of tortured imagination” in this four-novella collection ( Library Journal ).
 
In this startling quartet of his most provocative stories, the multiple prize-winning author of A Personal Matter reaffirms his reputation as “a supremely gifted writer” ( The Washington Post ).
 
In The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, a self-absorbed narrator on his deathbed drifts off to the comforting strains of a cantata as he recalls a blistering childhood of militarism, sacrifice, humiliation, and revenge—a tale that is questioned by everyone who knew him. In Prize Stock, winner of the Akutagawa Prize, a black American pilot is downed in a Japanese village during World War II, where the local children see him as some rare find—exotic and forbidden. In Aghwee The Sky Monster, the floating ghost of a baby inexplicably haunts a young man on the first day of his first job. And in the title story, a devoted father believes he is the only link between his mentally challenged son and reality.
 
“[A] remarkable book.” — The Washington Post
 
“?e is definitely one of the Modern Masters.” —Seattlepi.com

The Nobel Prize–winning “master of the bizarre plunges the reader into a world of tortured imagination” in this four-novella collection ( Library Journal ). In this startling quartet of his most provocative stories, the multiple prize-winning author of A Personal Matter reaffirms his reputation as “a supremely gifted writer” ( The Washington Post ). In The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away , a self-absorbed narrator on his deathbed drifts off to the comforting strains of a cantata as he recalls a blistering childhood of militarism, sacrifice, humiliation, and revenge—a tale that is questioned by everyone who knew him. In Prize Stock , winner of the Akutagawa Prize, a black American pilot is downed in a Japanese village during World War II, where the local children see him as some rare find—exotic and forbidden. In Aghwee The Sky Monster , the floating ghost of a baby inexplicably haunts a young man on the first day of his first job. And in the title story, a devoted father believes he is the only link between his mentally challenged son and reality. “[A] remarkable book.” — The Washington Post “Ōe is definitely one of the Modern Masters.” —Seattlepi.com Kenzaburō Ōe was ten when American soldiers entered his mountain village during World War II, and his writing "reveals the tension and ambiguity forged by the collapse of the values of his childhood on the one hand and the confrontation with American writers on the other ... [His] heroes have been expelled from the certainty of childhood, into a world that bears no relation to their past."--Page 4 of cover The title piece in this collection reveals its importance to Oe's identity as a writer. Prize Stock, winner of the Akutagawa Prize, is about the relationship between a Japanese flier and captured black American flier during World War II. Aghwee the Sky Monster is about a young man's first job. The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away is an unsparing parody of Yukio Mishima's terrorism and suicide