Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness

Kenzaburo Oe's Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness is a disturbing and oddly distant collection of four short stories. The title story is the partly-autobiographical account of a father with a handicapped child. Meanwhile, the other stories revolve around themes of illness and post-war Japanese-American relations. I admire Oe, but find him less readable (in English, at least) than Murakami and other top tier Japanese writers.