The most challenging story in the Grove Press collection of Oe's pre-Nobel works

By far the most complex and challenging of the 4 novels (some would call at least 2 of them "stories") in the Grove Press 1977 Kenzaburo Oe's Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness is the first in the book, Some Day He Himself May Wipe Away Our Tears (I think I have that right; the title, apparently a passage in a Bach contata?, is an explicit Xtian message as well as a reflection on the Emperor worship in Japan up to and through the Second World War. Story is narrated, for the most part, by a 35-year-old man dying of liver cancer (it may, however, be an illusion) who's telling his life story to a scribe/nurse (and many of the passages break away from his narrative and involve discussion between narrator and scribe or other characters such as his mother about the work he is trying to compose). Whew. The story itself is mostly about his difficult childhood, in which he was bullied, and about his father who, as best I can make out, deserted from the Japanese army toward the end of the war, came home to his village, lived in isolation in a storage room suffering from many maladies (a theme in other Oe stories), and eventually led some kind of doomed post war expedition to try to restore the Emperor to his divine status. It is extremely difficult to follow this plot on first reading; the translator/editor, John Nathan, notes in his intro that most Japanese readers could not finish reading this piece! (There are other elements specific to the Japanese wartime experience that are even harder for most readers to elicit: the mother is Chinese and there seems to be a suggestion that the father was suspected to be a spy for China during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria - again, cloudy and hard for any reader to follow.) Though this story may have been Oe's most ambitious at the time of publication, why on earth did Nathan make it first in this collection, almost deliberately scaring readers away? I would encourage any reader to take on these 4 novels in order of publication: Prize Stock, Teach Us, Aghwhe the Sky Monster, He Himself. You'll have to look elsewhere to get the pub dates; Nathan doesn't offer guidance on this matter, nor does he say much about Oe's status in Japanese literature. Still, his intro, to be fair, does give a good first-hand portrait of Oe - who became a good friend of Nathan's: What he looked like, his personality quirks, his relationship with his son, Pooh, w/ mental disabilities. Overall, this collection is a good look at Oe's early career, pre 1994 Nobel Prize.