A short novel from Oe that would be a great subject for a sophisticated literature class

The short novel Prize Stock in the collection of 4 short novels by Japanese author Kenzaburo Oe would be a great piece for discussion and analysis in a college course (far too controversial for most h.s. classes). The novel - written I think in about 1950? - tells of the capture of a black American soldier whose plane crashes in the very last days of WWII near a remote Japanese village. The villagers hold the man in a dungeon-like cell awaiting instructions on what to do with the prisoner (the Japanese army is in complete disarray apparently and the villagers get no clear message, at least at first). Over time, the narrator and two other young boys, assigned to care for the prisoner, seem to develop a friendship w/ him, and eventually they remove his shackles and, later, he does favors for some of the villagers through various repairs (such as of the prosthetic leg of the village "clerk"). It seems at moments that this will become a happy story of enemies and opposites building a cross-cultural understanding; at first the soldier - the first and only black person the villagers had ever seen - is viewed in almost monstrous terms and we see all of the racist stereotypes emerge (which of course would make this a work to be discussed in class in the most sensitive terms: Is the story racist? or, Is it an accurate account of attitudes toward race at that time and place? and, Weren't the Japanese themselves subject to racist stereotypes, esp during the war years?). But the story surprises us right to the end (which I won't divulge), when then villagers get word about what to do with the soldier, which leads readers (students) to try to figure out who was right, who was wrong - what the soldier should have done, what the boys should have done or not done. Apparently this was made into a film called "The Captive" (a better title); no idea of its quality. It seems atypical of Oe's work, staying clearly in the realist mode; another short novel in the collection Teach Us to Overcome our Madness from Grove Press, in 1977, pre Nobel Prize), Aghwee: The Sky Monster, better typifies Oe's work: visionary and dreamlike, centered on a man with mental disabilties and musical genius (apparently somewhat based on Oe's son), in many ways, I see for the first time, a forerunner of an influence upon the much more popular Japanese novelist Murakami.