A strange short novel that defies convention in Nobel-winner Oe's early collection

Kenzabura Oe was pretty much unknown to American readers before he won a Nobel Prize in the mid-90s; I found and read one of his novels way back then, liked it, don't remember it (I think it was about a man and his son w/ severe disabilities and perhaps based on Oe's own family and life), but haven't read his work since then. I pulled from the shelves in my town library a copy of one of his early books, actually predating the Nobel, a collection of four short novels called Teach Us to Outgrow our Madness (weird title and hard to remember; it's the title of one of the 4 short novels). I'm glad to have this edition from the '70s, but its a poor example of publishing: Could you maybe give us some info about when each of these novels was originally published? Could you perhaps give us the 4 in chronological sequence? I started, as you'd expect, reading the first in the four - about a man in a hospital, perhaps in the ward for mental illnesses, who believes he's dying of liver cancer; this novel is full of weird narrative shifts and is extremely difficult to follow and is a terrible introduction to Oe's work. I stopped after about 20 pp. and moved on to the next in the collection: Prize Stock. This one, clearly an early work, is much more conventional and accessible: Set in a small and remote Japanese village during World War II, the story concerns an appearance of an "enemy" plane that crashes in a nearby forest; the only survivor is a black soldier who'd parachuted to safety. The villagers bring him in and hold him prisoner in a dank basement, almost like a dungeon or tomb. The story is told from the POV of a young boy in the village who's assigned the task of daily feeding and care for the soldier, who fascinates the boy and all the other boys in the village. This is in no way a Sidney Portier-type movie in which the "enemies" form a bond of friendship and caring - it's dark and mysterious; our moral compass is askew: We can see why the villagers keep the soldier chained and imprisoned but we hardly sympathize with them - nor do we know a single thing, at least halfway through, about the captive soldier. Novels are about change - transformation of character over the course of a series of events - but this one seems to defy convention, and I expect the characters will be pretty much the same at the end of the narrative as they were at the outset. We'll see.