This might have been the best book I could read to start my interaction with Nobel laureate Kenzeburo Oe, or the worst, I am not clear yet.
Why the worst? Well, it spends a lot of time tracing and retracing other novels he’s written and tying them to his personal life. What I didn’t know going in is that several of his novels are kinds of roman a clef/autofiction and he references his personal life a lot in his fiction.
But it might have been the best because it allows me some insight as I love forward. So who knows.
This novel is about a well-known Japanese writer reflecting on his career in some ways, but also thinking about the specific difficulties of raising his son, who has significant mental health issues. The son, whom the narrator calls Eeyore throughout, becomes the very real anchor in this novel that keeps the otherwise esoteric and abstract musings on translation, poetry, William Blake, and a high-minded literary career grounded.
The books spends a lot of time with William Blake, where the titles of the novel and the chapters come from. He discusses how the difficulties in understanding poetry, which refracts the world through another writer’s mental and verbal lens, is further complicated the language shifts and time shifts when contemporary Japan is juxtaposed with late 18th century England. This gets folded into his own work as a novelist and his conversations about literary writing and literary criticism in his career.
Then, this is all put alongside his attempts to understand his son as well. He finds himself wanting.
(photo: https://www.amazon.com/Rouse-Young-Men-New-Age/dp/080213968X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1552586828&sr=8-1-spell)