Product Description

Japan's Nobel Laureate presents a fresh and penetrating portrait of a woman of independent character and strong physical appetites, on a journey in search of spiritual peace that takes her to a commune in California and among the workers on a cooperative farm in a remote village in Mexico.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1998243 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-17
• Original language: Japanese
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

From Amazon.com
In An Echo of Heaven, Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe tells the riveting story of Marie Kuraki, a seductive, perverse intellectual whose two young sons, one retarded and one crippled, commit suicide. Thus begins Marie's intellectual, spiritual, and sexual journey to find meaning in this horrific tragedy. Oe, who draws a provocative but sympathetic portrait of Marie, supplements his narrative with old letters and journal entries from those whose lives she influenced.

Oe's prose (as translated by Margaret Mitsutani) is cold and precise, perhaps to maintain emotional distance since Oe himself has a mentally handicapped son. The description of Marie's quest also affords him the opportunity to engage in profound reflections on faith, sin, death, sexuality, heaven, and hell. --Madeline Crowley

From Publishers Weekly
A preponderance of symbolism weighs down Oe's first novel to appear stateside since he won the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature. K., the author's double, has been asked to write the story of an acquaintance of his, Marie Kuraki, a woman of great charm and intellect whose life is torn apart after her two disabled sons throw themselves into the sea. Like many of Oe's previous protagonists, Marie goes on a quest for meaning, searching for an alternative to her grim reality. She joins a radical cult that eventually moves to California. When this group dissolves, she hesitantly takes up the offer to become a symbol of fortitude and saintliness in a small Mexican farming village. The two boys' fatal tumble into the water seems to represent the two atomic bombs that disrupted Japan from its past, sending it reeling into a postwar period of great uncertainty with misguided leaders not unlike those who rule over Maria's altogether fragile sects. Unfortunately, the prose (possibly due in part to the translation), which strives for restraint, is more stilted than subtle. The works of many great writers, from Balzac to Flannery O'Connor, are mentioned throughout, which, along with the weighty symbolism, gives the novel a somewhat didactic mood. Nevertheless, Oe's imagery, from Marie's Betty Boop appearance to the sight of the boys making their way to the edge of the cliff, is strange and engaging, the work of a writer unafraid to tackle the fundamental theme of spiritual hunger.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Marie's life is shattered when her sons, one wheelchair bound and the other profoundly retarded, end their lives at the bottom of a cliff. In her resulting search for meaning, physical pleasure is only a brief distraction, so Marie quits her job teaching literature at the university and pursues religion as the balm that must surely heal. A stay in a Japanese commune leads to another in America, and finally she ends her life on a small Mexican collective farm, her body riddled with cancer, her search largely unfulfilled. Oe, winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature, relates Marie's story through a friend who is writing the screenplay for a movie about her. Composed of old letters and anecdotes, the torpid narrative is distanced from the central story, producing a novel as coldly analytical as a piece of literary criticism. Recommended for large collections only.
Paul E. Hutchison, Bellefonte, Pa.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.