Teach us to outgrow our madness

Kenzaburō Ōe was ten when American soldiers entered his mountain village during World War II, and his writing "reveals the tension and ambiguity forged by the collapse of the values of his childhood on the one hand and the confrontation with American writers on the other...[His] heroes have been expelled from the certainty of childhood, into a world that bears no relation to their past"--Back cover.