Kenzaburō Ōe

The first novel by Japan's most celebrated living writer, Nip The Buds, Shoot the Kids recounts the exploits of fifteen teenage reformatory boys evacuated to a remote mountain village in wartime. The narrator who acts as nominal leader of the small band, his younger brother and their comrades are all delinquent outcasts, feared and detested by the local peasants. When plague breaks out, their hosts abandon them and flee, then blockade them inside the empty village, together with a young Korean, an army deserter and a girl evacuee. However, the boys' brief, doomed attempt to build autonomous lives of self-respect, love and tribal valour inevitably fails with the reflux of death and the adult nightmare of war.

In December 1994, on the acceptance of only the second Nobel Prize awarded to a Japanese writer, Kenzaburo Oe gave a speech that was a message for mankind: one that pledged his own faith in tolerance and human decency; in the renunciation of war; and in the healing power of art - the power to calm and purify. Other key addresses he has given elsewhere join the Nobel lecture in this volume, giving a wider view of the work of a literary activist who sees himself as one of a dying breed in the intellectual life of his own country.

Oe explores the private and public ramifications of life with Mori, his retarded son. It is a free-wheeling meditation on justice, responsibility, and the possibility of human relationships.

Late in his life, writer Kogito Choko reconnects with his estranged friend, the filmmaker Goro Hanawa. Goro's subsequent suicide causes Kogito to examine and reexamine Goro's life for clues that will lead him to understand his friend's path.

Kenzaburō Ōe, the winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature, is internationally acclaimed as one of the most important and influential post-World War 2 Writers, known for his powerful accounts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and his own struggle to come to terms with a mentally handicapped son. The Swedish Academy lauded Ōe for his "poetic force (that} creates an imagined world where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today." His most personal book, A Personal Matter is the story of Bird, a frustrated intellectual in a failing marriage whose utopian dream is shattered when his wife gives birth to a brain-damaged child.

With a series of jewelry thefts targeting the first-class passengers on P&O ocean liners, the powers-that-be ask Phryne Fisher to mingle with the upper classes to solve a case of theft on the S.S. Hinemoa, during a luxury cruise to New Zealand.