ABSTRACT
Reading Oe Kenzaburo's works into larger critical dialogues on his work in regional and transnational contexts helps supplant the limited conception of global relationships as always anchored at least partly in the interests of a Western power. Oe's experience with Mexico comes principally from his time as visiting professor at the Colegio de Mexico, lecturing on the intellectual history of post-WWII Japan. The central thematics of Oe's earlier novels–including The Silent Cry and A Personal Matter, submitted as representative works to the Nobel Prize committee–are synthesised in Oe's Mexico writings. This chapter examines Contemporaneity Games and An Echo of Heaven. In An Echo of Heaven, redemptive move towards God is figured as a katatagae out of a regio dissimilitudinis. The final Mexico novel, An Echo of Heaven, published several years after the others in 1989, reveals radical changes in Oe's thought about travel, art, and the possibility of redemption, even if secular and somewhat ambiguous.
