ABSTRACT
In 1934 Henry Miller wrote Tropic of Cancer, which became available to the American public for the first time in 1960. He wrote Sexus in 1949, but it was not published in the United States until 1965. Norman Mailer's The Deer Park appeared in 1955, “The Time of Her Time” in 1959, by which time both American novelists were already causes célèbres in Japan. An avid reader of both writers’ work, Ōe published in July 1959 Our Times (Warera no jidai), his best-known sexually “repulsive” work, which annoyed almost all Japanese critics. It is no exaggeration to say that, without the controversial works of the two avant-garde American writers, the unfavorable reviews of Our Times might have driven Ōe to total despair. He was acutely aware that the “assessment of the sexual in Japanese literature is the lowest, the worst, in comparison to any other subject matter under the sun.” 1 His determination to employ the sexual as the most vital methodology never diminished in the “quagmire of bad reviews.” A foreign scholar of Japanese literature who was well known for her quips once said to him: “You look up words in a physiological dictionary instead of a language dictionary when you write novels, don't you?” He replied humorously, “That's correct. And I write with my genitals instead of a fountain pen!” 2
