ABSTRACT
“Father, Where Are You Going?” (Chichi yo, anata wa doko e ikuno ka?, 1968, hereafter “Father”), “Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness” (Warera no kyōki o ikinobiru michi o oshieyo, 1969, hereafter “Teach Us”), and The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away (Mizu kara waga namida o nuguitamō hi, 1971, hereafter My Tears) show an obsessive repetition of characters, events, images, and dialogues, sometimes repeated word for word, paragraph for paragraph. It is as though Ōe had rewritten the same draft again and again, and had found in all the versions independently satisfying stories. 1 Repetition becomes the fabric of the stories, shapes their structure, and provides an impetus to their narrative movement.
