When Oe Kenzaburo was 28, and already a cult writer for Japan's postwar youth, his first child was born in 1963 with a herniated brain pushing out of his skull, the “two-headed monster baby” of Oe's later fiction. Corrective surgery threatened brain damage, and for a while the father longed for the infant's death -a “disgraceful” time, he later wrote in a fictionalised memoir, that “no powerful detergent has allowed me to wash out of my life”. Yet a visit to Hiroshima to report on a peace congress, and encounters with atomic-bomb survivors, convinced Oe beyond doubt that his child must live. “I was trained as a writer and as a human being by the birth of my son,” he says.