Flannery Will Get You Nowhere : NOVEL : AN ECHO OF HEAVEN,<i> By Kenzaburo Oe (Kodansha: $25; 204 pp.)</i>

In 1994, Kenzaburo Oe was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature and in his Stockholm speech, describing his vocation as novelist, he quoted Flannery O’Connor: To write novels is for him “a habit of being.” It is not by chance that to define the concrete he resorts to abstraction, nor by chance that to talk about himself this quintessentially Japanese writer quotes an American Catholic whose every story worried the problem of nature and grace, mystery and manners, reason and revelation.

“An Echo of Heaven,” surely the most abstract of Oe’s novels, takes as its starting point O’Connor’s idea of God’s interference in the daily business of this world. He takes it further than O’Connor would be willing to go.

Nor are the ideas alone abstract. Set in Tokyo, California and Mexico, the events of this novel could take place anywhere or nowhere or, more properly, in the region of the mind. And indeed it is the narrator’s mind that provides the filter through which we view the extraordinary events.

The narrator, K (yes, K!), is a successful novelist and the father of a brain-damaged child. Through this child, K meets Marie Kuraki, the mother of another brain-damaged child, and becomes obsessed with her. Marie is in her 30s, beautiful and brilliant, a teacher who is expert in the works of O’Connor. The story is ostensibly Marie’s odyssey of grief: Her healthy child is paralyzed in a traffic accident, her brain-damaged child joins the paralytic one in a double suicide, her husband dies of cancer, she is involved in a sex scandal.

Overwhelmed by grief and nearly lost to clinical depression, she decides to investigate what lies behind O’Connor’s notion of mystery. She studies Catholicism and abandons it; she joins a Japanese religious cult that for no good reason flees to California, where in time it dissolves. Finally, she takes up an offer to work in a Mexican commune as the “sorrowing mother,” no longer suppressing her grief but advertising it. The commune leader explains that her grief will make her a living inspiration for his workers. “As one part of this world that god is in the process of creating, what happened to your children is ‘intelligible,’ surely--so why not proclaim that to the world? And while you’re doing that, go one step further and offer your services willingly to the god who forced that experience on you. . . .”

Marie has tried everything and now, an unbeliever still, she agrees to try this, to cope with her grief by living it out as an exemplar. Inevitably, she surrenders to the part she plays; when she dies five years later, the commune workers venerate her as a saint.

This is ostensibly the story, but the real story belongs to the narrator, who creates this novel by piecing together the history of Marie’s grief and her response to it. He relies on personal experience, conversations about her, an essay by her, a tape of her making love, newspaper articles, magazine features, letters, phone calls, testimonials, diaries, film clips--all the media tools that go to create a contemporary myth.

And that is exactly what the narrator does in this novel: he creates the myth of Marie Kuraki even while he deconstructs the way in which myths are created today. We see the commune leader hire her to create a false myth that will inspire his workers. We see the pious myth of conventional sanctity as it is filmed by the three adoring young men who follow her through her life. And we see the troubling myth of a modern saint, one with the complex sexual needs and desires of a contemporary woman who nonetheless creates for herself, or in spite of herself, a life of prayer and self-abandonment.

Having deconstructed myth, the narrator refuses to surrender to it. In the end we see him immobile, irresolute, poised between belief and unbelief, uncertain if in fact the myth was created by himself or by Marie or even perhaps by “someone far stronger than themselves.”

Seeking to understand suffering and explain grief, Oe attempts to comprehend, rationally, the nature of the mystery of faith, the place where God speaks and humankind responds. But the mystery, quite simply, is and will remain.

“An Echo of Heaven” is relentlessly intellectual and its intellectuality in the end is a disservice to the book. It is brilliantly structured, taut and forceful and always engaging, but as an inquiry into faith it fails to satisfy and as a study in grief it is strangely unaffecting. It troubles the mind on many levels but it does not succeed in touching the heart.