NONFICTION - Oct. 20, 1996

A HEALING FAMILY by Kenzaburo Oe, illustrated by Yukari Oe (Kodansha: $17, 146 pp.). This is Oe’s plainest testimony to the healing power of a family. The Nobel Prize winner has written about and referred to his family often in his work, particularly to his son, Hikari, who was born in 1963 with a large growth on his brain. Despite the fact that doctors predicted Hikari would be severely brain damaged, the family decided to raise him. Oe writes of this decision after he is shown pages from the doctor’s diary that describe how the father hesitated before giving his consent to the surgery that saved his son’s life. “Ultimately,” he writes, “I, too, was reborn along with Hikari.”

The boy grew up with a love of music and, encouraged by his parents, became a composer with two CDs and many concerts to his credit. “Listening to his piano lessons,” writes Oe, “I can feel the best, most human things in his character finding lively and fluent expression. . . . I feel in awe of the richness of his inner life.” Throughout this memoir, the Oes are often challenged for making Hikari’s life so public. In response, Kenzaburo Oe recalls a passage of Flannery O’Connor, in which she wrote “that sentimental attitudes toward handicapped children, which encourage the habit of hiding their pain from human eyes, are of a piece with the kind of thinking that sent smoke billowing from the chimney’s of Auschwitz.”

Above all, what rises from these pages is the dignity and tension of family life. Hikari becomes a conduit for that tension, for both the pleasure and pain of rigid roles and daily rituals.