Roller-coaster rides in hell

Kenzaburo Oe is the world's greatest living novelist in any language. The Nobel committee chose well. Oe is a writer of tremendous depth, productivity and variety of styles: to date he has produced well over 60 works, more than 40 of them fiction.

In terms of intellectual and emotional power and commitment, there is no other contemporary prose writer to match him. So it is odd that the translators of this book have piloted between his towering masterpieces to light on what is arguably his worst n ovel.

The plot introduces a novelist in his late thirties with a mentally handicapped son (like Oe himself) who meets a similar father-son pair at the remedial class; the father is an ex-nuclear engineer, retired after accidental contamination during an abortive nuclear hijack. The former engineer appoints the novelist as his ghostwriter, to transcribe dispatches which will record the pair's phantasmagorical adventure.

Soon after the "memorandum" begins, father and son undergo a miraculous switch-over. The former engineer is rejuvenated and decontaminated as a healthy, randy 18-year-old; his son, Mori, becomes a self-contained, personable 28-year-old able to communicate "the Cosmic Will" telepathically to his father. With his lover, a veteran radical activist, Mori-father (as he is known) learns of a secret arms race between two rival underground groups to build a nuclear bomb with which to blackmail Tokyo. The puppet-master manipulating the conspiracy is the Patron, a nuclear-power plutocrat who plans to use it to exalt himself as saviour of the Japanese people. Aided by sundry activists and a carnival parade of peasants, Mori and Mori-father set ou t to stop the conspiracy and save Japan.

Peter Kemp reviewed The Pinch Runner Memorandum very harshly in the Sunday Times, seemingly on the basis that Japanese novelists are intrinsically unpleasant. Martin Amis and Will Self are proof that the Japanese have no monopoly on unpleasantness, but there are sufficient grounds for criticism anyway. The rich potential of the author's conceptions is thrown away, and most of the characters are left thoroughly two-dimensional. There is little drama, and the dominant prose mode is declamation: one chapte r consists entirely of Mori and Mori-father haranguing a radical meeting, and their interminable blueprints of alternative futures for Japan read like schoolboy fantasies. Oe's work can be as terrifying and exhilarating as a roller-coaster ride throughh ell, but here any tragic intensity is dissipated in whimsy.

It is perhaps easy to see why the translator Michiko Wilson, who teaches Japanese literature at the University of Virginia, chose Pinch Runner. Originally published in 1976, it is one of Oe's most right-on books, busily ticking off its checklist of New Left shibboleths. Here Oe rides some of his favourite hobby-horses and indeed yokes them together. Pinch Runner reads partly as a guided tour of Japan's very nasty extremist fringe.

It also incorporates wholesale the critical ideology of the Russian formalist Mikhail Bakhtin, whose Rabelaisian "grotesque realism" has elsewhere been immensely fertile for Oe but here engenders ponderous and self-conscious clowning. This is therefore abetter read for teachers of comparative literature keen to spot allusions to fashionable theories than for the uncommitted. There are tell-tale signs of the translation's genesis in the overly American colloquialisms which mark its effortless fluency and the footnotes which leave Japanese terms unexplained while elucidating items like the Kochel numbering of Mozart's compositions. "Pinch runner" is a baseball term for someone who steals a base. The rejuvenated father, elected a s "a pinch runner for those who can't run" in "the rescue game for humankind", is a wish-fulfilment for those born under Sartre and raised under Derrida. One suspects that the Wilsons have simply let their enthusiasms run away with them.

Misguided by the best intentions, translators and publisher have done their idol an immense disservice by representing Oe, still too little known in the West, through his weakest work. In Pinch Runner his technical brilliance is squandered, his politics caricatured, his humanity diffused. Try instead The Silent Cry or Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, astonishing works readily available in English, or Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, due out early in 1995. There are far better ways into his immense corpus than this volume.