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Death by Water
Death by Water
Death by Water
Audiobook16 hours

Death by Water

Written by Kenzaburo Oe

Narrated by Paul Boehmer

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

3/5

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About this audiobook

Kenzaburo Oe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for creating "an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today." In Death by Water, his recurring protagonist and literary alter-ego returns to his hometown village in search of a red suitcase fabled to hold documents revealing the details of his father's death during World War II: details that will serve as the foundation for his new, and final, novel.

Since his youth, renowned novelist Kogito Choko planned to fictionalize his father's fatal drowning in order to fully process the loss. Stricken with guilt and regret over his failure to rescue his father, Choko has long been driven to discover why his father was boating on the river in a torrential storm. Though he remembers overhearing his father and a group of soldiers discussing an insurgent scheme to stage a suicide attack on Emperor Mikado, Choko cannot separate his memories from imagination, and his family is hesitant to reveal the entire story.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 3, 2015
ISBN9781494588670
Death by Water
Author

Kenzaburo Oe

Kenzaburo Oe is Japan's most important living writer. Born in 1935 on the island of Shikoku, Oe studied literature at Tokyo University before spending the sixties in Paris where he came under the influence of Sartre. After his debut novel, he wrote a string of books dissecting contemporary Japan, including Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!, The Pinch Runner Memorandum and the essay collection Hiroshima Notes, on the impact on Japan's national psyche of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War. He lives in Tokyo with his wife and his eldest son Hikari, who was born with severe brain damage; many of the narrators in Oe's fiction have brain-damaged children, most notably in the semi-autobiographical novel A Personal Matter. He won the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature.

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Reviews for Death by Water

Rating: 2.9772727636363636 out of 5 stars
3/5

22 ratings2 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I found the story in Death by Water by author Kenzaburo Oe to be very slow at least until near the end. It was the beautiful prose that kept me reading to that end.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    i liked this novel a lot. it explores aging, losing one power, memory, and history. magical realism