Death by Water

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2016 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE



An astonishing interweaving of myth, fantasy, history and autobiography, Kenzaburo Oe's Death by Water is the shimmering masterpiece of a Nobel Prize-winning author.





For the first time in his long life, Nobel-laureate Kogito Choko is suffering from writer's block. The book that he wishes to write would examine the turbulent relationship he had with his father, and the guilt he feels about being absent the night his father drowned in a storm-swollen river; but how to write about a man he never really knew? When his estranged sister unexpectedly calls, she offers Choko a remedy - she has in her possession an old and mysterious red trunk, the contents of which promise to unlock the many secrets of the man who disappeared from their lives decades before.



Considered one of Japan's leading post-war writers, Kenzaburo Oe has won almost every major international honour, including the 1989 Prix Europalia and the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in Tokyo.



No Japanese novelist has ever written more brilliantly than Oe about the division that exists in the soul of his country.



Here is someone with astonishingly free access to his own past and his own thinking, finding insight and exhilaration in the most unlikely places



Kenzaburo Oe's poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.