An extraordinary work
- Kazuo Ishiguro,
An imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today ... at first glance [The Silent Cry] appears to concern an unsuccessful revolt, but fundamentally the novel deals with people's relationships with each other in a confusing world in which knowledge, passions, dreams, ambitions and attitudes merge into each other
- Nobel Prize for Literature citation,
Though thoroughly Japanese, Oe, in the range of hope and despair he covers, seems to me to have in him a touch of Dostoevsky
- Henry Miller,
Somehow - and this is what gives his art such unquestionable stature - Oe manages to smuggle a comic thread in all this tragedy
Independent
A new pinnacle in postwar Japanese fiction
- Yukio Mishima,
Oe piles copious and inventive misery onto his hero before allowing him enlightenment and redemption.
- Jake Kerridge, Sunday Telegraph
A formidable scholar and intellectual whose novels express the soul-searching of postwar Japan
Boston Globe