At the beginning of Kenazburo Oe's newly translated novel, "Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!," the protagonist tells us that he has decided to study the poetry of William Blake because he is getting old. "As I was leaving middle age, the group of writers I would read attentively in my last years and until I died became visible to me. And so from time to time I felt obliged to set out consciously to finish off one writer or another." The precision of language in "finish off" is intentional and demonstrates the care with which this brief but tightly packed novel has been written and translated. The wish to lay the authors whose works have haunted him to rest is also a cry for his own "finishing off"-relief from the analytic and emotional contortions required by his life as a father of a handicapped child, a writer and a political figure.

This book fits into what Oe calls his "idiot-son" oeuvre and, like the brutal affection implied by that name, it chronicles a relationship that appeals and appalls. Nearly all the details of the novel-characters, names, events, relationships and history-come directly from Oe's life. The narrator is simply called K, and like Oe, is a novelist and father to a handicapped son with a skill for musical composition named Hikari (in the novel, he is nicknamed Eeyore). In spite of the similarities to Oe's life, the narrator unabashedly vilifies himself and discredits his perception of his motives and his son. In the first vignette, we get a glimpse of the mentally handicapped Eeyore as a monstruous, adult-sized child who has become, in his father's eyes, dangerous. In the last, he is no longer Eeyore but Hikari, a beneficent force in the family. The family's terrible pain is also the source of their most genuine joy.

The chapters are episodes of memory linked only by K's narrative voice and titled by excerpts from Blake's poems. K reveals, by the last chapter, that he is writing these vignettes in honor of the 20th birthday of his son. But the stories focus on the insecurities that his son has raised in him, the way that he is distracted or not paying attention to the right details during his interactions with Eeyore.

At the most visceral emotional moments of each vignette, K parries his feelings into a recitation of a Blake poem. His son nearly drowns and K stands immobilized, thinking of a poem while another man dives in. "Before the ripples had spread across the surface, I glimpsed Eeyore, his mouth wide open, slowly sinking as though he were swimming space. 'Down, down thro' the immense, with outcry, fury & despair.'"

The challenge of reconciling his son's strange combination of childlike and adult features is one that K finds himself able to attempt only by considering Blake's verse. In Blake's elaborate and often impenetrable mythology and religion, K is able to isolate moments of identification that remind him of his own thoughts and, consequently, his comparative inadequacy as a writer. In fact, much of the novel is taken up by an admission that the task that he has set before him-to define and set an order on the world that will make it comprehensible for his handicapped child-is impossible except as he has done it, "through the mediation of Blake."

In spite of its seemingly academic premise, the novel is a powerful demonstration of the ways that this inscrutable poetry informs and orders a life. The most powerful moments of the novel are not those taken from Blake, but those that depict the moving humanity of K. At his core, he is a man who finds himself emotionally and mentally threatened by a son whose only real threat is his size. He goes to check Eeyore's diaper in the middle of the night and is confronted with an erect penis. He constantly wonders whether Eeyore has dreams or memories and is always surprised when his son shows evidence that he has both. He loves and fears his son.

K's fertile psychoanalytic imagination is always ready to realize faults within himself, even as he continues to exercise his confident intelligence and worldview. Never debilitated by self-doubt, he seems merely to wind it around him in ever tightening loops. In each chapter, the characterization of the son grows less terrifying and the father more.

The father, whose neurotic thought is darkly hilarious, contrasts with his son, whose actions and italicized dialogue have a surprising range of hope and understanding. Eeyore's explanations might be fodder for a Hallmark TV special if it weren't balanced with the uncouth observations and explanations of the father. "No! I'm all better," he replied emphatically. "I sank. From now on I'm going to swim. I'm ready to swim now!" The dark, arch humor may be the only way of approaching the lachrymose subject matter without making father or son simply pathetic. In order to appeal, the novel must also appall.

When Kenzaburo Oe received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, he quoted W.H. Auden's poem, "The Novelist" as an explanation of his vocation. "Among the Just / Be just, among the Filthy filthy too, / And in his own weak person, if he can, / Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man."

Measuring the protagonist of the novel against Auden's rubric, one finds that K has presented us a manuscript suffused with violations. K rarely trusts his own perception; he never feels just or filthy at the right moments. However, most poignantly and effectively, his suffering is not dull, but incredibly acute.