"Father, Where Are You Going?" (Chichi yo, anata wa doko e ikuno
ka?, 1968, hereafter "Father"), "Teach Us To Outgrow Our Mad-
ness" (Warera no kyōki o ikinobiru michi o oshieyo, 1969, hereafter
"Teach Us"), and The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away
(Mizu kara waga namida o nuguitamō hi, 1971, hereafter My Tears)
show an obsessive repetition of characters, events, images, and dia-
logues, sometimes repeated word for word, paragraph for paragraph. It
is as though Ōe had rewritten the same draft again and again, and had
found in all the versions independently satisfying stories. ¹ Repetition
becomes the fabric of the stories, shapes their structure, and provides
an impetus to their narrative movement.

"Father, Where Are You Going?" a line taken from Blake poem
"The Little Boy Lost," ² opens with the confession of the narrator
(whose name we are not told): "I write, [[ . . . while my father spent
his days in self-confinement,]] and have again realized that I have to
abort the manuscript" (7). ³ This short story is a narrative of reminis-
cences: vague memories of the narrator's father who died suddenly in
self-confinement perpetuate the narrator's desire to "recreate a whole
image of his father." The narrator was stimulated to undertake the
"reproduction project" because, on the one hand, he was too young to
remember the details of his father's self-confinement and death and, on
the other, his mother, the only capable informant, has adamantly re-
fused to tell her son anything. She maintains total silence. This pattern

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