A novel asking how a person can accept unbearable grief and go on living afterward. It brings together Kenzaburo Oe’s characteristic ethical questioning with his attention to family and community.

It quietly keeps asking what it means to go on living while carrying grief.

A collection of essays that examines human life through themes such as food, love, friendship, body, sex, money, family, the foreign, evil, beauty, mind, and death. Combining personal experience with literary reflection, it treats life not as abstraction but as an urgent question.

Through twelve themes, these essays face the question of what life is.