Oe's next novel, "The Changeling," has just come out in English, and it offers evidence that the Japanese master has regained his footing. The first volume of a trilogy, it finds Oe maintaining the stripped-down, third-person prose he adopted in "Somersault" while returning to the autobiographical sources that have, for decades, served him well. Chatty and casually indulging in cliché, the narration at times feels closer to the minimalism of Haruki Murakami than to Oe's once ostentatious prose. But "The Changeling" is not a bland novel -- far from it. It is a richly imagined, complex story full of the oddity, irony and existential angst that have long been at the heart of Oe's writing, only here they are seen more often on the level of plot and structure than on that of sentence and image.

The normally perceptive book critic Michael Dirda has complained that Oe's "Changeling" lacks a "clear and compelling narrative line," but in fact the lack of a simple first-this-happened- then-that-happened plot is in no way regrettable. The form Oe employs, at once more intricate and more freewheeling, is in fact among the novel's most exciting aspects.

This packaging isn't altogether deceptive, because the event at the heart of The Changeling – an unsettling, indeterminate incident during the postwar occupation of Japan – wouldn't be out of place in a Murakami story. Nor would the opening, in which Kogito Choko, an ageing, eminent Japanese writer, starts spending his evenings listening to taped monologues sent to him by Goro Hanawa, a famous film director and former actor who's also Kogito's friend and brother-in-law. "That's it for today," Goro's voice says one evening; "I'm going to head over to the Other Side now." There's a thud, then Goro's voice continues: "But don't worry, I'm not going to stop communicating with you. That's why I made a special point of setting up this system." Kogito falls into a doze; his wife, Chikashi, wakes him with the news that Goro, her only brother, has killed himself by jumping off a building.

The Changeling, Oe’s most recently translated novel published by Grove Press, is a work that directly addresses the relationship between fact and fiction in literature. The protagonist of the story is an established sixty-odd year old Japanese author who is sent a case of cassette tapes from his brother-in-law, a friend since their teenage years and now a famous movie director. The tapes are a series of monologues by the brother-in-law, in which he reminisces about their relationship over the years along with ruminations about their mutual artistic endeavors. On the last tape, the brother-in-law cryptically announces that he is now “going to the Other Side”, and then, nothing but a loud thump. And as soon as the protagonist hears this, his wife comes in to tell him that his brother-in-law was found dead—he had committed suicide by jumping off the roof of his office building.

The rest of the novel follows the protagonist as he tries to piece together why his brother-in-law committed suicide. He obsesses over the contents of the tapes by starting a nightly ritual of “talking” to his dead friend, an addiction so compelling he takes a year-long guest professorship at a university in Berlin to leave the tapes behind and free himself. However, the majority of the novel is set in periodic flashbacks, highlighting important events in their lives that led them down the paths they take today.

The Changeling is thus a long meditation on the power of real life events and how they shape a person and their fiction. It’s both a love letter to the creative process, as well as a philosophical treatise on the power of art and the way it reflects an inescapable past. In a way, The Changeling feels like it might be a work more personal to Oe than even a novel like A Personal Matter. It’s a direct view into the soul of Oe the writer, as opposed to Oe the father or Japanese citizen, and in a way, that’s more powerful.