Oe: Rob Wilson, you're an inveterate Japan and Korea watcher teaching English literature at the University of Hawaii. Your book, American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre, was published fairly recently by the University of Wisconsin Press. A couple of years ago, during a talk you gave at a conference at the University of California, Irvine, I heard you read passages from your book while it was still in manuscript. I was quite impressed by your notion of the nuclear sublime, so when I returned to Japan, I introduced it here, especially what you had to say about Hiroshima. You know, of course, that I've also written on Hiroshima. By chance, a Japanese translation of Harold Bloom's Ruin the Sacred Truths had just appeared, so I wrote a review essay of that and some other books, and in that essay, I discussed your work. I wrote that I thought the Japanese might have trouble under-