Start with A personal matter. A young man whose son is born with a skull deformity spends a few days deciding whether to let the child die, and the novel refuses to let him — or you — off easily. It is around two hundred pages, it is the most propulsive thing Oe wrote, and it introduces the material he returned to for the rest of his life.
The obvious alternative is The Silent Cry, which the Nobel committee singled out and which Oe himself treated as his major novel. It is the better book. It is also structurally difficult, moving between a 1960s village and an 1860 peasant uprising with two brothers who keep changing which of them is telling the truth. Read it second, when you already trust the writer.
Why the two share a subject
Oe's son Hikari was born with a brain hernia in 1963 and lived with a severe disability; Oe wrote about the decision not to let him die, and about the life that followed, across decades and in many forms, entirely openly. That fact is not gossip here, it is the acknowledged engine of the work, and knowing it makes the recurrence of the disabled-child figure legible rather than repetitive.
The core sequence
Take A personal matter, then The Silent Cry. Follow with Nip the Buds Shoot the Kids, his first novel — evacuated reform-school boys abandoned in a mountain village during the war. It is short, savage and much more straightforward than the later work, and reading it third rather than first stops you mistaking it for what he became.
Then Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness: Four Short Novels. These novellas are where the fat man, the father, and the son with impaired sight and enormous musical feeling take on the shapes they keep. It is the best single volume for seeing his method work at short length.
The nonfiction
Hiroshima notes is reportage from the survivors' hospitals and the annual conferences, written in the early 1960s, and it is where Oe's politics get their ground. Japan, the ambiguous, and myself collects the Nobel lecture and related talks, and is the clearest self-explanation he ever offered — including his account of writing out of a peripheral village rather than a metropolitan centre. Both are short. Either can be read at any point.
The later novels
A quiet life hands the narration to a daughter left in charge while the writer-father is abroad, and is the gentlest book here. Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age runs the father-and-son material through William Blake and assumes you will follow the quotations. An Echo of Heaven and The Changeling move further into a mode where the novelist and his life are barely separated. Somersault is a five-hundred-plus-page novel about a religious cult reconstituting itself, and most readers find it a slog even when they admire it. Death by water is late, reflexive and largely about the impossibility of writing the novel it describes.
Where to stop
Four books is a complete Oe: A personal matter, The Silent Cry, Nip the Buds Shoot the Kids and Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness: Four Short Novels, with Hiroshima notes if the political side interests you. The late novels are for readers who already want more of exactly this, and Somersault in particular should not be anyone's third Oe. The ordered list, with the rest of the sequence, is on our reading path.
One note on translation: Oe is served by several different translators across five decades and no single house style, so tonal shifts between books are partly a translation artefact rather than evolution in the prose.
Follow the full ordered path here: Kenzaburo Oe Reading Order: Where to Start.
