Books like Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness: Four Short Novels by Kenzaburō Ōe

"A wild, astonishing novel (by arguably England's most accomplished young writer) about Manhattan and Hollywood in the 1930s, Mayan gods, and a CIA operation gone terribly wrong--and the Booker short-listed Ned Beauman's magnum opus thus far. In 1938, two rival expeditions descend on an ancient temple recently discovered in the jungles of Honduras, one intending to shoot a screwball comedy on location there, the other to disassemble the temple and ship it back to New York. A seemingly endless stalemate ensues, and twenty years later a rogue CIA agent sets out to exploit it for his own ends, unaware that the temple is a locus of conspiracies grander than anyone could ever have guessed. Shot through with insanity, conspiracy, ingenuity, and adventure, showcasing Beauman's anarchic humor, spectacular imagination, and riveting prose, Madness Is Better Than Defeat teases, absorbs, entertains, and dazzles in equal measure"--

Two brothers return to their ancestral village in western Japan, each confronting personal crises and family secrets that threaten to unravel their bond against a backdrop of cultural and economic change.

A Personal Matter follows Bird, a disenchanted intellectual whose marriage collapses when his wife gives birth to a brain‑damaged child, forcing him to confront the moral crisis of whether to keep the infant or end its pain.