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The most popular classical composer of our day was born with a medical deformity so severe that his parents had to fight to keep him alive. They named him Hikari, which means "light"; now in his thirties, with an I.Q. of 65, limited language and motor skills, and an inability to express emotions clearly, Hikari has indeed become a beacon of inspiration. He has miraculous musical gifts, including a phenomenal memory and the ability to compose chamber works that have broken sales records and delighted hundreds of thousands of listeners. His father's boundless love for and devotion to Hikari have been inspirational in more than one way. Kenzaburo Oe has written many novels and essays based on the experience of raising his musical-savant son, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1994. Based on exclusive access to the Oe family, as well as interviews with brain specialists and performers of Hikari's music, and including assessments by leading music critics, The Music of Light offers a portrait of uniqueness. Hikari is the only savant known in history who has composed original music. Lindsley Cameron explains how his brain works; how he can express sadness in his music but not with language or his face; and how his musical activities have extended his mental capacities.

Polycrystalline-silicon back-sealed (PBS) wafers preserve high gettering efficiency as long as the back polysilicon film remains, even after exhaustion of the film through repeated oxidation. After complete consumption of the film, the high gettering efficiency decreases to some extent, but is still maintained by many oxidation-induced stacking faults and dislocations formed at the interface between the film and the silicon lattice during oxidation. All the Ni atoms and almost all the Cu atoms on the intentionally contaminated wafer surface are trapped in the back polysilicon film regardless of the density of oxygen precipitates.

Despite its distinguished tradition in Japan as the shi-shosetsu, or "I-novel," raw autobiography in the guise of fiction was a genre Yukio Mishima dismissed with a contemptuous smirk. Like Kafka, who once noted that writing an autobiography would be as easy as recording one's dreams, Mishima was convinced that confessional writing exercised neither the imagination nor the craft to shape it into art, merely one's propensities for self-indulgence. Yet, he submitted to the considerable attraction it must have held for him on several occasions. Apart from work not translated, his early Confessions of a Mask (1949) can be cited, as can Sun and Steel, written some twenty years later. Neither conforms strictly to all shi-shosetsu conventions, however, the former because its material shows evidence of tight artistic control, the latter because its character as abstract discourse excludes much of the quotidian in which the shi-shosetsu usually revels. But both works lay bare the essential forces at play, or at war, in Mishima's puzzling psychology. What emerges most clearly from this psychology is a conflict between two antithetical modes of being, both equally seductive for Mishima. To establish one's existence either within the confines of