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Kenzaburo Oe (1935-2023) |
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Japanese novelist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994. Kenzaburo Oe often dealt with marginal people and outcasts and isolation from individual level to social and cultural levels. Another central theme - as in the works of a number of other Japanese writers - is the conflict between traditions and modern Western culture. Much of Oe's later fiction examined the relationship between disabled and nondisabled people. "My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity. I too am living as a writer with this polarisation imprinted on me like a deep scar." ('Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself' by Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1994; https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1994/oe/lecture/. Accessed 1 July 2025) Kenzaburo Oe was born in a mountain village on the island of Shikoku, the smallest of the four main Japanese islands, where his family had lived for centuries. The village and the forests surrounding it later inspired several of Oe's pastoral works. Oe's father died in the Pacific war in 1944, and in the same year he lost his grandmother, who had taught him art and oral performance. After attending a local school, Oe transferred to a high school in Matsuyama City. He won an admission to the University of Tokyo, where he studied French literature and received his B.A. in 1959. His final-year thesis was on the French writer Jean-Paul Sartre. Another important French writer for Oe was Albert Camus. During these years he started to write and explore his childhood, when the World War II had filled his mind with horror and excitement. His early works expressed the of the degradation and disorientation caused by Japan's surrender at the end of World War II. Sex and violence labelled his depiction of rootless young people. Oe wanted to experiment with language and create a new way of literary expression, which would capture the social and psychological changes that took place in his home country. He also had to cope with a personal handicap, the inferiority complex of a shy young man from the country, who stuttered and spoke with heavy Shokoku accent. Oe's first novel Memushiri kouchi (1958, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids), which has been compared to Golding's Lord of the Flies and Camus's The Plague, and won the Akutagawa Prize given to young writers of fiction. Between 1958 and 1964, Oe wrote several stories that reflected the life of a college student, but they did not gain critical success. In 1960 he travelled to China as a member of Japan-China Literary delegation. Later Oe created contacts to Chinese dissident writers living in the United States. In the 1960s, Oe joined New Left movement. He became one of most important the voices of the postwar generation. Oe's strong sense of social involvement led him in the anti-American Security Treaty protests in 1960, he was an antinuclear spokesman and involved in radical causes. Although gaining the status of highly influential political writer, Oe never joined any political party. In his early novels Oe explored the nature of antisocial
violence as well as perverse sexuality, as in his 1958 novella Memushiri kouchi. In an early novella, Shuku
(1958, The Catch),
the hero, a ten-year-old Japanese boy, is propelled from the innocent
world of childhood into
adulthood by various acts of madness, raging from the madness of war to
the temporary insanity of his father, who murders a prisoner of war
with an ax. When the story appeared, Oe was still a student at Tokyo
University. Threats against his life were made by the extreme Right. At
the same time, Oe was proclaimed the most promising writer to have
appeared since Yukio Mishima. Themes of madness appear in Oe's works as metaphors for the human condition, among them Hiroshima noto (1964), an essay about the public madness of nuclear warfare. Sora no kaibutsu Aguī (1964, Agwhee the Sky Monster) was a sly variation of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898), where a young father, a composer, has allowed his child to die at the hands of unscrupulous doctors and is visited by a ghost baby called Aghwee. The tale is narrated by a young student who has been hired to watch the composer. Right-wing activism was Oe's subject in Sevuntīn (1961, Seventeen),
which was based on an actual historical incident. The protagonist is a
pathetic 17-year-old fascist, who cannot stop masturbating. Involved in terrorism, he assassinates a socialist
politician and then kills himself in the emperor's name. Later Oe
returned to the theme in the novella The Day He Himself Shall Wipe
My Tears Away. This work, which has been counted as one of the most "difficult" texts for reader or translator in modern Japanese literature, was a sustained attack on Mishima, who attempted a right-wing coup in 1970 and subsequently committed suicide by seppuku. The English translator of the book, John Nathan, has described meeting Oe at a party at Mishima's house during which Oe insulted Mishima's wife: "Mrs. Yoko, you are a cunt!" ('Introduction,' in Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness: Four Short Novels by Kenzaburo Ōe, translated and with an introduction by John Nathan, New York: Grove Press, 1977, p. x) Oe has has contested the claim. The novella also criticizes the emperor system, and warns of the dangers of fanatical beliefs. Oe married in 1960 Yakari Itami; they had three children. His
wife is the younger sister of Juzo Itami, an acclaimed director of such
films as Tampopo, The Funeral and A Taxing Woman.
In 1963 he became the father of a baby boy, Hikari (which means
'light'), who was born with congenital abnormality of the skull. When the doctors advised Oe and his wife to let Hikari die, he rejected their advice. The birth of Hikari was a turning point in Oe's life and in his literary career. He said in a speech given at the International Conference on Rehabilitative Medicine in Tokyo, in 1988, that "the central theme of my work, throughout much of my career, has been the way my family has managed to live with this handicapped child. Indeed, I would have to admit that the very ideas that I hold about this society and the world at large – my thoughts, even, about whatever there might be that transcends our limited reality – are based on and learned through living with him." (The Music of Light: The Extraordinary Story of Hikari and Kenzaburo Oe by Cameron Lindsley, Thorndike, Me.: G.K. Hall & Co., 1998, p. 12) Hikari, who had an IQ of 65, turned out to be exceptionally gifted in music, and he is acknowledged as one of the most famous composers in Japan. "Next, I meditate on the friend whose cremation I attended. At the end of summer this year he daubed his head all over with crimson paint, stripped, thrust a cucumber up his anus, and hanged himself. His wife discovered the strange suicide on her return, spent as a sick rabbit, from a party that had lasted into the early hours. Why hadn't he gone with her to the party? He was that kind of man: no one would find it odd that he should let his wife go alone to a party while he remained in his study working on a translation (something, in fact, that we were collaborating on)." (The Silent Cry by Kenzaburo Ōe, translated by John Bester, London: Serpent's Tail, 2011, p. 4; first published as Man'en Gannen no Futtoboru in 1967 by Kodansha Ltd, Tokyo) Man'en gannen no futtoboru (1967, The Silent Cry) won the Tanizaki Junichiro Prize. It depicted two urban brothers, who return to their village in the mountains. From The Silent Cry Oe became increasingly interested in rural folk legends. Kojinteki na taiken (A Personal Matter, translated into English in 1968), was received enthusiastically in America. Bird, the novel's protagonist, is a young man who dreams of exploring Africa and attempts to escape the responsibility of having fathered a brain-damaged child. Bird plots with an old girlfriend to murder the child. In the course of the story, he grows up but befoe it he has a marathon sex session and vomits in front of his students. Warera no kyōki wo ikinobiru
michi wo oshieyo (1969), consisting of four novellas, won the
Noma Literary Prize, and was translated into English entitled Teach
Us to Outgrow Our Madness in 1978. In Pinchi ran'nā chōsho (1976) a
father and idiot son lead an army of marginals against the Japanese
establishment. Kōzui wa waga
tamashii ni oyobi (1973) won the Naoma Literary Prize. Atarashii hito yo, mezameyo (1983)
marked the return to the life of musically talented Hikari, who was
turning twenty. The Japanese critics named it the book of the year and
it received the Osaragi Jiro Prize for non-fiction. A Quiet Life (1996) had again autobiographical elements. A famous Japanese writer, whose first name begins with K, leaves his mentally retarded son in the care of his daughter Ma-Chan, to spend a year in the University of California as a writer in residence. Ma-Chan writes her thoughts in a diary. "Regardless of which elements are fact and which are fiction, ''A Quiet Life'' belongs to the literary genre of the confession; by rediscovering the family life he has neglected, a writer comes to terms with the human losses he has suffered in the course of gaining literary eminence." ('Her Brother's Keeper' by John David Morley, in The New York Times Book Review, November 17, 1996) Oe also published essays and short stories. A Healing Family, his first book
after the Nobel Prize, told about his son
Hikari. Other works from the 1990s include trilogy Moeagaru midori no ki, an
exploration of themes of faith and salvation, with complex allusions to
William Blake, Dante, and William Butler Yeats. Oe once stated, "Yeats
is the writer in whose wake I would like to follow." Oe travelled abroad widely. In 1961 he travelled to
Western and Eastern Europe, in 1965 and 1968 to the United States, in
1968 to Australia, and in 1970 Southeast Asia. He was visiting
professor at the Colegio de México, Mexico City in 1976, and the
University of California at Berkely. In 1989 the Europelia Arts
Festival named Oe the recipient of the Europelia Award. Chiryou tou (1991), a dystopian novel, was ignored by the readers. All illnesses are cured in the tower of treatment in the "New Earth." Torikae ko
(2001, The Changeling) started a trilogy about an aging
novelist named Kogito Choko, Oe's recurring protagonist and literary
alter ego. Kogito has a history of suicidal depression. The work was
written as a memoriel to Oe's brother-in-law, the film director Itami
Juzo, who jumped to his death in Tokyo in 1997. In the story he is
named Goro Hanawa. Chūgaeri
(1999,
Somersault), about a movement called the Church of the New Man, was
based on the nerve gas attack on the metro in 1995 in Tokyo. A
religious doomsday cult was responsible for the act of terrorism, in
which twelve people were killed. Although Oe is considered by many the
finest writer in Japan, his social criticism has been rejected. After
the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, Oe said that Japan had "a sacred
duty" to renounce nuclear power. Kenzaburo Oe died on 3 March, 2023, at the age of 88. For further reading: 'Translator's Note' by John Nathan, in A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe (1968); Approaches to the Modern Japanese Novel, edited by Kinya Tsuruta and Thomas E. Swann (1976); Oe Kenzaburo and Contemporary Japanese Literature by Hisaaki Yamanouchi (1986); The Marginal World of Oe Kenzaburo: A Study of Themes and Techniques by Michiko N. Wilson (1986); Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the Fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo by Susan J. Napier (1991); 'Ōe Kenzaburo,' in World Authors 1980-1985, edited by Vineta Colby (1991); The Music of Light: The Extraordinary Story of Hikari and Kenzaburo Oe by Lindsley Cameron (1998); 'Ōe Kenzaburō' by Paul St John Mackintosh, in Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, Volume 2, edited by Olive Classe (2000); Faulkner and Oe: The Self-critical Imagination by Akio Kimura (2007); 'Ōe Kenzaburo (1935- ) Japanese novelist' by Wai-chew Sim, in The Facts on File Companion to the World Novel: 1900 to the Present, edited by Michael D. Sollars (2008); The Novels of Ōe Kenzaburō by Yasuko Claremont (2009); Ōe Kenzaburō to "reito wāku" by Kudō Yōko (2022); Sayōnara Ōe Kenzaburō konnichiwa by Tsukasa Osamu (2024); Affect, Emotion and Sensibility in Modern Japanese Literature: From Natsume Sôseki to Ishimure Michiko by Reiko Abe Auestad (2025) - See: William Blake, whose mystical poems and prophesies (Book of Thiel etc.) inspired Kenzaburo Oe when he was writing Atarashii hito yo, mezameyo (Awake, New Man). Selected works:
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