Tokyo – Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, whose darkly poetic novels were built from his childhood memories during Japan’s post-war occupation and from parenting a disabled son, has died. He was 88.
Oe, who was also an outspoken anti-nuclear and peace activist, died on March 3, his publisher, Kodansha Ltd., said in a statement on Monday. The publisher did not provide further details about his death and said his funeral was being held by his family.
In 1994, Oe became the second Japanese writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Swedish Academy cited the author for his works of fiction, where “poetic power creates an imagined world where life and myth condense to form a confusing picture of the human situation today.”
FILE – Japan’s Kenzaburo Oe, left, receives the Nobel Prize in Literature from Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf, right, at the Konserthuset in Stockholm, Sweden, December 10, 1994.
His most searing works were influenced by the birth of Oe’s mentally disabled son in 1963.
“A Personal Matter,” published a year later, is the story of a father coming to terms through darkness and pain with the birth of a brain-damaged son. Several of his later works feature a damaged or deformed child with symbolic significance, with the stories and characters developing and maturing as Oe’s son ages.
Hikari Oe had a cranial deformity at birth that caused mental disability. He has limited ability to speak and read but has become a musical composer whose works have been performed and recorded on albums.
The only other Japanese to win a Nobel in literature was Yasunari Kawabata in 1968.
Despite the outpouring of national pride at Oe’s win, his main literary themes here raise deep concerns. A boy of 10 when World War II ended, Oe came of age during the American occupation.
“The humiliation took a firm hold on him and has colored much of his work. He himself describes his writing as a way to exorcise demons,” said the Swedish Academy.
Childhood wartime memories strongly colored the story that marked Oe’s literary debut, “The Catch,” about a country boy’s experiences with an American pilot shot down over his village. The story, published in 1958, when Oe was still a university student, won Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize for New Writers.
He also wrote non-fiction books on the devastation and rise of Hiroshima after the US atomic bombing of August 6, 1945, as well as on Okinawa and its post-war US occupation.
Oe has campaigned for peace and anti-nuclear causes, especially since the 2011 Fukushima crisis, and has often appeared in demonstrations.
In 2015, Oe criticized Japan’s decision to restart nuclear reactors in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami-triggered meltdown at the Fukushima plant, calling it a risk that could lead to another disaster. He urged then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to follow Germany’s example and phase out nuclear energy.
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“Japanese politicians are not trying to change the situation but only to maintain the status quo even after this massive nuclear accident, and even though we all know that another accident would simply wipe out Japan’s future,” Oe said.
Oe, then 80, said his last life’s work is to strive for a nuclear-free world: “We must not leave the problem of nuclear power plants to the younger generation.”
The third of seven children, Oe was born on January 31, 1935, in a village on Japan’s southern island of Shikoku. At the University of Tokyo, he studied French literature and began writing plays.
The Academy noted that Oe’s work has been heavily influenced by Western writers, including Dante, Poe, Rabelais, Balzac, Eliot and Sartre.
But even with these influences, Oe brought with him an Asian sensibility.
In 2021, thousands of pages of his handwritten manuscripts and other works were sent to be archived at the University of Tokyo.
Source: sn.dk