Kenzaburō Ōe facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Kenzaburō Ōe
Ōe in 2012
Native name	大江 健三郎
Born	(1935-01-31)January 31, 1935 Ōse, Ehime, Japan
Died	March 3, 2023(2023-03-03) (aged 88) Tokyo, Japan
Occupation	Novelist, short-story writer, essayist
Alma mater	University of Tokyo
Period	1950–2023
Notable works	A Personal Matter, The Silent Cry
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Literature 1994

Ōe at Japanisches Kulturinstitut Köln/Cologne (Germany), April 11, 2008

Kenzaburō Ōe (大江 健三郎, Ōe Kenzaburō, 31 January 1935 – 3 March 2023), was a Japanese writer and a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature. His novels, short stories and essays, strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory, deal with political, social and philosophical issues, including nuclear weapons, nuclear power, social non-conformism, and existentialism. Ōe was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature for creating "an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today".

Life

Ōe was born in Ōse (大瀬村, Ōse-mura), a village now in Uchiko, Ehime Prefecture on Shikoku. He was the third son of seven children. Ōe's grandmother taught him art and oral performance. His grandmother died in 1944, and later that year, Ōe's father died in the Pacific War. Ōe's mother became his primary educator, buying him books such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, whose impact Ōe says "he will carry to the grave".

Ōe remembered his elementary school teacher claiming that Emperor Hirohito was a living god, and asking him every morning, "What would you do if the emperor commanded you to die?" Ōe always replied, "I would die, sir. I would cut open my belly and die." At home in bed at night he would acknowledge his reluctance to die and feel ashamed. After the war, he realized he had been taught lies and felt betrayed. This sense of betrayal later appeared in his writing.

Ōe attended high school in Matsuyama. At the age of 18, he made his first trip to Tokyo and in the following year began studying French Literature at Tokyo University under the direction of Professor Kazuo Watanabe, a specialist on François Rabelais. Ōe began publishing stories in 1957, while still a student, strongly influenced by contemporary writing in France and the United States.

In 1959 and 1960, Ōe participated in the Anpo protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty as a member of a group of young writers, artists, and composers called the "Young Japan Society" (Wakai Nihon no Kai). The treaty allows the United States to maintain military bases in Japan, and Ōe's disappointment at the failure of the protests to stop the treaty shaped his future writing.

Ōe married in February 1960. His wife, Yukari, was the daughter of film director Mansaku Itami and sister of film director Juzo Itami. The same year he met Mao Zedong on a trip to China. He also went to Russia and Europe the following year, visiting Sartre in Paris.

In 1961, Ōe's novellas Seventeen and The Death of a Political Youth were published in the Japanese literary magazine Bungakukai. Yamaguchi had admirers among the extreme right wing who were angered by The Death of a Political Youth and both Ōe and the magazine received death threats day and night for weeks. The magazine soon apologized to offended readers, but Ōe did not, and he was later physically assaulted by an angry right-winger while giving a speech at Tokyo University.

Ōe lived in Tokyo. He has three children; the eldest son, Hikari, has been brain-damaged since his birth in 1963, and his disability has been a recurring motif in Ōe's writings since.

In 1994 Ōe won the Nobel Prize in Literature and was named to receive Japan's Order of Culture. He refused the latter because it is bestowed by the Emperor. Ōe said, "I do not recognize any authority, any value, higher than democracy." Once again, he received threats.

Ōe at a 2013 antinuclear demonstration in Tokyo

Ōe has been involved with pacifist and anti-nuclear campaigns and has written books regarding the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Hibakusha. After meeting prominent anti-nuclear activist Noam Chomsky at a Harvard degree ceremony, Ōe began his correspondence with Chomsky by sending him a copy of his Okinawa Notes. While also discussing Ōe's Okinawa Notes, Chomsky's reply included a story from his childhood. Chomsky wrote that when he first heard about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, he could not bear it being celebrated, and he went in the woods and sat alone until the evening. Ōe later said in an interview, "I've always respected Chomsky, but I respected him even more after he told me that." Following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, he urged Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda to "halt plans to restart nuclear power plants and instead abandon nuclear energy". Ōe has said Japan has an "ethical responsibility" to abandon nuclear power in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, just as it renounced war under its postwar Constitution. He has called for "an immediate end to nuclear power generation and warned that Japan would suffer another nuclear catastrophe if it tries to resume nuclear power plant operations". In 2013, he organized a mass demonstration in Tokyo against nuclear power. Ōe has also criticized moves to amend Article 9 of the Constitution, which forever renounces war.

Writing

Ōe explained, shortly after learning that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize, "I am writing about the dignity of human beings."

After his first student works set in his own university milieu, in the late 1950s he produced works such as Shiiku (飼育), about a black GI set upon by Japanese youth (made into a film, "The Catch" by Nagisa Oshima in 1961) and Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, focusing on young children living in Arcadian transformations of Ōe's own rural Shikoku childhood. He later identified these child figures as belonging to the 'child god' archetype of Jung and Kerényi, which is characterised by abandonment, hermaphrodism, invincibility, and association with beginning and end. The first two characteristics are present in these early stories, while the latter two features come to the fore in the stories which appeared after the birth of Hikari.

The works which he published between 1961 and 1964 are influenced by existentialism and picaresque literature, populated with more or less criminal rogues and anti-heroes whose position on the fringes of society allows them to make pointed criticisms of it. Ōe's admission that Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is his favorite book can be said to find a context in this period.

He explains, "I have always wanted to write about our country, our society and feelings about the contemporary scene. But there is a big difference between us and classic Japanese literature." In 1994, he explained that he was proud the Swedish Academy recognized the strength of modern Japanese literature and hoped the prize would encourage others.

According to Leo Ou-fan Lee writing in Muse, Ōe's latest works tend "toward bolder experiments with the technique of 'defamiliarization' by negotiating his narratives across several imaginary landscapes pertaining to painting, film, drama, music and architecture". Ōe believes that novelists have always worked to spur the imagination of their readers.

About his son Hikari

Book cover of the 1996 English version of Kenzaburō Ōe's book about his handicapped son and their life as a family.

Ōe credits his son Hikari for influencing his literary career. Ōe tried to give his son a "voice" through his writing. Several of Ōe's books feature a character based on his son.

In Ōe's 1964 book, A Personal Matter, the writer describes the psychological trauma involved in accepting his brain-damaged son into his life. Hikari figures prominently in many of the books singled out for praise by the Nobel committee:

Hikari's life is the core of the first book published after Ōe was awarded the Nobel Prize. The 1996 book, A Healing Family, celebrates the small victories in Hikari's life.

Hikari was a strong influence on Father, Where are you Going?, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, and The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, three novels which rework the same premise—the father of a disabled son attempts to recreate the life of his own father, who shut himself away and died. The protagonist's ignorance of his father is compared to his son's inability to understand him; the lack of information about his father's story makes the task impossible to complete, but capable of endless repetition, and, "repetition becomes the fabric of the stories."

2006–2008

Ōe did not write much during the nearly two years (2006–2008) of his libel case. He began writing a new novel, which The New York Times reported would feature a character "based on his father," a staunch supporter of the imperial system who drowned in a flood during World War II.

2013

Ōe published a new book at the end of 2013 named Bannen Yoshikishu and published by Kodansha (English title is In Late Style).

The novel is the sixth in a series with the main character of Kogito Choko, who can be considered Ōe's literary alter ego. The novel is also in a sense a culmination of the I-novels that Ōe has continued to write since his son was born mentally disabled in 1963.

In the novel, Choko loses interest in the novel he had been writing when the Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami struck the Tohoku region on March 11, 2011. Instead, he begins writing about an age of catastrophe, as well as about the fact that he himself was approaching his late 70s.

Honors

• Akutagawa Prize, 1958.
• Shinchosha Literary Prize, 1964.
• Tanizaki Prize, 1967.
• Noma Prize, 1973.
• Yomiuri Prize, 1982.
• Jiro Osaragi Prize (Asahi Shimbun), 1983.
• Nobel Prize in Literature, 1994.
• Order of Culture, 1994 – refused.
• Legion of Honour, 2002.

In 2006, the Kenzaburō Ōe Prize was established to promote Japanese literary novels published in the last year. The winning work is selected solely by Ōe. The winner receives no cash award, but the novel is translated into other languages.

Selected works

The number of Kenzaburō Ōe's works translated into English and other languages remains limited, so that much of his literary output is still only available in Japanese. The few translations have often appeared after a marked lag in time. Work of his has also been translated into Chinese, French, and German.

In a statistical overview of writings by and about Kenzaburō Ōe, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 700 works in 1,500+ publications in 28 languages and 27,000+ library holdings.

Books available in English

• Shiiku, 1957 - The Catch, published in "The Catch and Other War Stories" by Kodansha International (Tokyo) in 1981
• Memushiri Kouchi, 1958 – Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (translated by Paul Mackintosh and Maki Sugiyama)
• Sevuntiin, 1961 – Seventeen (translated by Luk Van Haute)
• Seiteki Ningen 1963 *** Humans, published as J (translated by Luk Van Haute)
• Kojinteki na taiken, 1964 – A Personal Matter (translated by John Nathan)
• Hiroshima noto, 1965 – Hiroshima Notes (translated by David L. Swain, Toshi Yonezawa)
• Man'en gannen no futtoboru, 1967 – The Silent Cry (translated by John Bester)
• Warera no kyōki wo ikinobiru michi wo oshieyo, 1969 – Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (1977)
• Mizukara waga namida wo nuguitamau hi, 1972 – The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away in Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (1977)
• Pinchiranna chosho,' 1976 – The Pinch Runner Memorandum (translated by Michiko N. Wilson)
• Atarashii hito yo mezame yo, 1983 – Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (translated by John Nathan)
• Jinsei no shinseki, 1989 – An Echo of Heaven (translated by Margaret Mitsutani)
• Shizuka-na seikatsu, 1990 – A Quiet Life (translated by Kunioki Yanagishita & William Wetherall)
• Kaifuku suru kazoku, 1995 – A Healing Family (translated by Stephen Snyder, illustrated by Yukari Oe)
• Chugaeri, 1999 – Somersault (translated by Philip Gabriel)
• Torikae ko (Chenjiringu), 2000 – The Changeling (translated by Deborah Boehm)
• Suishi, 2009 – Death by Water (translated by Deborah Boehm).

See also

In Spanish: Kenzaburō Ōe para niños

• List of Japanese Nobel laureates
• List of Nobel laureates affiliated with the University of Tokyo
• Anti-nuclear power movement in Japan
• Relocation of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma