Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel prize-winning Japanese writer, dies aged 88
Kenzaburo Oe, a giant of Japanese writing and winner of the Nobel prize in literature, has died aged 88.
Spanning fiction and essays, Oe’s work tackled a wide range of subjects from militarism and nuclear disarmament to innocence and trauma, and he became an outspoken champion for the voiceless in the face of what he regarded as his country’s failures. Regarded by some in Japan as distinctly western, Oe’s style was often likened to William Faulkner; in his own words, in his writing he would “start from my personal matters and then link it up with society, the state and the world”.
Many of his stories and essays touched on formative events in his life, including the impact of war on Japanese society in novels such as The Silent Cry – which the Nobel committee deemed his masterpiece – and the birth of his son Hikari, which led him to explore his own experience as the father of a disabled child in the novels A Personal Matter and A Quiet Life.
Oe’s death, on 3 March, was due to old age, his publisher Kodansha said.
Henry Miller once likened Oe to Dostoevsky, in his “range of hope and despair”, while Edward Said, a friend for 20 years, noted his “extraordinary power of sympathetic understanding”. Fellow laureate Kazuo Ishiguro once described him as “genuinely decent, modest, surprisingly open and honest, and very unconcerned about fame”, while his translator, John Nathan, credited him with “creating a language of his own, in the manner of Faulkner and few Japanese writers before him”.
Born in 1935 in Ose, a remote village in the forests of Shikoku, Oe was the fifth of seven children, growing up on the folk tales of his grandmother and mother. When Oe’s father was killed in the second world war in 1944, his mother began to educate him with books including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson, the impact of which, he said in his 1994 Nobel acceptance speech, he would “carry to the grave”.
Raised believing that the emperor of Japan was a living god, Oe was shocked at the age of 10 when he first heard the voice of Emperor Hirohito, as he surrendered after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All of his beliefs were upturned. “But for my experiences of 1945 and the subsequent years, I would never have become a novelist,” he would later say.
Postwar currency reform drove his family, wholesalers of banknote paper, into precarity. Oe was the only one of his siblings to go to university, studying French and becoming a journalist. He began publishing fiction in 1957, and within a year his novella Shiiku(The Catch), about a friendship between a Japanese child and a black American PoW, won Oe the Akutagawa prize at the age of 23. His first novel, Memushiri Kouchi(Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids), also published in 1958, follows a group of juvenile delinquents evacuated to a village in wartime who are then abandoned by the villagers.
Oe became increasingly political, demonstrating against the renewal of Japan’s security treaty with the US, the Vietnam war and even marching in Paris in 1961 with Jean-Paul Sartre
and Simone de Beauvoir against the Algerian war. He rapidly became a cult writer among Japan’s postwar youth, voicing their anger at the country’s government. He told the Paris Review in 2007 that he considered himself an anarchist: “Kurt Vonnegut once said he was an agnostic who respects Jesus Christ. I am an anarchist who loves democracy.”
Influenced by Sartre and American literature, Oe created many disfranchised and grotesque antiheroes. Japanese critics scoffed that his writing “reeked of butter”, having been sullied by western syntax, and he became a target of Japanese conservatives for his criticism of the emperor, and for his depiction of Japan as pathetic and subservient in several sexually explicit stories. After the publication of Sevuntiin(Seventeen), his 1961 novel inspired by the real assassination of Japan’s socialist party chairman the year before, he received death threats and was physically assaulted while lecturing at the University of Tokyo. His 1970 essay Okinawa Notes, in which he detailed how the Japanese military had convinced Okinawan civilians to kill themselves as the allies invaded in 1945, resulted in him being sued in 2005 by two retired officers; three years later, all charges against Oe were dismissed. His 1972 novel The Day He Shall Wipe
My Tears Away was a satire of patriotic excess, published just two years after the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima famously performed seppuku after leading a failed coup.
In 1960 Oe married his wife, Yukari. Three years later their first child, Hikari, was born with a herniated brain and doctors urged the parents to let him die. Oe admitted to once wishing for his son’s death – a “disgraceful” thought, he later wrote, that “no powerful detergent has allowed me to wash out of my life”. But encounters with survivors of Hiroshima a month later were transformative, and led to his essay Hiroshima Notes. “I was trained as a writer and as a human being by the birth of my son,” he told the Guardian in 2005. Hikari went on to become a musical prodigy and an award-winning composer, with Oe saying his music sold “better than any of my novels, and I’m proud of that”.
Oe wrote many fictional fathers with disabled sons, in books such as A Personal Matter, The Silent Cry and A Quiet Life, which was adapted for cinema by Oe’s sister-in-law, the director Juzo Itami, with a score based on Hikari’s compositions. In 1995, he wrote a bestselling essay collection, A Healing Family, in which he credited Hikari for teaching him the healing power of art. He rejected accusations that he had exploited his son by writing about him so frankly: “Our relationship is a real one. It’s the most important thing: life comes first, and literature second … I’m always happy to be with him. I can be very lonely and fearful of people. But with my son I’m very free.”
In the early 1990s, Oe vowed to stop writing fiction, saying Hikari had now found his own voice, and that the three books in his The Flaming Green Tree trilogy signalled his career coming full circle. But winning the Nobel prize in 1994 changed his mind. Just days later, he refused Japan’s Order of Culture on the grounds that he refused to “recognise any authority, any value, higher than democracy”. This scandalised Japan, and he received death threats.
Oe continued to write into his late 70s, with his final book, Bannen Youshiki shū (In Reito Sutairu) (In Late Style) published in 2013. He continued to speak out against war, nuclear power and the revival of Japanese nationalism, urging official compensation for the wartime Korean sex slaves known as “comfort women”, and called for Japan to focus on reconciling with its neighbours in Asia. “History must be looked at again. If Japan thinks trade and prosperity are enough, that would be totally wrong,” he told the Guardian in 2005. “I would like to live to see a final reconciliation between Japan, and China and Korea.”