Kenzaburō Ōe

Kenzaburō Ōe grew up in Ōse, a village in the forested interior of Shikoku, listening to his grandmother’s stories of local myth and of the region’s peasant uprisings. His father died in 1944; his mother bought him books, among them Huckleberry Finn. Taught in wartime that the emperor was divine, he later described the sense of betrayal that followed defeat. He studied French literature at the University of Tokyo, where Sartre’s existentialism shaped his early thinking, and began publishing stories while still a student; in 1958 he won the Akutagawa Prize for “Prize Stock.”

His early fiction dealt with occupation, sexuality and political violence, and his novellas about a young right-wing assassin brought him threats. The birth in 1963 of his son Hikari, with a severe brain abnormality, reoriented his work: A Personal Matter follows a young father tempted to let his damaged child die, and Hikari, who became a composer, recurs in many later books. The Silent Cry returns to a Shikoku village and its buried history of revolt. Alongside the fiction ran essays such as Hiroshima Notes, and a persistent opposition to nuclear weapons and to nationalism.

Ōe was the second Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize, after Yasunari Kawabata. The same year he declined Japan’s Order of Culture because it is conferred by the emperor. He remained a public voice for pacifism and against nuclear power, and continued writing into the 2010s. He died in 2023, at the age of eighty-eight.