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 Kenzaburō Ōe (大江 健三郎 Ōe Kenzaburō, born January 31, 1935) is a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature. His works, strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory, engage with political, social and philosophical issues including nuclear weapons, social non-conformism and existentialism. Ōe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 for creating "an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today."[1]
[edit] LifeŌe was born in Ōse (大瀬村 Ōse-mura), a village now in Uchiko, Ehime Prefecture on the island of Shikoku in Japan. He was one of seven children, whose father died when Ōe was nine. At the age of 18 he began to study French literature at the University of Tokyo, where he wrote his dissertation on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. He began publishing stories in 1957 while still a student, strongly influenced by contemporary writing in France and the United States. He married in February 1960. His wife, Yukari, was the 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. Ōe now lives 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 then. In 2004, Ōe lent his name and support to those opposing proposed changes in the post-war Japanese constitution of 1947. His views were seen as controversial by those who want Japan to abandon the constitutional impediment to "the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes," which is explicitly renounced in Article 9.[2] In 2005, two retired Japanese military officers sued Ōe for libel for his 1970 essay Okinawa Notes. In Okinawa Notes, Ōe wrote that members of the Japanese military had coerced masses of Okinawan civilians into committing suicide during the Allied invasion of the island in 1945. In March 2008, the Osaka District Court dismissed all charges against Ōe. In this ruling, Judge Toshimasa Fukami stated, "The military was deeply involved in the mass suicides". In a news conference following the trial, Ōe said, "“The judge accurately read my writing."[3] [edit] WritingŌe's output falls into a series of groups, successively dealing with different themes. He explained, shortly after learning that he'd been awarded the Nobel Prize, "I am writing about the dignity of human beings."[4] After his first student works set in his own university milieu, in the late 1950s he produced several works (such as Prize Catch and Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids) focusing on young children living in Arcadian transformations of Ōe's own rural Shikoku childhood.[5] He later identified these child figures as belonging to the 'child god' archetype of Jung and Kerényi: one which is characterised by abandonment, hermaphrodism, invincibility, and association with beginning and end.[6] The first two characteristics are present in these early stories, while the latter two features come to the fore in the 'idiot boy' stories which appeared after the birth of Hikari.[7] Between 1958 and 1961 Ōe published a series of works incorporating sexual metaphors for the occupation of Japan. He summarised the common theme of these stories as, "the relationship of a foreigner as the big power [Z], a Japanese who is more or less placed in a humiliating position [X], and, sandwiched between the two, the third party [Y] (sometimes a prostitute who caters only to foreigners or an interpreter)".[8] In each of these works, the Japanese X is inactive, failing to take the initiative to resolve the situation and showing no psychological or spiritual development.[9] The graphically sexual nature of this group of stories prompted a critical outcry; Ōe said of the culmination of the series, Our Times, "I personally like this novel [because] I do not think I will ever write another novel which is filled only with sexual words."[10] Ōe's next phase moved away from the earlier sexual content, shifting this time towards the violent fringes of society. 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.[11] Ōe's admission that Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is his favorite book can be said to find a context in this period.[12] 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".[13] More generally, Ōe believes that novelists have always worked to spur the imagination of their readers.[1] Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness introduces 'Mori' as a name for the 'idiot-son' (Ōe's own term); 'Mori' means both 'to die' and 'idiocy' in Latin, and 'forest' in Japanese. This association between the disabled boy and the forest recurs in later works such as The Waters Are Come in unto My Soul and M/T and the narrative about the marvels of the forest. The Nobel laureate believes that he is a very Japanese writer. He said, "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.[4] Ōe's novella The Catch, about the treatment of an African-American soldier shot down during World War II by Japanese villagers, was made into a film by Nagisa Oshima and released in 1961. [edit] SilenceŌe did not write much during the nearly two years he was involved in a trial from 2006 to 2008. He is beginning 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. Another projected character is a contemporary young Japanese woman who “rejects everything about Japan” and in one act tries to destroy the imperial order."[14] In this, as in so much else, Kenzaburo Ōe remains the master of an ambiguous Japanese expression, exploring that which is neither white nor black, but somewhere in between.[15] [edit] Honors
[edit] Selected worksAlthough the number of works translated into English and other languages remains limited, Ōe's literary output includes many publications which are still only available in Japanese.[16] List of books available in English
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
[edit] External links
Categories: 1935 births | Living people | Japanese novelists | Japanese short story writers | Nobel laureates in Literature | People from Ehime Prefecture | Japanese Nobel laureates | University of Tokyo alumni | Princeton University faculty | Free University of Berlin faculty | Magic realism writers | Winners of the Akutagawa Prize | Operation Iceberg | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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