Oe Kenzaburo
(b. 1935), Japanese novelist, nonfiction essayist, and winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for literature. Oe Kenzaburo is known throughout the world by translations of his work as a weaver of historical, mythical, and sexually grotesque novels and in Japan for his notoriously impenetrable wordplay and solipsistic tales. Oe was born on the southwestern island of Shikoku and took the position of posing moral and stylistic challenges to the status quo of the metropolis, a position that became more and more tenuous as his stature in the literary world continued to rise.
Among the last generation of children to be educated under the wartime imperial regime, in the postwar period Oe studied French existentialist literature at Tokyo University. His morbid stories of studentsworking grotesque jobs dealing with human and canine corpses in order to earn enough money to study won him early recognition for bringing Europeanstyle angst to the circumstances of postwar Japan.
Oe Kenzaburo in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in June 2000 to receive an honorary doctorate from Harvard University. (REUTERS NEWMEDIA INC./CORBIS)In 1958, he was awarded the Akutagawa Literary Prize for his novella Shiiku (The Catch), the tale of a young boy's realization that both godlike figures in his life, the black American paratrooper stranded in his village and the emperor, are mortals. After the experiences of both the death threats he received in response to his "Sebunchin" (Seventeen, 1960), a story based on two actual assassinations by seventeen-yearold students, and the birth of his son, who was diagnosed with a brain hernia, as fictionalized in Kojintekina taiken (A Personal Matter, 1964), Oe's work assumed a more humanistic tone. His reflections on the survivors of the atomic bomb, Hiroshima nooto (Hiroshima Notes, 1965), and his epic novel of an antihero encountering his mythical and historical family roots, Man'en gannen no futtoboru (Football in the First Years of Man'en, 1967, translated as The Silent Cry), incorporated homages to William Butler Yeats, William Blake, and Dante Alighieri.
Arguing that he was a pacifist and a democrat, Oe refused the Emperor's Order of Culture within months of receiving the Nobel Prize. His more recent trilogy, Moegaru midori no ki (Burning Green Tree), is an amalgam of Until the 'Savior' Gets Socked (1993), Vacillating (1994), and On the Day of Grandeur (1995) that combines themes of a vanishing mythic order on the periphery of modernized Japan with an existential interrogation of ethics through the depiction of everyday life.
Further Reading
Lewell, John. (1993) Modern Japanese Novelists: A Biographical Dictionary. New York: Kodansha.
Treat, John Whittier. (1987) "Hiroshima nooto and Oe Kenzaburo's Existentialist Other." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47, 1 (June): 97–136.
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