Kenzaburo Oe, Japanese Nobel Prize-winning novelist, dies aged 88

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Death was informed by the author’s publisher this Monday (13). He won a Nobel Prize in 1994. Kenzaburo Oe, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, dies aged 88 Francois Guillot/AFP Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature and a progressive icon who challenged the conformism of modern society, died at the age of 88, publisher Kodansha reported on Monday (13). “He died of old age in the early hours of March 3,” the publisher said in a statement, and indicated that his family had already held the funeral. Known for his pacifist and anti-nuclear stance, Oe was part of a generation of writers “deeply wounded” by the Second World War, “but full of hope for a rebirth”. Born in 1935, Oe grew up in a forested valley on the island of Shikoku in western Japan, a remote place he often evokes in his writings as a microcosm of humanity. Though traumatized by Japan’s capitulation after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, he quickly adhered to the democratic principles of the American occupier. As a teenager, he decided to study French literature at the prestigious University of Tokyo, and began his literary career. In 1958, he won the renowned Akutagawa Prize for Young Authors with “The Tusk”, about an African-American pilot held captive in a rural Japanese community during World War II. That same year, he published his first major novel, “Pull Out the Seeds, Shoot the Children”, a social fable about children in a correctional facility in wartime Japan. The birth in 1963 of a disabled son, Hikari (“Light” in Japanese), turns his personal life upside down and gives his work new impetus. “Writing and living with my son overlap and these two activities can only deepen each other. I told myself that this is definitely where my imagination can take shape,” he later explained. “A personal matter” (1964) was the first novel in a long series of books inspired by his personal life. In it, Oe narrates the life of a young father facing the birth of a disabled baby, which he even thinks about killing. His “Notes from Hiroshima” (1965) are a compendium of testimonies from victims of August 6, 1945. In 1994, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature for creating “with great poetic force an imaginary world where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting portrait of the fragile human situation”, in the words of the commission.

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