Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel Laureate and critic of postwar Japan, dies at 88 — With his powerful novels and essays, Mr. Oe tried to ensure that Japan learned the lessons of its 20th-century militarism

Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel Laureate and critic of postwar Japan, dies at 88 — With his powerful novels and essays, Mr. Oe tried to ensure that Japan learned the lessons of its 20th-century militarism

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/13/obituaries/kenzaburo-oe-dead.html

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  1. No byline for the linked content^1 in the New York Times.

    Excerpt:

    >Kenzaburo Oe, a Nobel laureate whose intense novels and defiant politics challenged a modern Japanese culture that he found morally vacant and dangerously tilted toward the same mind-set that led to catastrophe in World War II, died on March 3. He was 88.

    >His publisher, Kodansha, announced the death on Monday. It did not specify a cause or say where he had died.

    >Mr. Oe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 for creating what the Nobel committee called “an imagined world where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.”

    >Mr. Oe was Japan’s second Nobel laureate in literature, after Yasunari Kawabata in 1968. In style and substance, the two could hardly have been more different.

    >Where Mr. Kawabata mostly wrote sparse, elegant novels and stories on traditional themes, Mr. Oe stretched the Japanese language to its limits with gnarly sentences that dealt head-on with sex, depression, abnormality and the struggle for human dignity.

    > 

    >Though he often said he wrote with only a Japanese audience in mind, Mr. Oe attracted an international readership in the 1960s with three works in particular: “Hiroshima Notes,” a collection of essays on the long-term consequences of the atomic bomb attacks; and the novels “A Personal Matter” and “The Silent Cry,” which had their genesis in a crisis for him and his wife, the birth of a son with a deformed cranium.

    >Politically, he was a prominent voice for a generation of dissidents who opposed arming Japan’s defense forces and advocated paying war reparations to China, Korea and other Asian neighbors.

    >He was frequently vilified and occasionally threatened with death by elements on the right, as when he declined to receive Japan’s Order of Culture in 1994 because it was bestowed by the emperor. “I do not recognize any authority, any value, higher than democracy,” he said.

    >Mr. Oe also had a quarrel with Japanese society, arguing that, after 25 years of democracy and intellectual ferment following the war, the country had lapsed into a trough of conformity.

    >It was a period, he argued, marked by one-party rule and “insular, unaccommodating” attitudes that prevented constructive relationships with other Asian countries, much less a meaningful role in world affairs.

    > 

    >Kenzaburo Oe was born on Jan. 31, 1935, in a village in Ehime Prefecture on Shikoku. His father, a member of a prominent landowning family, drowned in the Pacific war.

    >On the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, his mother was outdoors gathering herbs when she saw a flash in the sky — the atomic bomb explosion over Hiroshima, 100 miles away.

    >Mr. Oe’s memories of World War II were those of a terrified, disillusioned schoolboy.

    >His teachers would ask the students what they would do if the emperor commanded them to commit suicide. They had to answer, “I would die, sir. I would cut open my belly and die.”

    >At the University of Tokyo, Mr. Oe majored in modern French literature, but throughout his life his reading ranged widely among European and American writers, with a particular reverence for W.B. Yeats.

    >While his influences included everything from “Huckleberry Finn” to the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of images of grotesque reality, little of this erudition called attention to itself in his fiction.

    ^1 The New York Times, 13 Mar. 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/13/obituaries/kenzaburo-oe-dead.html

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