Kenzaburō Ōe
Kenzaburo Oe | |
|---|---|
 Ōe, in 2005 | |
| Occupation | Novelist, Short story writer, Essayist |
| Nationality | Japanese |
| Period | 1950–present |
| Notable works | A Personal Matter, The Silent Cry |
| Notable awards | Nobel Prize in Literature 1994 |
Kenzaburo 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. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994.
Life
Ōe was born in Ōse (大瀬村, Ōse-mura), a village now in Uchiko, Ehime Prefecture, 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 of 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 2007, 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. On March 28, 2008, judges of the Osaka District Court dismissed all charges against Ōe. In his ruling, presiding judge stated that "it can be said the military was deeply involved in the mass suicides". The plaintiffs appealed the decision of the district court.
Works
Ōe's output falls into a series of groups, successively dealing with different themes. 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.[1] 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.[2] 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.[3]
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)".[4] 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.[5] 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".[6]
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.[7]
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".[8]
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.
Oe did not write much during the nearly two years he was involved in a trial from 2006 to 2008. He's beginning on 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. The other is a contemporary young Japanese woman who “rejects everything about Japan” and in one act tries to destroy the imperial order."[9]
References
- ^ Wilson, The Marginal World of Ōe Kenzaburo: A Study in Themes and Techniques p. 12. M E Sharpe (1986).
- ^ Ōe, The Method of a Novel p. 197.
- ^ Wilson p. 135.
- ^ Ōe, Supplement No. 3 to Ōe Kenzaburo Zensakuhin, Vol. 2, Series I, p. 16.
- ^ Wilson p. 32.
- ^ Quoted in Wilson, p. 29.
- ^ Wilson p. 47.
- ^ Wilson p. 61.
- ^ Norimitsu, Onishi (May 17, 2008). "Released From Rigors of a Trial, a Nobel Laureate's Ink Flows Freely". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-05-18.
