Kenzaburo Oe
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.
Oe was born in , a village now in
Uchiko,
Ehime Prefecture,
Japan. He was one of seven children, whose father died when Oe was nine. At eighteen 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, and later that year met
Mao on a trip to
China. He went to
Russia and Europe the following year, visiting Sartre in Paris.
Oe 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 Oe's writings since then.
Oe'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) focussing on young children living in
Arcadian transformations of Oe's own rural
Shikoku childhood.
[Wilson, The Marginal World of Oe Kenzaburo: A Study in Themes and Techniques p. 12. M E Sharpe (1986).] 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.
[Oe, The Method of a Novel p. 197.] 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.
[Wilson p. 135.]Between 1958 and 1961 Oe 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)".
[Oe, Supplement No. 3 to Oe Kenzaburo Zensakuhin, Vol. 2, Series I, p. 16.] 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.
[Wilson p. 32.] The graphically sexual nature of this group of stories prompted a critical outcry; Oe 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".
[Quoted in Wilson, p. 29.]Oe's next phase did move 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.
[Wilson p. 47.]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".
[ Wilson p. 61.] Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness introduces 'Mori' as a name for the 'idiot-son' (Oe'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.
Works translated into English
Lavish Are The Dead (死者の奢り,
Shisha no ogori, 1957)
Someone Else's Feet (他人の足,
Tanin no ashi, 1957)
Prize Stock (
Shiiku, 1957, also translated as
The Catch)
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (芽むしり"'ち,
Memushiri kōchi, 1958)
Seventeen (セヴンティーン,
Sevuntiin, 1961)
A Personal Matter (個人的な"",
Kojinteki na taiken, 1964)
Aghwee the Sky Monster (空の怪物アグイー,
Sora no kaibutsu Aguii, 1964)
Hiroshima Notes ('ロシマ・ノート,
Hiroshima nōto, 1965)
The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away (みずから我が涙'ぬぐいたまう日; Mizukara waga namida o nuguitamau hi, 1972)
The Silent Cry (万延元年のフットボール,
Man'en gan'nen no futtobōru, 1967)
Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (我らの狂気'"き延びる"'教えよ,
Warera no kyōki wo ikinobiru michi wo oshieyo, 1969)
The Pinch Runner Memorandum ("ンチランナー調書,
Pinchi ran'naa chōsho, 1976)
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (新しい人よ、眼ざめよ,
Atarashii hito yo mezameyo, 1983)
* ed:
The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath (1984)
Japan's Dual Identity: A Writer's Dilemma (1988)
An Echo of Heaven (人"の親戚,
Jinsei no shinseki, 1989)
A Quiet Life (静かな"活,
Shizuka na seikatsu, 1990)
Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself: The Nobel Prize Speech and Other Lectures (曖昧な日本の私,
Aimai na Nihon no watashi, 1995)
A Healing Family (恢復する家族,
Kaifukusuru kazoku, 1995)
Somersault (宙"り,
Chūgaeri, 1999)
Works not translated into English
M/T and the narrative about the marvels of the forest (M/Tと森のフシギの物語, 1986)
*
Nobel e-Museum Biography*
Nobel Laureate page*
Biography and booklist*
with poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today
