Editor TLN
He passed away at the age of 88. In 1994 he was the second Japanese to receive the prestigious award for literature. After the Fukushima accident, he promoted a campaign to call for the closure of nuclear power plants. In his works, his ability to describe the interior dramas of today’s man also stands out.
Tokyo () – The Kodansha publishing house announced this morning the death of the Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994. He was 88 years old and his death, which occurred on March 3, would be associated with age.
His career as a writer was long and prolific, characterized by prestigious awards: his was the second Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Japan after Yasunari Kawabata’s in 1968. His work was influenced by two specific events: the experience of war as a child (he was ten years old at the time of Japan’s surrender on August 14, 1945) and the disability of his son Hikari, now 59 and an acclaimed composer.
The fears aroused by the war marked his memory, beginning – according to his own account – by not being able to show the loyalty and spirit of sacrifice that was then demanded of even the smallest children in Japan, but also the experience of the atomic bombs that were dropped on his country, and that repeatedly inspired his works. A decisive memory for some of his books, such as Notes on Hiroshima in 1965 and then Notes on Okinawa in 1970.
His own suffering and that of the Japanese people during and because of the conflict pervaded much of his writing and was the basis of his convinced pacifist and anti-nuclear commitment. So much so, that after the Fukushima-2 reactor accident in 2011, he promoted a campaign with millions of subscriptions calling for the closure of nuclear power plants. “Repeating the mistake of showing the same disrespect for the human path by building nuclear reactors is the worst possible betrayal of the memory of the Hiroshima victims.” This told the magazine The New Yorker ten days after the paralysis of the refrigeration systems that caused the very strong earthquake and the even more disastrous tsunami of March 11, 12 years ago, triggered the risk of a new nuclear catastrophe.
Oe also published more introspective and autobiographical works, beginning with a personal experience (1964), which depicts a man unable to accept the birth of a brain-damaged son in the context of a family in crisis.
Oe’s long and prolific career began in 1957, while he was still a student of French literature at the University of Tokyo, with the publication of The prey. This stark vision of the fate of an African-American airman captured in a Japanese village earned him the Akutagawa Prize the following year, at just 23 years old.
For the world public, the silent scream, published in Japan in 1967 and later translated into many languages, was his disturbing calling card. Here he showed the characteristics underlined in the motivation for the Nobel Prize awarded to him in 1994: his ability to “create with poetic force an imaginary world where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting image of the difficult human condition of our days” .
