Kenzaburō Ōe, the last of Japan’s great post second world war Japanese writers, died in early March. When he was awarded the Nobel prize in 1994, he said that as a novelist he wished to “enable both those who express themselves with words and their readers to recover from their own sufferings and the sufferings of their time, and to cure their souls of the wounds”.
He wrote on taboo themes in Japan such as disability through his life with his son Hikari, who was born with a herniated brain, autism and epilepsy. He wrote about the dangers of nuclear weapons and the aftermath of Hiroshima and about the communities and folklore of his native rural island Shikoku.
He portrayed human nature in all its aspects, even the most cruel, with great inventiveness. In the words of his English translator John Nathan, his works feature a “language all his own, a language which can accommodate the virulence of his imagination”.
