Kenzaburo Oe, the famed Japanese writer, died aged 88 years old on March 3, though the news of his passing has only just been shared online.
Despite writing over 50 works of different kinds, and winning nine major prizes including the Nobel Prize in Literature and the French Legion of Honour, Oe is less-well known in the UK than his Japanese contemporaries Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto.
But he was a fascinating man: he lived in Paris, was friends with Edward Said, interviewed Chairman Mao and was a vocal anti-nuclear activist.
Over his life Oe, who later lived in a suburb of Tokyo with his wife Yukari and son, wrote essays and fiction, covering a wide range of topics including humanism, trauma, and fatherhood – Oe had three children, one of whom, Hikari (who became one of Japan’s most famous composers), was disabled, and so he often explored this relationship in his works too. Speaking to The Guardian, Oe said: “I was trained as a writer and as a human being by the birth of my son.”
He was born in a village on the island of Shikoku in 1935, the fifth of seven children. He was just a child when the Second World War broke out and its fallout would massively impact him both practically and philosophically throughout his life. He grew up being taught the folk tales that had been told for generations in his village, and when he moved to Tokyo aged 18 to study French Literature, he became the first member of his family clan to ever leave the forested valley.
In 1957, when he was 22 years old, he published four short stories, one of which won the prestigious Akutagawa prize.
Oe described himself as an anarchist as a younger man, and maintained his political activism throughout his life: he spoke at anti-nuclear rallies and wrote numerous essays on the subjects of nuclear disarmament and militarism. “The issue of nuclear arms was and is a fundamental question for me,” said Oe to author Sarah Fay in a Paris Review interview in 2007. He also marched with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in Paris in 1961, protesting against the Algerian War.
“Regret and repentance for the [second world] war, and the determination that it should never happen again, are enshrined in the constitution,” said Oe to the Guardian in 2005. “That’s why I regard it as so important.”
The author was pretty nonplussed about winning the Nobel Prize – he said that there was nothing positive nor negative about winning the prize, only that it had helped to raise his profile. His opinion of himself hadn’t changed.
To celebrate his extraordinary life, here are five fascinating facts about the author.
He was heavily inspired by French literature
Oe was keen to develop a new style of Japanese writing: one that took on the way English and French writers chose to express a subject using elaboration.
He said that when he wrote his first novels he was reading French and English literature for eight hours a day and then writing in Japanese for two hours. In the Paris Review he explained: “I would think, How would a French writer express this? How would an English writer express this? By reading in foreign languages and then writing in Japanese, I wanted to build a bridge.”
His son nearly turned down his Nobel Prize
In 1994, when Oe was 59 years old, he was called one evening by a member of the Nobel committee with the news that he had been awarded its prize. It was Hikari who picked up the phone, who, Oe explained to Fay, “said in English, No, and then again, No. Then Hikari handed me the phone.”
“[The committee member] asked me, Are you Kenzaburo? I asked him if Hikari had refused the Nobel Prize on my behalf and then I said, I’m sorry—I accept.”
He had a fraught relationship with Yukio Mishima and was close friends with Edward Said
He had a long friendship with the Palestinian-American professor and writer Edward Said, which spanned 20 years. Oe said in the Paris Review: “If it ever looks like I’m not listening, I’m thinking about Said. His ideas have been an important part of my work. They have helped me create new expressions in the Japanese language, new thoughts in Japanese. I liked him personally as well.”
Said described Oe as having the “extraordinary power of sympathetic understanding”.
On the other hand, Oe never saw eye to eye with the Japanese author Yukio Mishima, despite the two having a sort of friendship in the Sixties. They were on opposite ends of the political spectrum – in 1970 Mishima unsuccessfully tried to inspire the Japan Self-Defense Forces to start a coup by entering a military base in central Tokyo and taking its commandant hostage.
In a conversation with Kazuo Ishiguro that was published in Grand Street magazine, Oe said, “Mishima’s entire life, certainly including his death by seppuku [a kind of ritualistic Japanese suicide], was a kind of performance designed to present the image of an archetypal Japanese. Moreover, this image was not the kind that arises spontaneously from a Japanese mentality. It was the superficial image of a Japanese as seen from a European point of view, a fantasy.”
He interviewed Chairman Mao, Kurt Vonnegut and Jean-Paul Sartre
In his earlier career, Oe interviewed several prominent authors and politicians, including, incredibly, Chairman Mao – he was one of five Japanese writers who had been sent to interview the Chinese President in 1960 when Oe was part of the protest movement against a Japan-US Security Treaty (which went into effect in June 1960).
According to Oe, the group met Mao at 1am in a “dark garden” which smelt of jasmine. Oe called Mao “an impressive man” and “an unusually large man” but said he was not permitted to ask the politicians any questions. “He quoted himself from his books—word for word—the entire time,” said Oe to Fay. “It was so boring. He had a huge can of cigarettes and he smoked heavily.”
Oe also interviewed Satre when the Japanese writer lived in Paris: “Sartre was a major figure in my life,” he said, but added, “Like Mao, he basically repeated things that he’d already published.” In 2005, when Oe spoke to The Guardian, he was more charitable, calling Sartre a “charming intellectual who kept quoting himself”.
In 1984 Oe interviewed American writer Kurt Vonnegut when he came to Japan for a conference on progressive education: “Vonnegut was a serious thinker who expressed profound ideas in a spirit of Vonnegutian humor. I wasn’t able to extract something important from him either,” said Oe.
Fellow writers, he has some tips...
Every writer has their own approach to producing work – some repeatedly edit, while some restart each page when they feel like they’ve made a mistake. Oe was the former: “I am the kind of writer who rewrites and rewrites. I am very eager to correct everything,” he explained to Fay.
“So one of my main literary methods is ‘repetition with difference.’ I begin a new work by first attempting a new approach toward a work that I’ve already written—I try to fight the same opponent one more time. Then I take the resulting draft and continue to elaborate upon it, and as I do so the traces of the old work disappear.”
