Writer Kenzaburo Oe died early on March 3 of natural causes, Japan’s publisher of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Kodansha, announced today.
In a statement, the publisher stressed that Oe has “deceased of old age” and that the family has already held the funeral of the writer, a progressive and maverick Japanese icon.
Born in 1935, in a remote village on Shikoku Island, southwestern Japan, in the middle of a vast forest, an environment he often used for his work, Oe studied French literature at the University of Tokyo.
In his work, he tirelessly denounced violence against the weak and spoke out against the conformism of modern Japanese society.
In 1958, he won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for Young Authors for “The Capture”. The tragic story of an African-American pilot captured by a Japanese community during World War II would later be made into a movie by Nagisa Oshima.
Oe won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994, becoming the second Japanese author to receive that award.
The jury praised the writer at the time as someone “who creates with great poetic power an imaginary world in which life and myth merge into a confused picture of the current fragile human situation”.
Soon after, Oe turned down the Order of Culture, a Japanese award bestowed by the emperor, something that caused controversy. “I cannot recognize any authority, any value superior to democracy,” he justified.
The writer was a staunch supporter of the anti-nuclear cause and the pacifist constitution adopted by Japan after World War II.
Hated by Japanese nationalists, Oe would be sued for defamation but acquitted, having recalled in the essay “Notes from Okinawa” (1970) that civilians had been driven to suicide by Japanese soldiers during the 1945 Battle of Okinawa.
Source: DN
