Last Updated 1-30-96
Kenzaburo Oé was born in 1935, in a small Japanese town on the island of Shikoku. As a young boy, he was caught up in the fervor and propaganda of the second World War. He, like most boys his age, was ready to die for his country and his emperor. However, when the war ended, and young Oé heard the emeror on the radio, he realized that his great hero was a mere human. Such a disillusionment at such an early age influenced his life and his writing.
Oé was content with living in his small village; however, since there was no university near his home, he was forced to leave for Tokyo at the age of seventeen. In Tokyo, he had to re-learn Japanese, due to the different dialect spoken in his village. It was at this point that he started writing. He felt he was losing all ties with his home, and at first began writing what he refers to as "the mythology of his village". During this time, he wrote many short stories, and a novella, The Catch, for which he won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's equivalent of the Pulitzer.
Despite this initial success, Oé was not popular, either with the readers or the critics. His first two novels, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids and Our Age were panned by the critics as being too dark, dreary, and un-elegant. Oé continued writeing, however, and put out about one novel a year.
In 1963, Oé's son, Hikari, was born. Hikari was born with a brain hernia, and doctors gave him little chance of living any significant amount of time, and said that even if he did, he would be severely retarded. Oé and his wife almost decided to abandon the child, but before they did, Oé went to a memorial for those killed at Hiroshima; here he realized that he could not take the easy way out and abandon his child.
The birth of Hikari caused a change in Oé's writing: he was now writing about his son, and the relationship they shared. His first novel after the birth of his son, A Personal Matter, is about a father dealing with the birth of a mentally handicapped child. Since then, Oé has written several stories with similar themes, which he refers to as his "idiot son" stories.
It is probably for these stories that Oé is best known, and also probably these stories that were mainly significant in his winning the Nobel Prize in 1994. Although some people suggest that Oé won the prize as a figurehead for Japan, most feel that he won it on his own merit. It is interesting to note that immediately after accepting the Nobel Prize, Oé refused to accept the Order of Cultural Merit, one of Japan's highest honors. He did this because of his distrust of the Japanese government.
Immediately after accepting the Nobel Prize, Oé announced that he was finished writing novels. His stated reason for this is that he wrote his fiction to give a voice to his son, and now his son has his own voice. Hikari has become a composer, with two CDs currently in release and selling well, both in Japan and in the U.S. , and he has become famous in Japan in his own right. No one really knows what Oé will do now, perhaps not even him. He has accepted a guest professorship at Harvard for next year, but beyond that, his current plans are unknown.
Last Updated 1-30-96