The literary world mourns the loss of Japanese Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe

class=”sc-97fd9fa8-0 jNFKxv”>

As one of the foremost representatives of Japanese post-war literature, Oe was a constant admonisher and warner into old age and did not shy away from taking a clear stand against the attempts of the ruling conservatives to change the pacifist post-war constitution. At the same time, he was at the forefront of a movement of people in his country demanding a phase-out of nuclear energy after the Fukushima nuclear disaster caused by an earthquake and tsunami exactly 12 years ago.

Oe was something like Japan’s social conscience. Former Chancellor Willy Brandt once said that Oe apparently played the same role in his country as Günter Grass did in Germany: the polluter. Both winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature – Oe’s correspondence with Grass was published in Germany in 1995 – spoke the lessons of their country’s painful past in both their work and their actions.

For many, Oe was the first modern writer in Japan with strong European influences and influences, not least through French existentialism. However, Oe achieved his literary breakthrough with his early story “Der Fang” (1958) about the world of children’s experiences and adventures through impressions of the war. It was not always an easy read, “consumable”, especially for readers in the Western world.

Oe liked to upend European reading habits (“I don’t make it easy for my readers”), but his literary stature was soon recognized even before the Nobel Prize was awarded – Henry Miller even brought Oe close to Dostoyevsky. Oe himself called his narrative style ‘grotesque realism’ and liked to refer to the French poet François Rabelais (1494-1553).

But German authors such as Grimmelshausen and Goethe also made an impression on him. Shortly before his 80th birthday, a German translation of his autobiographical essays appeared in “Light shines on my roof”. It is about his mentally handicapped son Hikari, who composes classical music. His son’s birth was also the subject of perhaps his best-known novel, the 1964 masterpiece “A Personal Experience.” “An act of self-development barely known in European literature,” wrote one reviewer.

In Japan, Oe co-founded a civilian organization that campaigned for the preservation of Article 9 of the post-war peace constitution. Oe, long regarded as a literary loner or leftist intellectual “citizen angst”, spoke repeatedly on the subject. As the government of the recently assassinated right-wing conservative ex-premier Shinzo Abe passed, among other things, a law to increase the punishment of secret treason and continued to strengthen the role of the military, Oe warned that Japan was falling back into the times that led until the Second World War. “I feel Japan has reached a turning point.”

Another central theme for Oe, who was born on January 31, 1935 on the island of Shikoku in southwestern Japan into a noble samurai family and remained marked by his rural origins, was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, where in May of that year the G7 – Summit of Western economic powers takes place.

“Hiroshima should be etched in our memory: it is a catastrophe even more dramatic than natural disasters because it is man-made. To repeat this with the same disregard for human life at nuclear power plants is the worst betrayal of the memory of the Hiroshima victims,” ​​Oe said in an interview following the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

The Swedish Nobel Prize Committee, which awarded Oe the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature, recognized not only Oe’s literary work, but also his role as a social critic and as a warning against the uncritical Westernization of his homeland. Oe, who once called himself the “black sheep” of Japanese literature, counted Thomas Mann among his role models when it came to combining literary and socio-political interests.

(SDA)

Source: Blick