Japanese writing legend and Nobel laureate in literature Kenzaburo Oi has passed away at the age of 88.
giants of Japanese writing
Spanning fiction and essays, Oi’s work tackled a wide range of topics from militarism and nuclear disarmament to innocence and trauma, and he became an outspoken champion for the voiceless as his country’s failures. Regarded by some in Japan as uniquely Western, Oe’s style was often compared to that of William Faulkner; In his own words, his writings “started with my personal affairs and then linked it to the society, the state, and the world”.
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Japanese society in novels like Silent Cry
Many of his stories and essays touch on early events in his life, including the effects of the war on Japanese society in novels such as The Silent Cry—which the Nobel Committee considered his masterpiece—and the birth of his son Hikari, which inspired him to write a novel. Explore his experience as a father of a disabled child in Personal Matters and A Quiet Life.
Oi died on March 3, due to old age.
Henry Miller once compared Oi to Dostoevsky in his “range of hope and despair”, while Edward Said, a friend of 20 years, noted his “extraordinary power of sympathetic understanding”. Fellow laureate Kazuo Ishiguro once described him as “genuinely decent, humble, surprisingly open and honest, and very unconcerned about fame”, while his translator John Nathan described him as “in the manner of Faulkner and credited with creating his own language”. some Japanese writers before him”.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the Strange
Born in 1935 in Ose, a remote village in the forests of Shikoku, Oi was the fifth of seven children, growing up on his grandmother’s and mother’s folk tales. When Oi’s father died in World War II in 1944, his mother began to educate him with books including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Strange Adventures of Nils Holgersson, the influence of which, he was responsible for his 1994 Nobel Prize Award. Will say in a speech, he will “take to the grave”.
About friendship between POWs
The post-war currency reform threw his family, wholesalers of banknote paper, into uncertainty. Oe was the only one of his siblings to go to university, study French, and become a journalist. He began publishing fiction in 1957, and within a year his novel Shiku (The Catch), about a friendship between a Japanese child and a black American POW, won the Oya Akutagawa Prize at the age of 23. His first novel Memushiri Kouchi (Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids), published in 1958, follows a group of child delinquents who are taken to a war-time village, and are then killed by the villagers. is abandoned by
