Death of Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe, humanist and non-conformist figure

The Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, died on March 3 at the age of 88, the Kodansha publishing house announced on Monday March 13. “He died of old age in the early hours of March 3,” the publisher said in a statement explaining that his funeral had already been arranged by his family.

An intellectual figure apart in Japan, Kenzaburo Oe was an ardent defender of the anti-nuclear cause and of the pacifist Constitution of his country.

Born on January 31, 1935, he grew up in a remote hamlet on the island of Shikoku, in the middle of a vast forest, a setting he would frequently use in his work, like a mythical microcosm of humanity.

As a child, he gorged himself on the subversive legends of his village told to him by his mother and grandmother. But his youth was darkened by the Second World War and the deadly propaganda of the Japanese militarist regime inculcated at school.

Traumatized by the capitulation of Japan after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, it is however very quickly conquered by the democratic principles brought by the American occupier.

Passionate about French letters

At the age of 16, reading a book on the French Renaissance provoked an illumination in him: “The expression ‘meaning of free examination’ which comes up often in this book seemed to show me the path to follow for the future”, will say does it much later.

The teenager decides to go to study French literature at the prestigious University of Tokyo, and begins his literary career while still a student. It enjoyed early success, with short stories with disturbing subjects and grotesque or off-center characters, an unconscious mirror of the malaise of post-war Japanese youth.

In 1958, he won the prestigious Akutagawa prize for young authors for “Gibier d’Élevage”. This tragic story featuring an African-American pilot captive of a Japanese village community during the Second World War will be adapted to the cinema shortly after by Nagisa Oshima.

The same year released his first great novel, “Tear the buds, shoot the children”, a social fable about kids from a reformatory left to their own devices in Japan during the war.

Express yourself in the margins

From the outset, the provincial writer decided to stay “on the periphery”, promising never to collaborate “with those who are at the center and have power”.

The birth in 1963 of a handicapped son, Hikari (“Light” in Japanese), will upset his personal life and give new impetus to his work. “Writing and living with my son overlap and these two activities can only deepen each other. I told myself that it would probably be there that my imagination could take shape”, he will explain later.

“A Personal Affair” (1964) is the first of a long series of novels inspired by his private life, which depicts a young father confronted with the shock of the birth of a severely handicapped baby, to the point of considering kill.

His “Notes from Hiroshima” (1965) are a collection of poignant testimonies of victims of August 6, 1945. Then in his “Notes from Okinawa” (1970), he is interested in the tragic fate of this small peripheral archipelago of Japan, which will not be handed over by the United States until 1972.

Hated by Japanese nationalists, Kenzaburo Oe would be sued for defamation decades later for having recalled in this essay that civilians had been driven to suicide by Japanese soldiers during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. He won his case at the end of his trial. a long procedure.

His nostalgia for the forest and the myths of his childhood will be another great source of inspiration for his novels “The Game of the Century”, “M/T and the story of the wonders of the forest”. In 1994, the Nobel Prize for Literature consecrated the one “who, with great poetic force, creates an imaginary world where life and myth condense to form a confusing picture of the current fragile human situation”.

His refusal shortly after of the Order of Culture, a Japanese distinction awarded by the Emperor, will cause scandal in his country. “I cannot recognize any authority, any value higher than democracy”, had justified the writer, faithful to his ideal.

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