Kenzaburo Oe: five books to enter into the work of the late Nobel pacifist and anti-nuclear

Kenzaburō Oethe second Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize in LiteratureHe died at the age of 88. As announced by the Kodansha publishing house, the author of books such as a personal matter, Dam there Uproot the seeds, shoot the children “died of old age in the early hours of March 3.”

His work is known for the clear pacifist and anti-nuclear position for which he preached all his life, given the influence that the atrocities of the Second World War and the Pacific War they had in their literature. But it will also be marked by the birth of her first child, diagnosed with hydrocephalus there autismwhose complications have penetrated into his books.

Afterwards, GlobeLiveMedia Lisons share a list of five essential books For anyone who wants to enter the work of one of the most important Japanese writers of the 20th century, whose absence leaves an impossible void in Japanese and world literature.

For his first novel, Kenzaburō Oe it is inspired by an event from his childhood that will mark the years to come. During the years of the Pacific War (which made the United States the first power in this ocean and meant the fall of the japanese empire), an enemy plane crashes into the mountains of a hunting village and its inhabitants take their sole survivor, a black soldier, as captive.

The children of the village, isolated because of the bad weather and the war, will constantly contemplate this foreign being in their eyes, to the point that it ends transforming from a hostage into an almost divine figure for the villagers against the backdrop of a Japan that would change forever.

With this novel, published in 1957, Ōe received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, the first of what was to be a career full of both Japanese and international recognition.

Although this was the second novel he published, in 1958 it was Ōe’s first. It tells the adventures of a group of fifteen teenagers from a correctional school who, during the war, had to be evacuated to an isolated and remote mountain town, which the mayor considers urgently needed. remove the most problematic “from the seed”.

And if they are troublemakers, the protagonist is one of those young people who will attract the most attention from the authorities because he is the leader of a gang of troublemakers, among whom is his little brother and his henchmen, all marginalized criminalsfeared and hated by the local peasants.

But the plot of this novel only begins at one Epidemic which threatens to destroy the village and forces the inhabitants to leave the premises. But, before leaving, they leave the teenagers locked in the empty city, where their attempts to build a life outside of the nightmare lived in Japan at the time are doomed.

Ōe is widely known for his position pacifist and anti-nuclear, which he reflects not only in his activism but also in his literature. One of his most remarkable books to deepen his ideas is Hiroshima Notebooksin which he collects the testimonies of the “forgotten of August 6, 1945”: old people condemned to loneliness, disfigured women and doctors who fought against the toxic effects of radiation.

For this, the author went to Hiroshima in August 1963 within the framework of the ninth world conference against nuclear weapons. In this book, Ōe asks a series of questions which, in any case, he does not answer, but leaves them as questions to think about in the future, so that such situations do not happen again in the years to come. Can you make sense of a destroyed life? What remains after a nuclear disaster? Is it possible to end this part of Hiroshima that we all carry inside?

As its title indicates, this novel is, in addition to one of the most remarkable of all his vast bibliography, also his work more intimate and personal. With strong inspiration in his own life, this book is based on the diagnosis of hydrocephalus and autism of her first child.

Here, the author deploys all his fears and obsessions that he will later maintain in his next works, especially everything that revolves around the relationship with his son, Hikari Ōe, as can be seen in other titles like The waters invaded my soul, Awake, O young people of the new age! there contemporary games.

The protagonist of the novel is Bird (“bird” in English, whose name could be an indication of his elusive personality), a 27-year-old man who, on the verge of becoming a father, dreams of fleeing to Africa in order to avoid the rigid fate of family life. But everything will change when your child is born with a cerebral herniawhich condemns him to imminent death or to a vegetative life.

As with much of his work, Ōe drew inspiration from his private life for this novel, one of the last he published. Renacimiento, released in bookstores in the early 2000s, is based on the suicide of filmmaker Juzo Itamibrother-in-law of the author, a fact which deeply shocked Japanese society and which is still attributed to the dreaded japanese mobsterTHE yakuza.

Ōe recounts his encounters and those of his brother-in-law Itami with the violent world of this criminal gang, who both clashed in their artistic creations. Thus, by mixing the harshness of reality with the strength of fiction, she weaves a story that links loss to the hope of new births.

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