The Nobel prize-winning novelist and essayist Kenzaburō Ōe, who has died aged 88, made his name as a cult author for Japan’s rebellious postwar youth. His early fiction – titles such as Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (1958), Seventeen (1961) and J (1963), peopled with juvenile delinquents, political fanatics and subway perverts – gave voice to an alienated generation who witnessed the collapse of their parents’ values with the defeat of the second world war. His wartime childhood fed a lifelong pacifism, and his scourging of resurgent militarism and consumerism. Yet his decisive rebirth as a writer came through fatherhood.
When Ōe was 28, his first child, Hikari, was born with a herniated brain protruding from his skull. Surgery risked brain damage, and doctors urged Ōe and his wife, Yukari, to let the infant die – a “disgraceful” time, he later wrote, that “no powerful detergent” could expunge. Then also working as a journalist, Ōe fled to report on a peace rally in Hiroshima. His encounters with hibakusha (atomic-bomb survivors) and doctors there convinced him his son must live – a moment he saw as a “conversion”. As he told me in Tokyo just after his 70th birthday – when I met him for a Guardian profile– “I was trained as a writer and as a human being by the birth of my son.”
The imaginative link between his stricken son and the survivors of nuclear fallout and military aggression – the personal and the political – is Ōe’s most profound literary insight. Intolerance of the weak to the point of euthanasia has historically presaged militarism – in imperial Japan as in Nazi Germany. Ōe’s lifelong commitment to Hikari (nicknamed “Pooh” after AA Milne’s bear) inspired a unique cycle of fiction whose protagonists are fathers of brain-damaged sons – often named Eeyore – and pervades his literary vision.
His conversion was reflected in a volume of essays, Hiroshima Notes (1965), and the novel A Personal Matter (1964), whose antihero Bird takes refuge in alcohol and adultery until he resolves to rescue his newborn “two-headed monster”. Its translator John Nathan thought it the “most passionate and original and funniest and saddest Japanese book I had ever read”. Ōe’s masterpiece, The Silent Cry, in which the narrator and his violently rebellious brother (both facets of the author) clash over family history, was published in 1967. These novels, published in English translation in, respectively, 1969 and 1988, brought Ōe the international recognition that culminated in the 1989 Prix Europalia and 1994 Nobel prize for literature.
His Nobel lecture, Japan, the Ambiguous and Myself, was a rejoinder to the 1968 Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata, who had lectured on Japan, the Beautiful and Myself. Ōe spoke of a Japan, after its “cataclysmic” 19th-century modernisation drive, vacillating between Europe and Asia, western modernity and tradition, aggression and human decency – a polarisation he felt as a “deep scar” from which he wrote to free himself.
The novelist Kazuo Ishiguro told me Ōe was “fascinated by what’s not been said” about Japan’s wartime past. Believing the writer’s role to be akin to a canary in a coalmine, he assailed that reticence head on. “Did the Japanese really learn anything from the defeat of 1945?” he wrote in a 50th anniversary foreword to Hiroshima Notes. Although nuclear atrocity, and the drive to rebuild Japan as a cold-war ally, encouraged a sense of victimhood, one of the neglected lessons, for Ōe, was that his parents’ generation were not just victims but aggressors in Asia.
Ōe was born in Ose, a remote mountain village of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands. His father was killed in 1944, and his mother saw a flash in the sky when far-off Hiroshima was bombed. Ōe was 10 when Emperor Hirohito surrendered in 1945 and robbed Ōe’s generation of their innocence. All that had seemed true became a lie. Fear and relief as US jeeps rolled in with the allied occupation of 1945-52 created a lasting ambivalence. Ōe, who later campaigned against US military bases in Okinawa, said: “I admired and respected English-speaking culture, but resented the occupation.”
His family were driven out of their banknote-paper business by currency reform. At Tokyo University in 1954-59, where he studied French, his country accent made Ōe feel an outsider, but a 1957 novella (translated as Prize Stock in the collection Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness), in which a boy’s friendship with a black American PoW is destroyed by war, won him the Akutagawa prize for best debut, at 23. Inspired by Rabelais’ grotesque realism, Sartre’s existentialism and an American tradition from Huckleberry Finn to Catcher in the Rye, he created antiheroes who courted disgrace in their disgust at civilisation. His assault on traditional values extended to the Japanese language. Nathan noted a “fine line between artful rebellion and mere unruliness”.
At his home in a quiet Tokyo suburb, visitors could not fail to be struck by his humility and self-deprecating humour. As he amiably recounted meeting Chairman Mao in Beijing in 1960, with his “Giant Panda cigarettes”, Ōe mimed smoking them with relish. Just as striking was his devotion to family. He married Yukari, the daughter of the prewar film director Mansaku Itami, in 1960, and Hikari, the first of their three children, was born in 1963. Although Hikari’s condition circumscribed his father’s life, it also enlarged it. It was through their relationship that Ōe grasped the “role of the weak in helping avoid the horrors of war” (the subject of a fictitious musical) and the “wondrous healing power of art”.
Hikari’s rare talent for identifying birdsong was spotted when he was six. Despite autism, visual impairment, epilepsy and learning disabilities, he had perfect pitch and became a renowned composer – the joint subject of Lindsley Cameron’s book on father and son, The Music of Light (1998). Yet in novels by Ōe such as Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age! (1983) – the title from William Blake – it is not Eeyore’s talent that is redemptive but the innocence he incarnates. Confronting parental ambivalence about the maturing sexuality of their children, that novel reveals fear of the vulnerable to be a projection of the darkness within ourselves.
Ōe’s post-Nobel novels could be large and, for some, unwieldy. The doomsday cult in Somersault (1999) resembled Aum Shinrikyo, perpetrators of the 1995 Tokyo subway gas attack, but the trauma of an apocalyptic leader renouncing his twisted faith harked back to the war. The Changeling (2000) fictionalised Ōe’s friendship with Juzo Itami (his wife’s brother). The director of the cult comedy Tampopo (1985), and a 1995 film adaptation of Ōe’s novel A Quiet Life (1990), Juzo died after falling from the roof of his office building in 1997, five years after his face was slashed by yakuza gangsters whom he had ridiculed on screen. In Death By Water (2009), Ōe’s alter-ego Kogito (the name a wry nod to Descartes) strives to write a novel about his father’s death.
Yet it is for the “idiot son” cycle that Ōe may most vividly be remembered. “I believe in tolerance,” Ōe said, and how the innocent “can play a role in fighting against violence”. After 1945, he felt strongly, Japan should have “stood up with the weak … the weak are a value in themselves.”
He is survived by Yukari, and their children, Hikari, another son, Sakurao, and a daughter, Natsumiko.
• Kenzaburō Ōe, writer, born 31 January 1935; died 3 March 2023
