Spanning fiction and essays, Oe’s work tackled a wide range of subjects from militarism and nuclear disarmament to innocence and trauma, and he became an outspoken champion for the voiceless in the face of what he regarded as his country’s failures. Regarded by some in Japan as distinctly western, Oe’s style was often likened to William Faulkner; in his own words, in his writing he would “start from my personal matters and then link it up with society, the state and the world”.
Many of his stories and essays touched on formative events in his life, including the impact of war on Japanese society in novels such as The Silent Cry – which the Nobel committee deemed his masterpiece – and the birth of his son Hikari, which led him to explore his own experience as the father of a disabled child in the novels A Personal Matter and A Quiet Life.
Henry Miller once likened Oe to Dostoevsky, in his “range of hope and despair”, while Edward Said, a friend for 20 years, noted his “extraordinary power of sympathetic understanding”. Fellow laureate Kazuo Ishiguro once described him as “genuinely decent, modest, surprisingly open and honest, and very unconcerned about fame”, while his translator, John Nathan, credited him with “creating a language of his own, in the manner of Faulkner and few Japanese writers before him”. (...)
Influenced by Sartre and American literature, Oe created many disfranchised and grotesque antiheroes. Japanese critics scoffed that his writing “reeked of butter”, having been sullied by western syntax, and he became a target of Japanese conservatives for his criticism of the emperor, and for his depiction of Japan as pathetic and subservient in several sexually explicit stories. After the publication of Sevuntiin (Seventeen), his 1961 novel inspired by the real assassination of Japan’s socialist party chairman the year before, he received death threats and was physically assaulted while lecturing at the University of Tokyo. His 1970 essay Okinawa Notes, in which he detailed how the Japanese military had convinced Okinawan civilians to kill themselves as the allies invaded in 1945, resulted in him being sued in 2005 by two retired officers; three years later, all charges against Oe were dismissed. His 1972 novel The Day He Shall Wipe My Tears Away was a satire of patriotic excess, published just two years after the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima famously performed seppuku after leading a failed coup.
In 1960 Oe married his wife, Yukari. Three years later their first child, Hikari, was born with a herniated brain and doctors urged the parents to let him die. Oe admitted to once wishing for his son’s death – a “disgraceful” thought, he later wrote, that “no powerful detergent has allowed me to wash out of my life”. But encounters with survivors of Hiroshima a month later were transformative, and led to his essay Hiroshima Notes. “I was trained as a writer and as a human being by the birth of my son,” he told the Guardian in 2005. Hikari went on to become a musical prodigy and an award-winning composer, with Oe saying his music sold “better than any of my novels, and I’m proud of that”.
Oe wrote many fictional fathers with disabled sons, in books such as A Personal Matter, The Silent Cry and A Quiet Life, which was adapted for cinema by Oe’s sister-in-law, the director Juzo Itami, with a score based on Hikari’s compositions. In 1995, he wrote a bestselling essay collection, A Healing Family, in which he credited Hikari for teaching him the healing power of art. He rejected accusations that he had exploited his son by writing about him so frankly: “Our relationship is a real one. It’s the most important thing: life comes first, and literature second … I’m always happy to be with him. I can be very lonely and fearful of people. But with my son I’m very free.”
by Sian Cain, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Auad/Alamy
