Kenzaburo Oe

On this day in 1935 was born in a Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994. He began to write as a student of French literature at the University of Tokyo, and even then the novel “Lovina” received the most prestigious Japanese award “Akutagawa”.

One of the most Japanese writers in the world, and his literary work was marked by the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and personal tragedy because his son was born in 1963 with brain damage. Next year, the same day published two of his books, is one of “personal experience” with the main character a young child’s brain-damaged father, and the other is a book of essays on the survivors in Hiroshima – “Records of Hiroshima”. He refused the Order of Culture in 1994, which he was awarded the Government of Japan on the news of the Nobel Prize, because he thought that the then Japanese politicians are far from true democracy. After the announcement that the Nobel Prize reporters said that the award was recognition of his literary generation that made a decisive cut and separated from the pre-war Japanese nationalism and war.

One of the most famous of peace and environmental activists in Japan. “What can be said about civilization whose greatest achievement of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima?” He said once. The reasoning of the Nobel Committee said: “In his ‘grotesque realism’ There is powerful poetry that breaks through the limitations of language and culture, poetry full of fresh observations and reduced the scene.”