At the end of 2023, I remember one author again. On March 3, Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe passed away. Oe was the second Japanese writer to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, following Yasunari Kawabata.
However, the Japanese government only officially expressed its condolences for his death. The reason is simple. The Japanese government felt uncomfortable with him. Although he was the author who won the Nobel Prize for literature in Japan, Oe persistently stared at Japan’s past.
He investigated Japanese crimes in Asia and formed a group to defend the 9th Peace Constitution with fellow writers against Japan’s rearmament. People talked about Oe’s work when the Fukushima nuclear accident occurred in 2011 after the East Asian earthquake.
Except for those born in 1935, he ended the war at the age of 10. For a young boy, the end of the war was close to liberation. Japan stopped visiting shrines, and the emperor, whom the Japanese worshiped so much, returned to normal life. The rest of the generation was the first to break free from the yoke of militarism and receive a democratic education after the war. Besides studying Chinese literature at Tokyo University, he actively participated in social movements, taking the lead in the ‘Snagawa’ struggle against the expansion of airfields in the United States.
In 1957, he won the May 1st prize for publishing a short story titled “Strange Part-time Worker” in the Tokyo University Press. The following year, he won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award, for “Farming,” and Oe emerged as a representative writer in his 20s. The main theme of Oe’s novel was “The Powerless Young Man.” The themes of the novel were everywhere.
In 1960, a 17-year-old Japanese high school student killed Inejiro Asanuma, the leader of the Japanese Socialist Party, at a Tokyo subway station. The murder of a politician of the Progressive Party by a teenager with the ideology of emperor worship shocked Japanese society. Considering the incident in which a man in his 60s attacked the neck of Lee Jae-myung, the leader of the Democratic Party of Korea, who was visiting Busan on the 2nd, one can guess the shock.
Using this incident as a motif, Oe released a novel, SEVENTEEN, and A Politician Boy Dies. The novel was a satirical novel about a high school student in inferiority complex who recovers his self-esteem by participating in a rally to praise the emperor.
Since then, Oe has suffered from death threats from Japan’s far-right. Oe went through another ordeal shortly thereafter. He had the first son, Hikari, in 1963, but the child had a skull problem. Hikari lost his normal intelligence while undergoing surgery to remove the head lump, and he was unable to see or speak.
Oe did not fall into despair. He published his novel “Personal Experience” (1964), based on his experiences with deformed babies, and a report “Hiroshima Note” (1965), which interviews survivors of the atomic bomb. Oe’s commitment to confront personal and human tragedies without silence has become stronger since he welcomed his son.
Oe developed human tragedies such as personal tragedies of raising children with disabilities and wars into the theme of the novel. The novel “Flood Reaches My Soul” (1973) is about a man who escapes to a refuge with his son, Jin, who has an intellectual disability to escape the crisis of nuclear war.
The novel, which was translated and published this year, became a hot topic at a time of heightened conflict over the discharge of contaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant. It was because of the novel’s remarkable contemporaneity, which was published 50 years ago.
In 1994, Oe criticized Yasunari Kawabata, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature at the Nobel Prize in Literature. Recalling Japan’s mistakes, Oe said she couldn’t agree with Yasunari Kawabata, who praised “Japan’s beauty.”
He also rejected the Order of Culture and the Order of Culture, which was awarded by the Japanese emperor in honor of his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He said that as a “postwar democrat,” he could not recognize any authority that precedes democracy.
With this incident, foreigners were again targeted by Japanese far-right forces. They continued their activities undaunted. When he visited Korea shortly after winning the Nobel Prize, he sent a petition demanding the release of Hwang Seok-yeong, who was arrested by President Kim Young-sam, and participated in the campaign for the release of Soviet author Solzhenitsyn.
When the Japanese government actively cooperated with the war during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Oe opposed the dispatch of the Self-Defense Forces overseas and formed the 9th Peace Constitution Protection Group with fellow writers such as Shuichi Kato (1919-2008) and Takeshi Umehara (1925-2019).
Despite the active activities of conscientious intellectuals, Japanese society, which lost its social vitality due to the economic downturn, gradually turned to the right. The far-right group Republic of Korea, which especially hates Zainichi (Korean-born in Japan), expanded its power, and more religious groups, including Ohm Jin-ri-kyo, carried out extreme terrorism.
Mr. Oe lamented that Japan lost the opportunity to look back on the past as it jumped on the Cold War order and sought only economic growth. His regret is heavily embodied in his later works, such as “Iksa” and “The Mannyeon Bookstorey.”
After 2013, Oe declared that he would never finish writing and devoted himself to social activities, but he eventually closed his eyes without seeing the world he wanted. Oe did not give up hope until the end. His novel Every Year at a Farmhouse, written after the Fukushima nuclear accident, contains a poem written by the main character, Joko Kogito, as he welcomed his first grandchild.
The poem contains Oe’s firm hope for a better world after getting her son Hikari. “To my young children, the old man wants to answer/ I cannot live again. But/ we can live again.”
Kenzaburo Oe. He was a ‘writer’, ‘intellectual’ and ‘father’. I’d gladly offer the old formula ‘Great’ before him. One person left, and we confirmed our hope of living again.
SALLY
ASIA JOURNAL
