![]() ![]() The novel explores, often with brutal sincerity, the conflict of a man unsure whether to let the child die or to coexist with it, thus giving up his dreams of an exotic life. ![]() Possibly the best known of Ōe’s novels, it follows the narrator “Bird” as he faces a personal crisis after his son is born with a brain herniation requiring immediate surgery. ![]() Here is a list of five books to help you navigate Ōe’s writings. In the words of his English translator John Nathan, his works feature a “language all his own, a language which can accommodate the virulence of his imagination”. He portrayed human nature in all its aspects, even the most cruel, with great inventiveness. He wrote about the dangers of nuclear weapons and the aftermath of Hiroshima and about the communities and folklore of his native rural island Shikoku. He wrote on taboo themes in Japan such as disability through his life with his son Hikari, who was born with a herniated brain, autism and epilepsy. When he was awarded the Nobel prize in 1994, he said that as a novelist he wished to “enable both those who express themselves with words and their readers to recover from their own sufferings and the sufferings of their time, and to cure their souls of the wounds”. Kenzaburō Ōe, the last of Japan’s great post second world war Japanese writers, died in early March. ![]() Source: The Conversation – UK – By Filippo Cervelli, Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Japanese Literature, SOAS, University of London ![]()
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