Kenzaburo Oe
Kenzaburo Oe
Kenzaburō Ōeis a Japanese writer and a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature. His novels, short stories and essays were strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory. They deal with political, social and philosophical issues including nuclear weapons, nuclear power, social non-conformism, and existentialism...
NationalityJapanese
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth31 January 1935
CountryJapan
stills
The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live.
jobs firsts literature
It is the second job of literature to create myth. But its first job is to destroy it.
jesus men effort
There could be joy in destruction, too, couldn't there? Isn't Jesus Christ's Second Coming supposed to occur only after a lot of unmitigated destruction? But again, human history is fraught with tragedies in which man spared no effort to destroy with millenarian joy, only to learn that no messiah appeared afterwards.
care green watches
It takes a person of great care and insight to watch for any abnormality in the green grass even while it grows abundantly and healthily.
jobs sorrow clown
The writer's job is the job of a clown …the clown who also talks about sorrow.
hangover agony suffering
If any suffering was fruitless it was the agony of a hangover; what he suffered now could not expiate suffering of any other kind.
reading sleep night
By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors.
children firsts married
After I got married, the first child born to us was mentally handicapped.
war principles morality
The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War.
reading reading-experience written
There's no better reading experience than going to the place where a text was written.
voice style firsts
Fundamentally a good author has his or her own sense of style. There is a natural, deep voice, and that voice is present from the first draft of a manuscript. When he or she elaborates on the initial manuscript, it continues to strengthen and simplify that natural, deep voice.
reality support half
Even though we now have the half-century-old new Constitution, there is a popular sentiment of support for the old one that lives on in reality in some quarters.
war forever world
After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution.
suffering form novel
I have survived by representing these sufferings of mine in the form of the novel.