Kenzaburo Oé is dead. The critical conscience of Japan, Nobel Prize for Literature 1994, died "of old age" on March 3, at the age of 88, as his publisher Kodansha announced yesterday in a short note, in which it was specified that the funeral has taken place in family privacy.
Oé always found his country's mentality very similar to that which led to World War II. "I am against the concept of an army, a group of people who do not move according to their conscience but following the orders of other people - he told this newspaper, at his home in Tokyo, at the end of 2005 -. Unfortunately, in today's Japanese society, not only in the army, but also at work, there are very few who have their own conscience, who are mentally independent."
It is difficult to highlight, among the more than forty books he published - of which barely half have been translated into Spanish or Catalan - which are his best works. There is, of course, A Personal Matter (1964), based on his experience, in which an English teacher is the father of a baby born with a head deformity. Another outstanding novel is El grito silenciosa (1967), in which two brothers return to their native town; one raises the neighbors against a supermarket owner and the other embarks on an introspective journey. A ¡Despertad, oh jóvenes de la nueva era! (1983), narrates the difficult relationship between a father named K and his hydrocephalic son, which includes aggression and moments of great fatigue along with bright scenes in which paternal love shines. Salto mortal (1999) is directly inspired by the 1995 sarin gas attack in Tokyo: a teacher returns from the US and looks for a former student, but is surprised to see him involved in a cult.
Oé spoke to us about horror: terrorism, war, destructive personal relationships... Violence is always present in his work. "I don't sing about violence - he told this newspaper -, I reflect it with my artifices as a writer in the most realistic, graphic and visual way, in an objective way, as if it were a documentary, because then the reader wonders what this can lead us to”. And sexuality? "In my country it is very repressed, there is a great stench. I'm talking about a happy sexuality, where the young man is freed to express himself one hundred percent".
He opposed the militarism of his governments and was threatened by extreme right-wing groups, such as when he refused to receive the Order of Culture of Japan in 1994 because it was granted by the emperor: "I do not recognize any authority, any value, superior to democracy".
In 1963, his son Hikari was born, who "suffered a life-or-death operation - he explained to us, in front of a steaming cup of tea - as it was necessary to remove a bright red lump, as big as a second head, attached to the back of his skull”. The result of the intervention was an irreversible mental disability. Oé's reaction was to travel to Hiroshima to explore the suffering. The essays of Cuadernos de Hiroshima came from there. “It was the most exhausting and depressing trip of my life. But when I had been there for a week, I found the key to getting out of the neurotic and decadent pit I had fallen into: the deep humanity of its people. I was impressed by his courage, his way of living and his way of thinking. Even if it seems strange, I was the one who left there encouraged by them, and not the other way around. Since that day, I look at the world through the eyes of the people of Hiroshima."
Oé is Japan's second Nobel Prize in Literature, after Yasunari Kawabata (1968). He is survived by his wife, Yukari, sons Hikari and Natsumiko, and daughter Sakurao.
