A guide to Kenzaburo Oe’s novels, interviews

A brief guide to Oe and his writings.

Keystone: “Personal Issues”

Oe is best known for this 1964 semi-autobiographical novel. This novel is Dirk’s comedy about a young academic who decides to leave his wife after a baby is born with a brain herniation. ‘Personal Issues’ is the first of what will be some A novel about the life of Ōe’s son Hikari, who appears under his own or other names (Eeyore, Mori, Kikuhiko) throughout his father’s fiction. The experience of raising children with severe mental disorders is what Ohe called his one of the central and structured pillars of his work.

Nonfiction Masterpiece “Hiroshima Note”

Ōe is primarily known as a novelist, but his 1965 collection of essays, Hiroshima Notes, is one of his bestsellers. Based on interviews with survivors and the doctors and nurses who cared for them, the book also provides a graphic depiction of the efforts of the American and Japanese governments to suppress the most horrific aspects of the aftermath of the atomic bombings. Offers.

What Ohe himself might have recommended: “The Silent Cry”

1967’s “Silent Cry” follows two brothers who return to their native village to put their childhood home up for sale, only to find themselves caught up in their dark past and reenacting the disturbing deeds of their ancestors. It’s a story to notice. “It was the work of my youth, and the flaws are obvious,” Ohe told an interviewer. “But I think it’s the most successful thing. The flaws are everything.”

Something else: “Oh wake up young people of the new age!”

The novel Rouse Up follows a father revisiting an old and impossible promise to unravel all the complexities of his 20-year-old son Eeyore’s life. The mysterious romantic William Blake uses poetry to bridge the gap between them.

Lyric novelist and Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe dies at 88

To know more about Oe’s life…

Read his interview in “The Paris Review”.

“I don’t find it that interesting to listen to,” Ohe told Sarah Faye in 2007. I have never been to a new world. I don’t have many amazing experiences. I’ve been through many little things. I write about those little experiences, modify them, and re-experience them through modification. ‘ But Ōe is on topics ranging from his prose (“very hard, very twisted, complicated”) to everyday habits (How to Cope with Insomnia: 4 Bottles of Whiskey and 2-4 Beers). , are disarming and outspoken, which makes their conversation a fascinating read. — he admits that this tends to reduce his reading ability).

Read Oe’s New Yorker profile from 1995.

The profile was prompted by Ohe telling listeners that he planned to stop writing fiction after he won the Nobel Prize and his son’s music was released, David Remnick reported at the time. Did. — Somehow I don’t have to speak for my son Hikari, who suffered severe brain damage. This profile provides a very intimate look at Ōe’s life, including his strained relationship with novelist Yukio Mishima, and hints at the political activities he would undertake later in life.

Listen to his Nobel Prize lecture.

Oe quotes a speech given by Yasunari Kawabata, Japan’s first Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1968, and offers his own meditation on what it means to be a Japanese writer. A remote, peripheral, or outlying area of ​​a country. ”

And when you’re done reading, here’s more:

Please listen to Hikari Oe’s music.

After pictures of Hikari’s music appeared in several of Oe’s books and the president of Nippon Columbia took an interest, Hikari became a popular classical composer, mainly for piano, flute, and violin. In 1995 one reviewer wrote that the music was “perfectly approachable”. ”

Watch a movie by Juzo Itami.

Itami, Ōe’s brother-in-law, inspired Ōe’s novel The Changeling (2000). What made Itami internationally famous was his “Noodle Western”, “Tampopo”, published in 1985, in which ragtag his band tries to save a single mother’s failing ramen shop. But if you want to explore the connection between Itami and Oe, you might want to look for “A Quiet Life,” about a young woman left to care for her brother after her mother and author father move out. . Australia.