“ returns to his hometown village in search of a red suitcase rumored to hold documents revealing the details of his father’s death during World War II, details that will serve as the foundation for his new, and final, novel. Now, with Somersault, Oe has broken his silence and shared with us the result of his artistic reorientation, in a magnificent story of the charisma of leaders, the danger of zealotry, and the mystery of faith.” (Adapted from Catalogue)
When he won the Nobel Prize nearly ten years ago, he announced that he would no longer be writing fiction–or, if he did, that his future work would be radically different from the highly autobiographical fiction he was known for. “Kenzaburo Oe is internationally recognized as one of the world’s finest writers. As K struggles to understand his family and assess his responsibilities within it, he must also reevaluate himself - his relationship with his own father, the political stances he has taken, the duty of artists and writers in society. K’s wife confronts him with the information that this child, Eeyore, has been doing disturbing things - behaving aggressively, asserting that he’s dead, even brandishing a knife at his mother - and K, given to retreating from reality into abstraction, looks for answers in his lifelong love of William Blake’s poetry. “K is a famous writer living in Tokyo with his wife and three children, one of whom is mentally disabled. Rouse up o young men of the new age / Ōe, Kenzaburō We have a wide range of his works available in both English and Japanese: Several critics said of him that, like Faulkner, he created a language of his own. Henry Miller once said that in his “range of hope and despair” he was like Dostoevsky. He continued writing late into his seventies, railing against any revival of Japanese nationalism, nuclear power and war. In the 1960s, he became more political and was a highly acclaimed cult writer for Japan’s post-war youth. īorn in 1935 as the fifth of seven children into an age where the emperor was still regarded as a living god, he lived through the second World War, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the subsequent post-war collapse in Japanese society and its economy. His novel A Quiet Life is loosely about his relationship with his son. Much of his work had its origins in his own life, such as The silent cry, which is about the impact of war on post-war Japanese society and is widely regarded as his masterpiece.
He said of his son “I was trained as a writer and as a human being by the birth of my son.”
He wrote on subjects such as nuclear disarmament, militarism, and also his disabled son, who in later life became a musical prodigy and an award-winning composer. His writing dealt with a wide range of ‘big question’ subjects - both on a personal and on a wider societal level. One of the giants of Japanese literature, Kenzaburō Ōe, died recently. The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live.
0 kommentar(er)
