YEREVAN, MARCH 13, ARTSAKHPRESS. Kenzaburo Oe, who won Japan its second Nobel Prize for literature with books about pacifism and his disabled son, has died.
His death was due to old age, Reuters reported citing his publisher Kodansha.
Oe was born in Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s main islands, the third son of seven children. After his father died suddenly in 1944, at home he was raised by his mother, who bought him books such as “Huckleberry Finn.”
A graduate of Tokyo University, where he studied French Literature, Oe began publishing stories while still a student and won the Akutagawa Prize, a career-launching award for new writers, in 1958. A steady stream of work followed, including books on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
His Nobel Prize was followed by Japan’s Order of Culture, but he refused to accept it because it was awarded by the Emperor and said: “I do not recognise any authority, any value, higher than democracy.”
Always a pacifist, Oe became an even more vocal critic after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, saying that Japan had “a sacred duty” to renounce nuclear power, the same way it renounced war under its constitution.
