Kenzaburō Ōe is read about 1,126 times a day, in 97 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 15 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 390 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?A Japanese writer whose work wrestled with nuclear weapons, existentialism, and social rupture - questions large enough to earn him the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature for a vision where myth and life merge into something unsettling and true.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
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About this person
Born 31 January 1935, Ōe came up through French and American literary traditions, absorbing their theories and turning them toward his own country's contradictions. His novels, stories, and essays pressed on political and philosophical pressure points: nuclear power, the cost of nonconformity, the weight of existence itself. The Nobel committee in 1994 recognized him for creating "an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today" - a literature that refused easy answers. He remained a major figure in contemporary Japanese letters until his death on 3 March 2023.
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