Kenzaburō Ōe

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 un…