A happy and boring life

In 1960, he has occasionally said in interviews, he sat across from Mao Zedong at midnight. He had come to Beijing with a delegation of writers opposed to the US-Japan security pact, the youngest at 25.

Mao just sat there, chain smoking and talking to himself non-stop. "Suddenly, after maybe an hour, Mao stopped talking, looked at me steadily and before leaving the room said to me: 'You are young, you are poor, you are completely unknown. You will be a good revolutionary!’.”

Kenzaburō Ōe did become a poet after all, a world-renowned poet. In 1994 he was the second Japanese to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. And, in its own way, a very revolutionary one, also from a political point of view. The militarists, nationalists and imperialists in Japan hated him because he wanted something other than subjection. For years he wrote against the rearmament of Japan, the close ties to the United States.

And again and again about the guilt Japan had shouldered in World War II, a stubborn liberal who never stopped trying to undermine the need for silence in a society that would rather forget and start over than engage in moral archeology and soul-searching.

He described his political position as that of an "anarchist who loves democracy," and his beliefs kept him from going to bars, where he frequently got into violent arguments with people who worshiped the Emperor. Of course he became something of a moral authority.

However, Ōe was never a big talker who swung speeches, climbed podiums or led signature cartels. He preferred to speak through his highly literary and form-conscious work. His novels are labyrinths of the imagination in which one can easily get lost – and therefore have to start from the beginning again and again: literary allusions, influences from existentialism (he wrote his thesis at university on Sartre), depictions of nature with great poetic power , a lot of “magical”, “surreal” and “grotesque”, as texts like to be called that do not content themselves with naturalism.

And a never-ending individualism that cares less about mediation than about making a work coherent. Now and again he almost regretted it because it cost him readers: Over the years, he once attested to himself in an interview, that his style had become “very difficult, intricate, complicated. This was necessary for me to improve my work and create a new perspective, but at some point doubts began to arise as to whether so much effort was the right method for an author".

His novels often deal with the developments in Japanese post-war society - the suffering of being an outsider, the complicated relationships between tradition and modernity, the trauma caused by history, the narrowness of bourgeois conventions, the alienation of the younger generation.

Ōe's novel A Personal Experience became best known in Germany. It tells the story of a young man whose son is born with massive brain damage. It's a book that you can hardly stand because it's so intense: episodes in which the protagonist's desperate consciousness thrashes wildly, conjures up atrocities against his newborn child, and cannot withstand the overwhelming demands of an existential misfortune.

What Ōe describes is a literary treatment of his own fate: his own son Hikari was born with a severe disability, was diagnosed by doctors as a hopeless case and did not speak a word until he was five years old - today he still needs care , but a virtuoso pianist with amazing insular musical gifts.

Unlike the father in A Personal Experience, Ōe has always loved his son unconditionally and devoted a good deal of his time to him - his life, he once said, is one third reading, one third writing and one third being with Hikari, and although he is not a believer, it is almost a religious ritual for him to tuck his son in every night.

He was once asked whether he had a happy life. Kenzaburō Ōes, affirmative, Answer: It is boring. "I've spent my life staying at home, eating the food my wife cooks, listening to music and being with Hikari. I feel like I've had a good career - an interesting one. I woke up every morning knowing I would never run out of books to read.”

Kenzaburō Ōe died on March 3rd at the age of 88, as his publisher has just announced. He was a great writer and a good person.