《Kenzaburo Oe》.doc

Kenzaburo Oe, The Art of Fiction No. 195 Interviewed by Sarah Fay PRINT | TWITTER | FACEBOOK | More |View a manuscript page Kenzaburo Oe has devoted his life to taking certain subjects seriously—victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the struggles of the people of Okinawa, the challenges of the disabled, the discipline of the scholarly life—while not appearing to take himself seriously at all. Although he is known in Japan as much for being a gadfly activist as for being one of the country’s most celebrated writers, in person Oe is more of a delightful wag. Unfailingly modest and lighthearted, he dresses in sport shirts, fidgets a great deal, and smiles easily. (Henry Kissinger, who stands for much of what Oe stands against, once remarked on his “devilish smile.”) Oe’s home, where he spends most of his time in the living room in a chair flanked by manuscript pages, books, and a plethora of jazz and classical CDs, is as comfortable and unpretentious as he is. The Western-style house, designed by his wife Yukari, is in the same Tokyo suburb where Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune once lived. It’s set back from the street, hidden by an abundant garden of lilies, maple trees, and more than one hundred different varieties of roses. With their youngest son and daughter grown and living on their own, Oe and Yukari live in the house with their forty-four-year-old mentally disabled son Hikari.? “The writer’s job is the job of a clown,” Oe has said, “the clown who also talks about sorrow.” He describes most of his fiction as an extrapolation of the themes explored in two novels: A Personal Matter (1964), which recounts a father’s attempt to come to terms with the birth of his handicapped child; and The Silent Cry (1967), which depicts the clash between village life and modern culture in postwar Japan. The first category includes such novels and stories as “Aghwee the Sky Monster” (1964), “Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness” (1969), The Pinch Runner Memorandum (1976), Rouse