Kenzaburo Oe, the prolific writer whose many works include A Personal Matter, The Silent Cry, Hiroshima Notes and A Quiet Life, will read from and discuss his work in An Afternoon with the Author and Nobel Prize Laureate on Thursday, June 1 at 4 p.m. in the UCSB MultiCultural Center Theater. Admission to this event is free. Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, copies of books by Oe will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

Oe, who is known for his accounts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and for his struggle to come to terms with raising a mentally handicapped son, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994. He was only the second Japanese author to receive the award. Unlike the work of Yasunari Kawabata, who received the honor in 1968, Oe’s books are known for being “politically charged tales filled with anger and a sense of betrayal, like the postwar generation he has come to represent” as reported in The New York Times at the time the Nobel Prize was announced.

Recognized as a leading author while still a student at Tokyo University in the 1950s, Oe’s early work, while characterized as bleak and despairing by some of his contemporaries, has been described by critics as centering around a core of hope and courage mixed with bitter humor. His postwar writings are regarded as classics of the disillusionment his nation felt at the time.

Having grown up during the American occupation and come of age in post-bomb Japan (he was ten years old when American jeeps first drove into his village), Oe has commented that the purpose of his work is to “exorcise demons.” In a New York Times interview, Oe describes himself and his work: “I believe I am a very Japanese writer. I have always wanted to write about our country, our society and feelings about the contemporary scene. But there is a big difference between us and classic Japanese literature.”

In 1963, his son was born with severe brain damage; two months later, Oe visited Hiroshima to talk with bomb survivors. Out of those personal experiences came his famous 1964 novel, A Personal Matter, and Hiroshima Notes. In A Personal Matter a man plots the murder of his infant son, who has also been born with severe brain damage, but finally realizes he must take responsibility for the child and embraces him. Hiroshima Notes is an account of the courage of the survivors of the bombing in the face of the dehumanizing horror of the event.

The Silent Cry, a novel first published in 1967, was called by the Nobel committee, “Oe’s major mature work, dealing with people’s relationships in a confusing world.” It traces the uneasy relationship of two brothers who return to their ancestral village home. Also in the stream of Oe’s work that evokes the myths and history of his native forest village are the books Bud-Nipping, Lamb Shooting, his first novel published in 1958; Letters to My Sweet Bygone Years from 1987; and Contemporary Games, which was rewritten in narrative form and published in 1986.

Oe’s other books that focus on life with his son and the boy’s development include Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, a collection of four short novels published in 1969; My Deluged Soul from 1973; and Rouse Up, O, Young Men of the New Age from 1983, which crowns this branch of his corpus.

Under strong influence of W.B. Yeats’ poetic metaphors, Oe wrote a trilogy of books including Until the ‘Savior’ Gets Socked (1993), Vacillating (1994) and On the Great Day (1995). With the completion of these three works, his being awarded the Nobel Prize and his son’s establishing a career as a composer, Oe brought to a close his career as a fiction writer and announced the goal of the final stage of his career: to create an entirely new form of literature.

His Nobel Prize acceptance speech and other lectures have been collected in the book Japan, the Ambiguous and Myself.

This event is presented by the UCSB College of Creative Studies, UCSB Arts & Lectures and the UCSB MultiCultural Center.

For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
Roman Baratiak at (805) 893-2080.