The Japanese Nobel Prize winner for Literature Kenzaburo Oé died in the early hours of March 3 of natural causes, his Japanese publisher, Kodansha, announced on Monday. In a statement, the editorial asked that the family not be interviewed, who have already held a private funeral, and indicated that there will be a public ceremony soon.
Born in Ehime prefecture (southwestern Japan) in 1935, Oé studied French literature at the University of Tokyo and won the Nobel Prize in 1994, becoming the second Japanese author to achieve this recognition.
The author made his literary debut with the text A strange job (1957) and rose to fame thanks to Cuadernos de Hiroshima (1965), an account of his trip to this city in southern Japan in 1963 and later years in order to interviewing the victims of the 1945 atomic bombing.
Later, in 1970, he would also publish Okinawa Notebooks, a travel notebook in which Oe narrates his encounters with the residents of this group of islands in southern Japan, and questions the living conditions in this region and the power exercised by the government. center on it.
In his more journalistic facet, Oé wrote articles in newspapers and magazines about the nuclear situation facing Japan today and actively participated in various groups against this type of energy.
In addition to the Nobel Prize in 1994, the writer was awarded other prestigious prizes such as the Literature Prize at the University of Tokyo in 1957 and the Akutagawa Prize in 1958, considered the most important among young writers in the archipelago, when he was only 23 years old.
