JAPANESE AUTHOR WINS NOBEL PRIZE

Author: By David Mehegan, Globe Staff

Date: Friday, October 14, 1994
Page: 58
Section: LIVING

In selecting Oe (pronounced OH-ay) to be the second Japanese author to win the prize (Yasunari Kawabata received it in 1968), the Swedish Academy of Letters cited his "imagined world where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today . . . In the imagined world he created, he succeeds in portraying the qualities humanity shares by intensifying what is individual."

In an interview in Japan yesterday, Oe said other modern Japanese writers such as Kobo Abe and Shohei Oka deserved the prize but had died too early.

"I won the prize," he said, "thanks to the accomplishments of modern Japanese literature. I think I got it because I am still young and living."

Oe's best-known novel is the 1964 "A Personal Matter," in which a father at first rebels against and eventually accepts the disability of his newborn son. An early story, "The Catch," concerns an American airman in World War II who lands in a Japanese village and takes a boy hostage.

His major mature work, "The Silent Cry," published in 1967, is a highly symbolic story of two brothers in 1960 trying to recover and come to terms with their family's tumultuous history. In the process, a village community is destroyed. Oe recently completed a three-volume novel, "Burning Green Tree," and has said it will be his last.

Other writings include "Lavish Are the Dead" (1957), "Pluck the Bud and Destroy the Offspring" (1958), "Hiroshima Notes" (1965), "Pinch Runner's Record" (1976) and "Awake, New Man" (1983).

Oe is a sort of Japanese James Joyce: steeped in many languages and literatures, including English, French, Italian and Russian, he has a Japanese prose style so difficult and complex that he is more honored than read in his own country.

"He is an amazingly serious scholar," said Masuo Miyoshi, a professor of English and Japanese literature at the University of California at San Diego, ''one of the very few real intellectuals in Japan. He has an amazing mind. His seriousness ranges from relations with the family, which is the thematic center of his work, to questions of Japan in the modern world."

Much of Oe's writing creates and celebrates a sort of rural village mythology, like the Celtic mythos of the young W. B. Yeats or the Yoknapatawpha County of William Faulkner. He has said that when he turns 60, he will leave Tokyo and return to his home village in Shikoku.

Though he has long been considered a contender for the Nobel, the selection of Oe surprised some observers. "He is not a part of the literary establishment," said Edward Fowler, professor of Japanese literature at the University of California at Irvine. "He spent time abroad and attacked the establishment. He is not a rebel or a loner, but has been an outsider looking in."

A student of French literature at Tokyo University, Oe was strongly influenced by Western writers, including Jean-Paul Sartre (the subject of his graduation thesis), Poe and T.S. Eliot. He was involved in radical left-wing politics during his student years, opposed the rearming of Japan and wrote a story about the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, "Aghwee the Sky Monster."

He was the third son in a large landowning family in Shikoku, the southernmost Japanese island. The family lost its land after World War II. The Japanese world after defeat, with its period of poverty followed by rapid reindustrialization and prosperity, form the backdrop to his work, which stresses the struggles of the individual to find reconciliation and meaning.

In "A Personal Matter," influenced by Oe's own life, the main character quits his job in a rage and takes a lover after he learns that his son is severely intellectually handicapped. At first, he plots the baby's death, but in the end takes responsibility for the child. Oe's own severely handicapped son, now 31, has shown great musical talent and his music has been recorded in Japan.

MEHEGA;10/13 NIGRO ;10/14,11:26 NOBEL14