Kenzaburo Oe

Kenzaburō Ōe

A group of delinquent boys are abandoned in a remote village during the Korean war and manage to survive by stealing food and hunting, only to face the possibility of death when the villagers return

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

It is the 1960s and the Nedokoro brothers have long-since left their family home in a remote forested valley on Shikoku, in the south of Japan: Mitsusaburo for Tokyo to work as a translator and English professor; his younger brother Takashi for the United States, to atone for his part in anti-American student protests. Takashi's return to Japan coincides with a local Korean supermarket magnate's offer to buy the brothers' ancestral storehouse, pitting Mitsusaburo and Takashi against one another and dredging up family histories perhaps best forgotten.Oe's dark masterpiece of family psychology is the most important Japanese novel of the post-war period and a strange, unsettling tale of how the call of blood and history echoes down the generations.

The Silent Cry

Kenzaburō Ōe was ten when American soldiers entered his mountain village during World War II, and his writing "reveals the tension and ambiguity forged by the collapse of the values of his childhood on the one hand and the confrontation with American writers on the other ... [His] heroes have been expelled from the certainty of childhood, into a world that bears no relation to their past"--Back cover.

Four Short Novels

Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness

"[Kogito Choko] returns to his hometown village in search of a red suitcase rumored to hold documents revealing the details of his father's death during World War II, details that will serve as the foundation for his new, and final, novel. Since his youth, renowned novelist Kogito Choko planned to fictionalize his father's fatal drowning in order to fully process the loss. Stricken with guilt and regret over his failure to rescue his father, Choko has long been driven to discover why his father was boating on the river in a torrential storm. Though he remembers overhearing his father and a group of soldiers discussing an insurgent scheme to stage a suicide attack on Emperor Mikado, Choko cannot separate his memories from imagination and his family is hesitant to reveal the entire story. When the contents of the trunk turn out to offer little clarity, Choko abandons the novel in creative despair. Floundering as an artist, he's haunted by fear that he may never write his tour de force. But when he collaborates with an avant-garde theater troupe dramatizing his early novels, Choko is revitalized by revisiting his formative work and he finds the will to continue investigating his father's demise" --

Death by Water

Kisisel Bir Sorun

At the age of twenty, Ma-chan, a young woman, is forced to redefine her family and her life when she finds herself the head of the household due to her father's acceptance of a visiting professorship at an American university

A Quiet Life

A study of the Hiroshima bombing and its aftermath provides an account of the victims, the efforts of caregivers, and the struggle to come to terms with the tragedy

Hiroshima Notes

Uma Questão pessoal

Em um misto de mito, história e memória, Morte na água é uma das obras-primas de Kenzaburo Oe, que trabalha com maestria ao desenvolver a narrativa de um trauma pessoal que é também o trauma de uma nação. Conhecido por sua aguda capacidade de observação da alma humana, Kenzaburo Oe é um dos principais romancistas contemporâneos. Ganhador do prêmio Nobel de literatura, seus livros angariam leitores em todo o globo. Em Morte na água, acompanhamos o escritor Kogito Chōkō — alter ego do próprio Oe — em sua luta pela inspiração para seu próximo livro, que o leva de volta à sua cidade natal em busca de informações que expliquem melhor a morte de seu pai. A intenção de Kogito é escrever um romance a partir do que coletar, mas ele acaba se vendo em meio a questões muito mais profundas que envolvem desde traumas pessoais até descobertas que remontam à Segunda Guerra Mundial. O relacionamento turbulento entre pai e filho emerge com toda força, além da culpa de Kogito por não ter estado presente na noite em que o pai se afogou. É Asa, sua irmã, quem traz para a narrativa um grande baú vermelho que pode conter as explicações que o protagonista tanto procura. Ao analisar a busca por um legado particular mas também nacional, Kenzaburo Oe constrói um romance inesquecível sobre traumas pessoais e coletivos, e sobre como as narrativas que construímos para nós mesmos podem se mostrar frágeis. "Neste livro, a serenidade e o domínio narrativo de Kenzaburo Oe são admiráveis." — New York Times Book Review

Morte na água

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2011 MAN ASIAN LITERARY AWARD Kogito is a writer, and is in his sixties when he rekindles a childhood friendship with his estranged brother-in-law Goro. Goro sends Kogito a number of cassette tapes onto which he has recorded reflections about their friendship. But one night, Goro's message takes a profoundly unsettling turn: 'I'm going to head over to the Other Side now,' Goro says, and then Kogito hears a loud thud. After a moment of silence, Goro's voice continues: 'But don't worry, I'm not going to stop communicating with you.' Moments later, Kogito's wife rings to tell him that Goro has jumped to his death from the roof of a building. Kogito begins a search to understand what drove his brother-in-law to suicide. The Changeling takes readers from the forests of southern Japan to the streets of Berlin in a profound exploration of the ways in which the past - both real and imagined - affects our lives.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2011 MAN ASIAN LITERARY AWARD

The Changeling

From the Nobel Prize–winning author: “One of the great short novels of the 20th century” (Jonathan Franzen, The Wall Street Journal). Internationally acclaimed as one of the world’s most influential writers, Kenzaburō Ōe brings to the fore the post-WWII rage and anxiety of a decorous society in this “deathly black comedy . . . dripping with nuclear terror” (The Japan Times). Bird is an antisocial twenty-seven-year-old intellectual hanging on to a failing marriage with whiskey. He dreams of going to Africa where the sky sprawls with possibilities. Then, as though walloped by a massive invisible fist, Bird’s Utopian fantasies are shattered when his wife gives birth to what he calls their “monster baby.” Now, Bird is left with one question: How can he and his wife spend the rest of their lives with this damaged thing clinging to their backs? As shameful, disgraceful, and unthinkable a desire as it is, Bird has an answer. Not sealed. Not just yet. Not before Bird flees on a bender of indiscriminate (and frustratingly impotent) sex, hard liquor, self-delusion, and most terrifying of all—self-discovery. “[I’d] forgotten just how crazy it is . . . It feels so much like life to me . . . it tells me that Ōe is onto something correct. People don’t want to deal with reality.” —Jonathan Franzen, The Wall Street Journal “Very close to a perfect contemporary novel.” —The New York Times “An astonishing novel.” —Mother Jones

A Personal Matter

Kurbani Beslemek

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, among many other awards. K lives in Tokyo with his wife and three children. Eeyore, his eldest, is mentally ill and during one dramatic outburst brandishes a knife at his mother. Rather than confront the situation, K's reaction is to sit and read in his study. Eventually Eeyore's problems force K back into family life, where his sympathetic readings of William Blake are no longer an escape route, but a vital way-in to understanding his own son.

Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!

Em 1964, o romancista japonês Kenzaburo Oe recebia a notícia de que seu primeiro filho nascera com uma anomalia cerebral. É a mesma situação enfrentada pelo protagonista de 'Uma questão pessoal', o professor Bird. Aos 27 anos, ele leva uma vida medíocre, bebendo pelos bares de Tóquio e sonhando com aventuras no continente africano. A gravidez da mulher acrescenta angústia ao cotidiano de Bird. A idéia de que será pai e chefe de família faz com que se sinta condenado à vida cotidiana. Para piorar, depois do parto, os pais descobrem que a anomalia cerebral fará o menino ter uma vida vegetativa. Bird não suporta a possibilidade de se ver atrelado para sempre a um filho anormal. Passa, então, a desejar a morte da criança. Aos poucos, porém, ele se dá conta de que a crise era uma oportunidade. Bird deve percorrer um longo caminho de conquista da realidade, enfrentando os desafios de amadurecimento da vida adulta.

Uma questão pessoal

La foresta d'acqua

In his first new novel since winning the Nobel, Oe makes an immense departure from the autobiographical fiction he is most famous for, in a magnificent story about the charisma of leaders, the danger of zealotry, and the mystery of faith.

Somersault

An anthology of stories about Japan after the atom bomb is edited by an acclaimed writer and surveys Japan's best storytellers on the bomb's impact on the daily lives of peasants, artists, and children

The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath

In Seventeen the story of a lonely seventeen year old who turns to a right-wing group for self-esteem and J the story of a spoiled, young, drifter son of a Japanese executive Oe shows us a world where the values that had regulated life had been blown to smithereens along with Hiroshima and Nagasaki: what confronts his heroes now is a gaping emptiness. Seventeen's lost young man is in the throes of becoming a right wing activist and assassin. He feels his identity for the first time in the enervating rush of murderous violence. The story has enormous topicality and vibrancy for today. In J. our protagonist's erotic excitement comes as a "chikan" one who rubs himself against women on crowded trains rather than participating in the drab everyday world, which he feels would only be self-deception. He can only feel complete while attaining "the absolute ecstasy of total action." Of course this action of sexual assault can bring arrest, disgrace, and imprisonment. As always, Oe treats his subjects not with pity or disdain, but with sympathy. Kenzaburo Oe is without a doubt the first truly modern Japanese writer. He has managed a feat which even his talented and prolific elder contemporary, the late Yukio Mishima, was unable to accomplish: he has wrenched Japanese literature free of its deeply rooted, inbred tradition and moved it into the mainstream of world literature. Oe's influences and literary heroes are less Japanese than American and European. Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean-Paul Sartre rank high among them, and Oe's favorite novel, he confesses, is Huckleberry Finn. Oe grew up on the western island of Shikoku, a place steeped in Japanese rural traditions and wartime propaganda. His early works are regarded as classics of the disillusionment his nation felt on seeing what Japan's leadership had done to the country. His heroes have been expelled from the certainty of childhood into a world that bears no relation to their past.

Seventeen, J

Two Novels

大江健三郎

"Two brothers, Takashi and Mitsu, return from Tokyo to the village of their childhood. Selling their family home leads them to an inescapable confrontation with their family history. Their attempt to escape the influence of the city ends in failure as they realize that its tentacles extend to everything in the countryside, including their own relationship."--Amazon.com.

Un récit qui dénonce la folie et la bêtise humaine.

Kenzaburo Oe

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