Word: kenzaburo
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...Kenzaburo Oe was a child of 10 when World War II ended; occupying foreigners, ruins, humiliations and guilt filled the Japanese landscape of his adolescence. His early fiction and essays were unusually intense by Japanese standards, tinged with pessimism and despair. After 1963, when his first son was born brain damaged, Oe's work became even more personal; a helpless or deformed child figure recurs, suggesting both implacable fate and the possibility of redemption. Compared with the four previous laureates -- Octavio Paz, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott and Toni Morrison -- Oe is little known but, thanks to the Swedish Academy...
...Kenzaburo Oe, a novelist who captured the alienation and moral malaise of Japan's "Westernized" postwar generation, became his country's second recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. (Japan's other winner was Yasunari Kawabata, in 1968.) Today's award triggered an outpouring of national pride -- newscasts led with the story and the Prime Minister issued congrats. The warm fuzzies all around contrast with the 59-year-old Oe's dark vision, steeped in the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...there are those writers who refuse to be seduced. And when they speak out, readers respond by the thousands. Internationally prominent novelists like Kobo Abe (Woman in the Dunes) and Kenzaburo Oe regularly sell 150,000 copies of each book. Other novelists, like Hisashi Inoue, 47, have enjoyed even greater success (see box). Shusako Endo's spare and elegant studies of Christian faith and martyrdom (Silence; The Samurai) have brought the 60-year-old author the title of the Japanese Graham Greene and made him one of the nation's most widely translated writers...