Kenzaburō Ōe

Oe grew up in a remote village on Shikoku and came of age amid Japan's wartime indoctrination and its sudden postwar reversal: the gap between the two shaped his lifelong suspicion of official truth. He studied French literature at Tokyo University under a leading Sartre scholar and won the Akutagawa Prize at twenty-three for a novella about a captured Black American airman.

In 1963 his son Hikari was born with a severe brain hernia; the decision to let doctors operate, and the strange grace of the son's later gift for music, ran through decades of his fiction, from A Personal Matter to The Silent Cry, his densest novel of myth and family guilt. He also wrote Hiroshima Notes, nonfiction reportage on atomic bomb survivors that fixed his lifelong anti-nuclear activism.

He won the Nobel Prize in 1994 and, months later, refused Japan's Order of Culture, saying he recognized no authority higher than postwar democracy. He died in 2023.