Contemporary Voices Across the Globe

Kenzaburo Oe (1935-2023), a Japanese novelist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 "who with poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today." Much of Oe's fiction, including A Personal Matter (1964), draws directly on his experience raising a son, Hikari, who was born with a severe brain hernia and later developed into a celebrated composer despite his cognitive disability, a relationship Oe returned to repeatedly as he examined themes of disability, shame, responsibility, and postwar Japanese identity in the long shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.