Kenzaburō Ōe Quotes

Japanese writer and Nobel Laureate (1935–2023)

Kenzaburō Ōe (大江健三郎, Ōe Kenzaburō; 31 January 1935 – 3 March 2023) was a Japanese author and a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature. In 1994 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Native Name: 大江健三郎

Alternative Names: Ōe Kenzaburō • Oe Kenzaburo • Kenzaburo Oe • Kenzaburou Oue

From Wikidata (CC0)

Now I was just a transient in the valley, a one-eyed passerby too fat for his years, and life there had the power to summon up neither the memory nor the illusion of any other, truer self. As a passerby I had a right to insist on my identity.

The people of Hiroshima went to work at once to restore human society in the aftermath of the great atomic flood. They were concerned to salvage their own lives, but in the process they also salvaged the souls of the people who have brought the atomic bomb.

We naturally try to forget our personal tragedies, serious or trifling, as soon as possible (even something as petty as being scorned or disdained by a stranger on a street corner). We try not to carry these things over to tomorrow. It is not strange, therefore, that the whole human race is trying to put Hiroshima, the extreme point of human tragedy, completely out of mind.

It's a little bit like what Akari said to his grandmother in Shikoku, during her final illness: 'Please cheer up and die!

If any suffering was fruitless it was the agony of a hangover; what he suffered now could not expiate suffering of any other kind.

The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live.

Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work.

It takes a person of great care and insight to watch for any abnormality in the green grass even while it grows abundantly and healthily.

One day Bird had approached his father with this question; he was six years old: Father, where was I a hundred years before I was born? Where will I be a hundred years after I die? Father, what will happen to me when I die? Without a word, his young father had punched him in the mouth, broke two of his teeth and bloodied his face, and Bird forgot the fear of death.

The destination of the soul: this is what I, led on by Nils Holgersson, came to seek in the literature of Western Europe. I fervently hope that my pursuit, as a Japanese, of literature and culture will, in some small measure, repay Western Europe for the light it has shed upon the human condition.

To repeat the error by exhibiting, through the construction of nuclear reactors, the same disrespect for human life is the worst possible betrayal of the memory of Hiroshima’s victims.