Kenzaburo Oe, one of post-war Japan’s leading novelists and the second Japanese to win the Nobel Prize in Literature after Yasunari Kawabata, died on March 3 at the age of 88, his publishers said.

Oe received the Nobel Prize in 1994, and according to the committee’s reasoning, the award was given to him for “creating with poetic force an imaginary world where life and myth condense into a moving image of the human predicament today.”

He wrote from an early age. While still a student in the French Literature Department at the University of Tokyo, he won a major literary prize for a short story, and in 1958 published his notable first novel, Choke the Kidneys, Shoot the Children. as well as two more of his books – Kastaniotis publishing house.

He was sued for his books, which revealed the dark pages of Japanese history, and he received death threats.

His novels, short stories and essays, heavily influenced by French and American literature, deal with political, social and philosophical issues. Although he often said that he wrote only for Japanese audiences, Oe gained international attention in the 1960s with three works: Notes on Hiroshima, a collection of essays on the long-term effects of the atomic bomb, and the novels A Private File and Silent Cry, which were written in the midst of a deep personal crisis: the birth of a son with severe brain damage. These early works formed the basis of many of the approximately 40 subsequent ones.

Politically, he was a prominent voice for a generation of his compatriots who opposed the armament of Japan and supported the payment of war reparations to China and Korea. He was sued for his books revealing the dark pages of Japanese history and was even threatened with life when he refused to receive the Japanese Order of Culture in 1994 because it had been given to him by the emperor. “I do not recognize any value above democracy,” he said at the time.

Born on January 31, 1935 in a remote village in the forests of Shikoku, he grew up listening to the folk tales of his grandmother and mother. His father died in the war in 1944. On the morning of August 6, 1945, his mother saw a flash in the sky – the explosion of an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, just 100 miles away. Despite being an important figure in his country, Ōe said in an interview with the Paris Review, “I spent my life at home, eating the food my wife cooks, listening to music and living with Hikari (his son). I feel I have chosen a good course. I wake up every morning knowing that I will never run out of books to read.”

Kastaniotis Publications is going to republish Oe’s books, which have been translated into Greek and are currently out of print.