On the death of Kenzaburō Ōe: How strange, how beautiful – culture

The Japanese narrator Kenzaburō Ōe has occasionally been compared to Günter Grass to describe his place in his country’s literature. And there are indeed some analogies that allow Western readers to understand what is alien to this character: a contemporary national classic whose starting point was the catastrophic end of the Second World War – similar in the two allied and equally completely defeated countries. Both became moral authorities, both were social-democratic-pacifist, and both were also awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature as political contemporaries, Kenzaburō Ōe in 1994.