Japanese Nobel winner's trial over history is over
WITH his trial over, Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel laureate in literature, was free again to write. He had already completed the preface and first chapter of a new novel, and found a title, “Death by Water,” in T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”
Mr. Oe’s eyes lit up behind his trademark round glasses as he spoke of striking a new approach in what he declared would be his final novel. If Mr. Oe (pronounced OH-ay), 73, kept his pace of writing two hours every morning, it would take two years to finish....
Perhaps Mr. Oe felt an urgency to make up for the time — two and a half years — he had lost defending himself and his writing in court. In late March, a district court rejected an attempt by plaintiffs backed by Japanese rightists to suppress a 1970 book that he had written on Japanese military atrocities in Okinawa during World War II. For Mr. Oe, it was the latest battle in a half-century struggle against the right. This time, he won.
Victory, though, came at great cost. He had written no fiction during the trial’s two and half years. And instead of spending his afternoons reading literature, he had devoted them to girding for battle by devouring hundreds of accounts on Okinawa and books written by right-wing authors, books that he “had never had any intention of ever reading.”
“Nothing could have been as boring and painful as reading those books,” Mr. Oe said, though he added that they had helped him understand his enemies’ “weaknesses and strengths.”
WITH the trial over, he sold all those books to a second-hand bookstore for $500.
Read entire article at NYT
Mr. Oe’s eyes lit up behind his trademark round glasses as he spoke of striking a new approach in what he declared would be his final novel. If Mr. Oe (pronounced OH-ay), 73, kept his pace of writing two hours every morning, it would take two years to finish....
Perhaps Mr. Oe felt an urgency to make up for the time — two and a half years — he had lost defending himself and his writing in court. In late March, a district court rejected an attempt by plaintiffs backed by Japanese rightists to suppress a 1970 book that he had written on Japanese military atrocities in Okinawa during World War II. For Mr. Oe, it was the latest battle in a half-century struggle against the right. This time, he won.
Victory, though, came at great cost. He had written no fiction during the trial’s two and half years. And instead of spending his afternoons reading literature, he had devoted them to girding for battle by devouring hundreds of accounts on Okinawa and books written by right-wing authors, books that he “had never had any intention of ever reading.”
“Nothing could have been as boring and painful as reading those books,” Mr. Oe said, though he added that they had helped him understand his enemies’ “weaknesses and strengths.”
WITH the trial over, he sold all those books to a second-hand bookstore for $500.