
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, October 14, 1994                   TAG: 9410140074
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-9   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: TOKYO                                 LENGTH: Medium

JAPAN NOBELIST IS HAUNTED BY WAR AFTERMATH

Novelist Kenzaburo Oe, whose dark musings on moral failure came to symbolize an alienated generation in postwar Japan, won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday, only the second Japanese author ever to do so.

The Swedish Academy, announcing the award, cited the 59-year-old author for his often disturbing works of fiction, in which ``poetic force creates an imagined world where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.''

In Japan, news of the award to Kenzaburo Oe (pronounced Ken-za-boo-roh OH-eh) led evening newscasts and spawned banner headlines, and the prime minister himself issued congratulations. The only other Japanese to win a Nobel in literature was Yasunari Kawabata, in 1968.

Oe himself reacted with gentle self-deprecation.

``Whenever I was named as a candidate, I always thought it was a joke.,'' he told reporters outside his Tokyo home. `` I never thought about winning the prize.'' He said he considered the prize a tribute to Japanese literature as a whole rather than himself personally.

Despite the outpouring of national pride over Oe's win, his principal literary themes evoke deep unease here. A boy of 10 when the war ended, Oe came of age during the American occupation.

``The humiliation took a firm grip on him and has colored much of his work. He himself describes his writing as a way of exorcising demons,'' the academy said.

Childhood wartime memories strongly colored the story that marked Oe's literary debut - ``The Catch,'' about a boy's experiences with a U.S. pilot shot down over his village. Published in 1958, the story won Japan's prestigious Akutagawa prize for new writers.

In exploring themes of darkness and loss, Oe has drawn on his own life experiences, most searingly in work influenced by the birth 31 years ago of a mentally handicapped son, Hikari.

In his novel ``A Personal Matter,'' published a year after the boy's birth, the father of a child with birth defects responds by getting fired from his job for drunkenness, taking a mistress and plotting the baby's death with her. At the last minute, he changes his mind and takes up his parental responsibilities.

by CNB