K
Kenzaburō Ōe
Japanese novelist, short-story writer and essayist, born on 31 January 1935 in the village of Ōse (now part of Uchiko) in Ehime Prefecture on the island of Shikoku. He studied French literature at the University of Tokyo under Kazuo Watanabe, a scholar of Rabelais, and began publishing while still a student, winning the Akutagawa Prize in 1958 for the novella "Shiiku" ("The Catch"). The birth of his eldest son, Hikari, with a brain hernia in 1963 became a central and recurring subject of his fic...
