In this essay collection, Ōe recounts his visits to Hiroshima beginning in the summer of 1963, when he was hired to write a report on a rally to abolish nuclear weapons. While inspired by his own son's birth, Ōe distances himself from Bird and portrays the crisis of a man in connection with the universal theme of dealing with fatality and the inner demons it foregrounds. With this story (and in many others thereafter), Ōe breaks with the traditional Japanese form of the confessional, autobiographical I-novel. The novel explores, often with brutal sincerity, the conflict of a man unsure whether to let the child die or to coexist with it, thus giving up his dreams of an exotic life. Possibly the best known of Ōe's novels, it follows the narrator 'Bird' as he faces a personal crisis after his son is born with a brain herniation requiring immediate surgery. Here is a list of five books to help you navigate Ōe's writings.

In the words of his English translator John Nathan, his works feature a 'language all his own, a language which can accommodate the virulence of his imagination'.

He portrayed human nature in all its aspects, even the most cruel, with great inventiveness. He wrote about the dangers of nuclear weapons and the aftermath of Hiroshima and about the communities and folklore of his native rural island Shikoku. He wrote on taboo themes in Japan such as disability through his life with his son Hikari, who was born with a herniated brain, autism and epilepsy.

When he was awarded the Nobel prize in 1994, he said that as a novelist he wished to 'enable both those who express themselves with words and their readers to recover from their own sufferings and the sufferings of their time, and to cure their souls of the wounds'. OL28945764W Page_number_confidence 91.49 Pages 190 Partner Innodata Pdf_module_version 0.0.19 Ppi 360 Rcs_key 24143 Republisher_date 20220924155813 Republisher_operator Republisher_time 258 Scandate 20220906084501 Scanner Scanningcenter cebu Scribe3_search_catalog isbn Scribe3_search_id 4821500256 Tts_version 5.Kenzaburō Ōe, the last of Japan's great post second world war Japanese writers, died in early March. Urn:oclc:record:1358638788 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier hiroshimanotes0000oeke_o5t0 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s29nbp76415 Invoice 1652 Isbn 4821500256ĩ784821500253 Ocr tesseract 5.2.0-1-gc42a Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9719 Ocr_module_version 0.0.18 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA12905 Openlibrary_edition Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 10:01:12 Associated-names Swain, David L Yonezawa, Toshi Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Boxid IA40688019 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

Hiroshima Notes by Kenzaburō Ōe