Nobel Prize

Kenzaburo Oe delivering his Nobel Prize lecture at the Swedish Academy on 7 December 1994. English* Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1994 Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself During the last catastrophic World War I was a little boy and lived in a remote, wooded valley on Shikoku Island in the Japanese Archipelago, thousands of miles away…

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My father, Alfred Gilman, could play almost any musical instrument and frequently did so at neighborhood parties; his father owned a music store in Bridgeport, Connecticut. My mother, Mabel Schmidt Gilman, was an excellent pianist and gave lessons; her father was a professional trombonist, also in Bridgeport. Despite this heritage, my musical career ended after…

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Links to other sites Video ‘Conversations with History: Kenzaburo Oe’ from University of California Television (UCTV)

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Kenzaburo Oe was born in 1935, in a village hemmed in by the forests of Shikoku, one of the four main islands of Japan. His family had lived in the village tradition for several hundred years, and no one in the Oe clan had ever left the village in the valley. Even after Japan embarked…

Kenzaburo Oe: Laughing Prophet and Soulful Healer by Michiko Niikuni Wilson This article was published on 26 January 2007. Kenzaburo Oe, Japan’s second Nobel Laureate in Literature, with his insistence on engaging the reader in a provocative dialogue on the human condition, is one of the most impassioned voices of conscience countering the country’s minimalist…