Japanese Nobel literature prize winner Kenzaburo Oe dies at 88

Tokyo, Mar 13 (EFE).- Japanese novelist, Nobel Prize for Literature laureate and peace activist Kenzaburo Oe has died at the age of 88, his publishing house announced on Monday.

Oe passed away due to old age in the early hours of Mar. 3, Kodansha said in a statement.

His family has already held a private funeral, and there will be a memorial service held at a later date, it added.

Born in Ehime prefecture in 1935, Oe studied French literature at the University of Tokyo and won the Nobel Prize in 1994, becoming the second Japanese author to achieve this recognition.

“With poetic force (Oe) creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today,” the Swedish Academy said.

The author made his literary debut with “A Strange Job” (1957), which won Tokyo University’s May Festival Prize, and rose to fame with “Hiroshima Notes” (1965), an account of his trip to this city in southern Japan in 1963 and years later in order to interview the victims of the 1945 atomic bombing.

Later, in 1970, Oe also published “Okinawa Notes,” in which he narrated his encounters with the residents of this group of islands in southern Japan, and questioned the living conditions in this region and the power exercised on it by the central government.

He also wrote articles for newspapers and magazines about the nuclear situation facing Japan and was active in civic groups calling for the elimination of nuclear plants and the retention of the pacifist Constitution.

In addition to the 1994 Nobel Prize, the writer won other prestigious awards such as the 1958 Akutagawa Prize, considered the most important among young writers in the country, when he was just 23 years old for “The Catch.” EFE