By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors.
From Kenzaburo Oe
However, please allow me to say that the fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world.
After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution.
The way Japan had tried to build up a modern state modelled on the West was cataclysmic.
I have survived by representing these sufferings of mine in the form of the novel.
The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia.
My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity.
As I grew up, I was continually to suffer hardships in different realms of life - in my family, in my relationship to Japanese society and in my way of living at large in the latter half of the twentieth century.
The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War.
From another point of view, a new situation now seems to be arising in which Japan's prosperity is going to be incorporated into the expanding potential power of both production and consumption in Asia at large.
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