After I got married, the first child born to us was mentally handicapped.

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• Kenzaburo Oe:

  I have survived by representing these sufferings of mine in the form of the novel.

• Kenzaburo Oe:

  The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia.

• Kenzaburo Oe:

  The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after th

• Kenzaburo Oe:

  The way Japan had tried to build up a modern state modelled on the West was cataclysmic.

• Kenzaburo Oe:

  After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we ren

• Kenzaburo Oe:

  Even though we now have the half-century-old new Constitution, there is a popular sentiment of supp

• Kenzaburo Oe:

  However, please allow me to say that the fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my

• Kenzaburo Oe:

  My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the

• Kenzaburo Oe:

  Paradoxically, the people and state of Japan living on such moral props were not innocent but had b

• Kenzaburo Oe:

  As I grew up, I was continually to suffer hardships in different realms of life - in my family, in