Oe Kenzaburo, Nobel Prize-Winning Japanese Author, Dies at 88
Mark Schilling Japan Correspondent Japanese author Oe Kenzaburo, the winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature, has died at age 88. His date of death, ascribed to old age, was March 3. A total of six films have been made from Oe’s work, most recently the 2001 “Gibier d’élevage,” a reworking of “The Catch” by Cambodian director Rithy Panh. Born in 1935 in Ehime Prefecture on the island of Shikoku, Oe began writing while still a student of French literature at the University of Tokyo. Not long after graduating in 1957, he published “The Catch,” a novella about a Black American airman who finds himself captured by rural Japanese villagers in the waning days of the war. It won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize and was made into a 1961 film by Japanese Nouvelle Vague auteur Oshima Nagisa.