Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 10:39AM
Drew Wolfe

Kenzaburo Oe

I am an anarchist who loves democracy.

I think I am doing my works to link myself, my family, with society — with the cosmos.

I don’t have faith nor do I think I will have it in the future, but I’m not an atheist. My faith is that of a secular person. You might call it “morality.”

Our credo, our theme, or our imagination is that of the peripheral human being. The man who is in the center does not have anything to write.

Human history is fraught with tragedies in which man spared no effort to destroy with millenarian joy, only to learn that no messiah appeared afterwards.

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.

I cannot talk about myself otherwise than by saying "Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself".

To obliterate from the Constitution the principle of eternal peace will be nothing but an act of betrayal against the peoples of Asia and the victims of the Atom Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

 

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