SOURCE: "Kenzaburō Ōe: The Early Years," in World Literature Today, Vol. 58, No. 3, Summer, 1984, pp. 370-73.

[In the following essay, Sakurai discusses the major influences on Ōe's early literary career, such as Japan's military defeat in 1945 and the works of such authors as Jean-Paul Sartre and traditional Haiku poets.]

A highly regarded Japanese novelist, Shòhei Òoka, commented in 1977 that to discuss Kenzaburō Ōe would be to discuss one-quarter of a century of Japanese literature beginning in 1957. Few critics familiar with the development of that literature would disagree. Since becoming established as a writer in 1957 at age twenty-two, Ōe has produced an astonishing body of work that ranks at the forefront of contemporary Japanese fiction. He came on the literary scene a decade after a younger generation of writers referred to as sengoha (Postwar School) had launched a movement to discard outmoded traditions and achieve contemporaneity with world literature...