SOURCE: Ōe, Kenzaburō, and Sam Staggs. “Kenzaburo Oe: After the Nobel, a New Direction.” Publishers Weekly 242, no. 32 (7 August 1995): 438-39.

In the following interview, Ōe discusses his background as an existentialist and recounts the controversy surrounding his acceptance of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Kenzaburo Oe is the last existentialist. Changing trends in literature and philosophy have reduced the outsized reputations of such existentialist giants as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, but it seems no one has told Oe that—or if so, he paid no attention. “It doesn't matter,” he says flatly when asked to comment on the diminished fortunes of his literary parents. To him, the heroes of his youth are still big. It's literature that got small.

For almost 40 years, Oe has been the faithful Japanese acolyte of his French mentors, filling book after book with images and metaphors drawn from the existentialist...