SOURCE: Ōe, Kenzaburō. “Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself: Nobel Lecture 1994.” World Literature Today 69, no. 1 (winter 1995): 5-9.

In the following transcript of Ōe's Nobel Lecture, originally delivered on December 8, 1994, the author outlines the dilemmas confronting post-war Japan and discusses the influence of his mentally-challenged son, Hikari, on his life and work.

During the last catastrophic world war, I was a little boy and lived in a remote wooded valley on Shikoku Island in the Japanese Archipelago, thousands of miles away from here. At that time there were two books by which I was really fascinated: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. The whole world was then engulfed by waves of horror. By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I...