Kenzaburo Oe, the Japanese Nobel Prize-winning novelist, has died, his publisher confirmed. He was 88. Oe’s passing on March 3 was announced by Kodansha on Monday, though the company did not disclose a cause of death. Oe was just 10 years old when Japan surrendered at the end of World War II following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and he would later write about the horrors of nuclear weapons. He was also critical of Japan’s role in the war and notoriously refused to accept Japan’s Order of Culture award in 1994 on the grounds that it was given by the emperor, saying: “I do not recognize any authority, any value, higher than democracy.” In the same year, Oe received the Nobel Prize in Literature, with the committee describing his work as an “an imagined world where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.”
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