Shōhei Ōoka

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Shōhei Ōoka (

After graduation, he became a journalist with the Kokumin Shimbun [ja], a pro-government newspaper, but quit after one year to devote himself to the study and translation of the works of Stendhal and other European writers into Japanese. In 1938, to support himself, he found a job as a translator with Air Liquide (Teikoku Sansō), a Franco-Japanese industrial company based in Kobe.^[1] In June 1943, he left their employ, and in November of the same year obtained a position at Kawasaki Heavy Industries.

However, in 1944, he was drafted into the

It was not until his repatriation after the war's end that Ōoka began his career as a writer. On the recommendation of his childhood French tutor and mentor Kobayashi Hideo, he published an autobiographical short-story of his experiences as a prisoner of war entitled Furyoki (俘虜記, lit. 'Account of a Prisoner of War'), published in English as Taken Captive: A Japanese POW's Story, in three separate parts between 1948 and 1951. Its publication, along with winning the Yokomitsu Riichi Prize in 1949, encouraged him to take up writing as a career.

His next work, Musashino Fujin, (武蔵野夫人, "A Wife in Musashino", 1950), is a

In 1958, he veered from his usual subjects and produced Kaei (花影, "The Shade of Blossoms", 1958–1959), depicting an aging, naive nightclub hostess’s struggle and ultimate demise from the destructive forces of desire and wealth in the decadent 1950s Ginza. The setting had changed but the recurring themes had not. His characters were still adrift and struggling for survival in an inhospitable environment. Kaei won the Shinchosha Literary Prize [ja] in 1961.

From 1953 to 1954, he was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at Yale University. He was also a lecturer on French literature at Meiji University in Tokyo.

In the late 1960s, he revisited the subject of the Pacific War and the Japanese defeat in the Philippines to produce the detailed historical novel Reite senki (レイテ戦記, "A Record of the Battle of Leyte", 1971). He compiled and researched an enormous amount of information for three years in order to produce it. As with all his writing, it looks at war critically from the perspective of a person who, despite ethical reservations, was forced to serve. The novel won the Mainichi Art Award [ja].

He was invited to become a member of the Japan Art Academy in November 1971 but declined to join, partly, he said, on account of his former experience of soldier and prisoner of war.

Along with translations and fiction, he also devoted himself to writing the critical biographies of Tominaga Taro [ja] and Nakahara Chūya, which won the Noma Literary Prize in 1974. He was awarded the prestigious Asahi Prize in January 1976 and the Mystery Writers of Japan Award in March 1978.

He died in 1988 at the age of 79. His grave is at the Tama Cemetery in the outskirts of Tokyo. He was posthumously awarded a second Yomiuri Prize in 1989 for a biography of Natsume Sōseki.

In October 1994, the Japanese writer Kenzaburō Ōe, when awarded the Nobel Prize of literature, mentioned Shohei Ōoka as one of the Japanese writers who "created the way to the Nobel Prize" for him^[2]

See also

• Japanese literature
• List of Japanese authors
• The Second Generation of Postwar Writers

References

• Ōoka, Shohei. Fires on the Plain. Tuttle Publishing (2001).
  ISBN 0-8048-1379-5
  .
• Ōoka, Shohei. Taken Captive: A Japanese POW's Story. Wiley (1996).
  ISBN 0-471-14285-9
  .
• Ōoka, Shohei. The Shade of Blossoms. University of Michigan Press (1998).
  ISBN 0-939512-87-4
• Ōoka, Shohei. A Wife in Musashino. Center for Japanese Studies University of Michigan (2004).
  ISBN 1-929280-28-9
  .
• Stahl, David C. The Burdens of Survival: Ōoka Shohei's Writings on the Pacific War. University of Hawai'i Press (2003).
  ISBN 0-8248-2540-3
  .

• Shohei Ōoka at J'Lit Books from Japan (in English)
• Synopsis of A Wife in Musashino (Musashino Fujin) at JLPP (Japanese Literature Publishing Project) (in English)
• Synopsis of Taken Captive (Furyoki) at JLPP (Japanese Literature Publishing Project) (in English)