The controversy over awarding a share of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize to Yassir Arafat was hardly surprising. What was surprising to some was the lack of controversy over the Nobel Prize for Literature. The selection of Kenzaburo Oe for the award suggests that the Swedish immortals decided that this was Japan's year and that somebody from that nation would be recognized. Or, as often happens, the Nobel Prize would salute not only the celebrated writer but also the national literature represented by that author.

Oe is not a insignificant in world literature, and he is a fine writer. Yet he is so little known that on the morning of the Nobel Committee's announcement, nobody answering bookstore phones knew the name. One of the problems the committee members may have faced was that they could not consider two of Japan's finest recent novelists. Both died in 1993—and the Nobel is not a posthumous award. Kobe Abe's Woman in the Dunes, Box Man and other riveting books were influential and widely read. Masuji Ibuse's Black Rain is probably the most beautiful novel written about Hiroshima.

For Oe, as for many Japanese writers, guilt has been a common theme. Many have seemed horrified at their own attraction to Western customs, technology and values, and at their implicit rejection or betrayal of centuries-old traditions.

Guilt may be a major component of the Japanese psyche. Americans cannot understand the Japanese humiliation over their role in Pearl Harbor. In the samurai tradition, a sneak attack is an act of dishonor. If two armed warriors decide to do battle as samurai, they go to the forest together to find a clearing. One turns his back on the other as they walk single file, confident that the other will not stab him in the back and thereby lose face.

The Japanese preoccupation with guilt is further evident in the widely practiced technique of Naikan psychotherapy, which urges clients to identify all the people who were helpful to them in their lives, and then regret having expressed insufficient gratitude to them.

Two major traumas in Oe's life were the springboard for an artistic philosophy that combined guilt and his pain over disappearing tradition. Each incident occurred in a flash. Oe's first shattering moment came when, at the age of ten, he heard the radio broadcast in which Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender to the Allies. In that instant his revered god became an ordinary human being; his respect for tradition was challenged.

The second humiliation, as he regards it, was the birth of his son Hikari, who is mentally retarded. This experience served as the focus of a number of the novelist's plots. Particularly moving is A Personal Matter, in which the main character engages in carousing and drunkenness before finally accepting responsibility for the child. In a short story, “Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness,” the father attempts to be his son's connection with the world but learns instead that he is dependent on the son. (Hikari, the first of three children, is now in his early 30s. He reads and speaks like a child but has musical talent: his compositions have been performed and recorded on two albums.) Perhaps Oe's best-known work in the U.S. is The Silent Cry, about an unhappy family that moves back to its village of origin. The protagonist suffers from the birth of a malformed child, the suicide of his best friend and a tortured relationship with his wife. He grasps at his brother's suggestion that they all leave the city for a simpler existence.

In Oe's world, the interaction of past and present generates problems—among them violence, including suicide, adultery, incest and gang activities. This violence has offended a number of readers, and some Japanese critics condemn it as too Western. D. J. Enright has complained that in A Personal Matter “a fantastic amount of vomiting goes on.” Another critic has observed that “Oe pushes his creations headlong into shameful situations,” like the playboy in the 1963 novel Homo Sexualis, who ejaculates by rubbing against girls on crowded subways (yet eventually comes to a kind of self-awareness meant to symbolize redemption).

It may not be surprising that many of Oe's literary models have been American: Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Saul Bellow and especially Mark Twain. Oe particularly admires the story of Huck Finn, who opts to “go to hell” rather than betray a runaway slave.

Oe also respects Sartre, Camus, Rabelais, Kobo Abe and Japan's popular Catholic novelist, Shusaku Endo. It is not easy to categorize Kenzaburo Oe. Some would label him an existentialist. His translator John Nathan writes that “Oe's early heroes have been expelled from the certainty of childhood, into a world that bears no relation to their past. The values that regulated life when they were growing up have been blown to smithereens along with Hiroshima and Nagasaki; what confronts them now, the postwar world, is a gaping emptiness, enervation, a terrifying silence like the eternity that follows death.”

Those words may reflect especially the earlier Oe. In any case, his characters, with their willingness to accept personal responsibility for their lives, are far less depressing than those in Sartre's Nausea, the dramas of de Motherland or the novels of Celine, Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet and Queneau. If Oe is an existentialist, he is more akin to Albert Camus, whose Sisyphus exhibited a certain courage in pushing his rock up the hill, giving whatever meaning he could give that eternal act.

Many of the characters in existentialist literature—and some existentialist writers—contemplate or commit suicide. But few of them—fictional or historical—have children. Kurt Vonnegut has said that he would not fulfill a desire to kill himself because it would be a bad example for his children. There may be sweet irony in the fact that Oe lives to be responsible for the child who almost shattered his life.