• Kenzaburo Oe, a Nobel Prize-winning author passed away at 88.
• Oe refused to recognize any authority higher than democracy.
• And argued that Japan should stop using nuclear energy.

Kenzaburo Oe, a Nobel Prize-winning author from Japan known for his staunch pacifism that permeated most of his writing, passed away on Monday due to “old age,” his publisher announced.

The 88-year-old had passed away on March 3, according to the publisher Kodansha, ten days earlier.

The Nobel Prize website described Kenzaburo Oe as someone “who with poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today”.

Oe, who was born in 1935 and grew up in the western prefecture of Ehime, made his literary debut in 1957 and won the Nobel Prize for literature almost four decades later.

After short story writer Kawabata Yasunari won the prize in 1968, he received it in 1994, making him the second person from his nation to do so.

Having grown up during the period that Japan was defeated in World War Two, Oe’s writing is greatly affected by his early memories.

He wrote on the suffering caused by the Hiroshima bombs and had recently participated in protests against former prime minister Shinzo Abe’s attempts to reform Japan’s pacifist constitution.

“By exercising collective self-defence, Japan will directly participate in a war,” Oe told people at a rally in 2014.

“I’m afraid that Japan’s spirit is approaching its most dangerous stage in the past 100 years,” he added.

Abe, who was assassinated last year, has long maintained that Japan’s defense strategy needed to be more muscular, particularly in light of China’s historic ascent in recent decades.

Oe’s brain-damaged son Hikari, who was unable to speak for many years as a toddler, served as another source of inspiration.

The writer viewed it as his duty to use his work to give his oldest kid a voice. He was married to Yukari, the sister of the late film director Juzo Itami.

The young Oe attended Tokyo University as a graduate student to study French literature. He started writing short tales while still in school, and after winning the Akutagawa Award, which launched his literary career, he quickly rose to notoriety.

After winning the Nobel Prize, he went on to receive Japan’s Order of Culture, which is given to the best musicians, poets, and scientists in the nation for their great achievements.

Oe, however, resisted at the time because it was an Emperor-given honor.

“I do not recognize any authority, any value, higher than democracy,” he said.

In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, he also argued that Japan should stop using nuclear energy.

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