Kojima Nobuo
Nobuo Kojima ( Japanese 小島 信 夫 , Kojima Nobuo ; born February 28, 1915 in Gifu Prefecture , Japan , † October 26, 2006 in Tokyo ) was a Japanese writer.
Life
Nobuo Kojima was born in 1915 in central Japan, north of Nagoya , and began writing for newspapers and magazines while still a student at Tokyo University .
During the Second World War he was drafted into the army and used in China . After his discharge from the army in 1946, he taught in schools and colleges and turned back to writing. As early as 1954 he received the Akutagawa Prize for a collection of short stories - American Sukuru (American School) .
When he received a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1957 , he spent a year in the United States studying the works of American authors and translating some into Japanese: u. a. William Saroyan's "The Human Comedy" , Sherwood Anderson's "Seeds" , Dorothy Parker's "Big Blonde" , Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" , Robert Penn Warren's "Blackberry Winter" , Irwin Shaw's "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses" , and Bernard Malamud's "The Loan" . Subsequently, Kojima taught English literature from 1961 to 1985 at Meiji University in Tokyo.
For his work Hoyo Kazoku (Foreign Family), published in 1965, he received the Tanizaki Jun'ichirō Prize . Nobuo Kojima addressed the clash of Far Eastern and Western culture, of diffuse ideals and reality during the American occupation and concretized this in the person of Professor Shunsuke Miwa, his wife Tokiko and their family. Foreign family is considered Kojima's most important work and was the first of his books to be translated into English.
His three-volume work with biographies of modern Japanese writers, Watashi no Sakka Hyōden (My Critiques on Writers), brought him the Art Prize of the Minister for Education and Teaching ( 芸 術 選 奨 文 部 大臣 賞 ) in 1972 . Nobuo had been a member of the Japanese Academy of Arts since 1989 . He was honored in 1994 as a person with special cultural merits .
His last book Fading Light , published shortly before his death in 2006, also received great praise.
Since 1999 the Gifu Prefecture has awarded the 1 million yen Kojima Nobuo Literature Prize .
Awards
- 1954 Akutagawa Prize for American School ( ア メ リ カ ン ・ ス ク ー ル , American sukūru)
- 1981 Grand Prize for Japanese Literature for Watashi no Sakka Hyōden
- 1982 Noma Literature Prize for Wakareru riyū ( 別 れ る 理由 )
- 1997 Yomiuri Literature Prize for Uruwashiki hibi ( う る わ し き 日 々 )
Works
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Shōjū. ( 小 銃 ), 1952.
- The rifle. Translated by Jürgen Berndt. In: Dreams of Ten Nights. Theseus, Zurich 1992, ISBN 3-85936-057-4 , pp. 337-349.
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Nikko. ( 日光 ), 1988.
- Sunlight. Translated by Andreas Simon. In: Explorations. Volk und Welt, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-353-00581-1 , pp. 109-134.
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Hoyo Kazoku. ( 抱擁 家族 ), 1965.
- Foreign family. Translated by Ralph Degen, Bebra-Verlag, Berlin, 2008
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b 小島 信 夫 . In: デ ジ タ ル 版 日本人 名 大 辞典 + Plus at kotobank.jp. Retrieved June 6, 2012 (Japanese).
- ↑ Topics: 小島 信 夫 文学 賞 . Choeisha Verlag, 2011, accessed June 7, 2012 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kojima, Nobuo |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | 小島 信 夫 (Japanese) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Japanese writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 28, 1915 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Gifu Prefecture , Japan |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 26, 2006 |
| Place of death | Tokyo |