Filippo Cervelli (SOAS) explores ‘Dante in Japan: Ōe Kenzaburō reads and writes the Divine Comedy’.

This talk examines Nobel laureate Ōe Kenzaburō’s relationship with Dante Alighieri as a prism shedding light into how a Japanese sensibility can engage with the Italian poet. A deep connoisseur of Western culture and literature, as seen in his engagement with William Blake or Heinrich von Kleist, Ōe found in Dante a fruitful channel to reflect on his life and worldview. His reading of the Comedy is situated within the history of the country’s intellectual fascination with Dante. As evidence of this long-standing engagement, Japan was the first Asian country to have a full translation from the Italian of the work of the Florentine poet. On the other hand, Ōe’s relationship with the Divine Comedy exemplifies his practice of reading other writers methodically, a technique that he had inherited from his mentor, Professor Watanabe Kazuo. The result of these two aspects is the semi-autobiographical novel Letters to My Nostalgic Years (Natsukashii toshi he no tegami, 1987), a powerful reflection on Ōe’s literary worldview. It is a retrospective of his life which, in light of Dante’s trip to the underworld, becomes an attempt to understand man’s suffering, conversion, and preparation for his future death, an issue that concerned Ōe deeply as he reached his fifties. Through close readings of Ōe’s novel, his essays, and short stories on Dante, this seminar shows how the Italian poet is crucial to illuminate the Japanese author’s voyage through life and through writing life itself, both looking back and with a glimpse forward.

Filippo Cervelli is Lecturer in Modern Japanese Literature and Popular Culture at SOAS University of London. He has written on the literature of Takahashi Gen’ichirō, Ōe Kenzaburō, Abe Kazushige, on post-Fukushima fiction, on manga and animation. He is the author of the monograph Immediacy in Contemporary Japanese Literature and Popular Culture, published by Routledge in 2025.