information:filtering, linguistic:translation
Early life and education

Ōe was born in Ōse (大瀬村, Ōse-mura), a village now in Uchiko, Ehime Prefecture, on Shikoku. The third of seven children, he grew up listening to his grandmother, a storyteller of myths and folklore, who also recounted the oral history of the two uprisings in the region before and after the Meiji Restoration. His father, Kōtare Ōe, had a bark-stripping business; the bark was used to make paper currency. After his father died in the Pacific War in 1944, his mother, Koseki, became the driving force behind his education, buying him books including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, which had a formative influence on him.

Ōe received the first ten years of his education in local public schools. He started school during the peak of militarism in Japan; in class, he was forced to pronounce his loyalty to Emperor Hirohito, who his teacher claimed was a god. After the war, he realized he had been taught lies and felt betrayed. This sense of betrayal later appeared in his writing.

Ōe attended high school in Matsuyama from 1951 to 1953, where he excelled as a student. At the age of 18, he made his first trip to Tokyo, where he studied at a prep school (yobikō) for one year. The following year, he began studying French Literature at the University of Tokyo with Professor Kazuo Watanabe, a specialist on François Rabelais.