A close friend of philosopher Takaaki Yoshimoto and writer Yukio Mishima, he helped draw attention to a new generation of postwar Japanese authors and push the Japanese literary world to break free from hegemonic ideologies and pursue more individualistic forms of expression.
Ichirō Hariu was born in Tokyo on July 25, 1926, the son of Japanese jurist and future Supreme Court justice Ken'ichi Okuno.
[1] In high school he developed an interest in science, enrolling in the Tokyo Institute of Technology where he graduated in 1953 with a degree in organic chemistry.
"[2] Calling on writers to develop "literary autonomy," Okuno praised Kōbō Abe's book The Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna) and Yukio Mishima's book A Beautiful Star (Utsukushii hoshi) as "epoch-making" works that had broken free of ideology and dogma to explore the authors' own subjectivities, whereas he criticized works by books by Yoshie Hotta and Hiroshi Noma as "failed works of non-literature" for being too blatantly political.
[4] In 1972, Okuno proposed his well-known theory of "primary landscape" (原風景, gen fūkei), which remains an important concept today in the analysis of Japanese literature.