Customer Reviews

A Personal Matter

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Nobel prize-winning novelist Kenzaburo Oe's best known book is a remarkable and intimate journey through the maze of ethics, fatherhood, and responsibility. The protagonist Bird is a dreamer; he dreams of going to Africa, of undemanding love, of a perfect son - none of which are within his grasp. His child is born with a herniated brain, and his wife's obstetrician is already talking excitedly about an autopsy as the baby, a boy, continues to live. This stubborn will to live, and Bird's responsibility to decide his son's fate, drives Bird deep into denial. If he doesn't do anything, then the baby might die naturally, and Bird will be free of the deformity that threatens to reflect ill on him as a man and husband. But his wife wants their child to survive; she wants to name him, to love him. And Bird begins to question his first inclinations. His touching relationship with his mistress Himiko only reinforces his sense of inadequacy and cowardice - until, that is, he begins to accept life as it is.

This stark, haunting novel leaves the reader with a deep sense of both loss and hope, although the latter is more, in Bird's mind, "forbearance." Oe's honest treatment of this difficult subject matter is sensitive and skilled, understated in a way that emphasizes the magnitude of what Bird faces. John Nathan's translation provides smooth, beautifully-rendered prose.

The subject matter may be too depressing for some readers but should appeal to those interested in quality literature. The issues Oe tackles are significant, and his characters, deeply human. A PERSONAL MATTER is an unforgettable novel not to be missed.

In this, his most famous book (says the blurb on the cover) Oe examines the devastation, fear and shame of fathering a brain-damaged child. This interpretation is oddly off-mark. "A Personal Matter" does not really examine these issues; it examines how a man avoids facing his own, quite different feelings. A sense of shame does pervade the novel, but it is an emotion that is felt most strongly by characters who think in a more conventionally Japanese way.

Bird, the main character of the novel, is a 27-year old man in a failing marriage. He teaches at a cram school and dreams of escaping to Africa. He is drifting through a life that has no meaning or direction (not that he bothers). The birth of his brain-damaged son forces him to face the question "what is the right thing to do for me?". He dodges the question as long as he can, plunging headlong into a drinking binge, a sexual affair, and eventually a scheme to have his son killed by a quack doctor. But the question does not go away. It is his very own personal matter. No one can help him. The question corners him (not surprisingly, several scenes of the novel prominently feature blind alleys), and finally he finds HIS answer. Or rather, the answer finds him - he did not consciously look for it.

More than anything that is impressive about this novel - the evocation of a stifling atmosphere, the restrained, matter-of-fact tone of the narrator, the stark realism, the depiction of the sense of shame and horror that the birth of a handicapped child evokes in the Japanese - more than all these things I admired how Oe managed to convey a sense of the unconscious humanity of the man Bird (who, after all, does not live up to any moral standards when he begins an affair while, at the same time, his wife is about to give birth in hospital).

The book has a very real background: In 1963, Oe's own son was born with a brain hernia. The doctors predicted that the boy would be severely retarded and gave him little chance of living any significant amount of time. Oe almost decided to abandon the boy. But before he did, he went to a memorial for those killed at Hiroshima, and there he realized that he could not take the easy way out. Today, the boy is as old as I am, and he leads a more or less independent life as an artist in Japan.

This book is about human responsibility. Bird, the teacher of a cram-school, has always, in his own words, been running away--from himself, from his marriage, from society, and from the duties he owes to his newly-born deformed child. The place which embodies his escapist tendency, where he self-deceivingly believes happiness resides, is Africa. He collects maps of Africa and buys books written by African writers. The author depicts a spiritually and morally empty modern Japan whose citizens, like Bird and Kimiko, live purposeless lives. Their quiet reckless acts of abandon hidden and bound behind a quiet orderly society reveal an intense desperation that is so insidiously harmful on the psyche because it cannot take form in overt revolt. This desperation can take either the aimless route of escapism or the dead-end road of suicide, to which the author has admitted his life had been heading. Kimiko's husband committed suicide for no apparent reason, thenceforth causing the wife to go on a crash course of sexual abandon. Bird's irresponsible sexual escapades with Kimiko are despicable, in light that his child and wife are committed to hospitals, but one is sympathetic to his degraded condition. One's knows that the birth of this monstrous child is the ultimate test, from which he will be surface like a hero from the darkness if he is able to confront his despicable character, take moral responsibility for his actions, and assume responsibility for others besides himself. His psychological journey is the mythic journey that all humans must take at least once in their lifetime. The book's unadorned language that sometimes borders on realistic crudeness is a marked contrast to Kawabata's poetic simplicity and Mishima's detailed psychological analysis. His unconventional and sometimes very strange adjectives take some time to put into perspective. Kenzaburo's unabashed depictions of raw sex are in a way refreshing, only because they show a side of human sexuality that is most likely more in tune with the prosaic state of contemporary society.

Japan has lost the power to connect the principle or theory and reality. I think literature's value is in making those connections. That's the mission of literature. Morals are significant. -Kenzaburo Oe

Kenzaburo Oe is probably the most highly regarded of Japan's post-war novelists and A Personal Matter is certainly his best known book. It is the harrowing, semi-autobiographical story of a parent's worst nightmare and of a brutal moral dilemma. As the novel opens, the twenty-something protagonist, whose immaturity is reflected in the fact that he retains his boyhood nickname of Bird, anxiously awaits the birth of his first child, but dreams of escaping his mundane domestic life in Japan and traveling instead to Africa. When Bird's son is born with a herniated brain--one doctor nervously giggles that it looks like he has two heads--he faces a choice between starving the child to death or financing exorbitantly expensive surgery with little chance of success. Even a successful operation is likely to cause significant brain damage.

Overwhelmed, Bird seeks to avoid his responsibilities by twittering--like his namesake--between alcohol, an old girlfriend and his African fantasies, avoiding his job, his wife, his child and most of all, the decisions which need to be made. Just hours after finally delivering the child to a back alley abortionist who will kill him and preparing to use the money he has saved up not on the prospective surgical procedures, but to run away to Africa with his girlfriend, Bird has an epiphany in a gay bar and, at last, determines to grow up and accept the mantle of responsibility that he has always sought to avoid. The story ends with the baby having been successfully operated on, though his future mental development remains in doubt, and with Bird's father-in-law telling him that his childish nickname is no longer appropriate because he is a changed man.

It is an open secret that the Nobel Prize has become little more than a politically correct constituency plum in recent years, so the prospect of reading a novel by an eminent left-wing Japanese novelist honestly filled me with dread. I was totally unprepared for this fierce, beautiful passion play and was pleasantly surprised by the stark, noirish prose style of Oe's writing. The brutally direct sentences of this brief novel present an unforgettable portrait of a man wrestling with a stark moral choice, one that lies at the center of much of our own politics, but which is seldom faced honestly. The fact that Oe's own son was born with a herniated brain only serves to add another layer of tension to an already unbearably tense tale. When Bird chooses life and himself becomes a man it is truly one of the most moving and gratifying moments of spiritual triumph in all of literature. Bird emerges as a heroic but very human figure. I can't imagine any reader being unaffected by this book; in fact, I can easily imagine readers being haunted by it. This is a great novel.

GRADE: A+

Kenzaburo Oe's novel of a suffering little man is one of the most revealing (and darkest) plunges into the human psyche I have read in ages. Bird is our anit-hero, a deplorable cram-school instructor who feels trapped in his non-exceptional life. When his child is born with a severe abnormality, he spends the next couple days waiting (and hoping) for the child to die. During this time, Bird hides from his wife and in-laws at the house of an old girlfriend, bemoaning his horrible life, and we are allowed to watch as he stumbles his way through drunken stupors, drug induced nightmares and sexual escapades. The writing is amazing. You cannot help but feel as if you are following Bird on his trek through his home city, participating in his anguish. Oe creates a sad character, one that you half pity and half blame for his own suffering. Bird is tormented by the fact that his friends and family still call him by his childhood name, a symbol that they still regard him as a young, immature individual. And yet, his behavior is definitely selfish and immature, refusing to do what is required of a true adult -and parent. A literal page-turner, I read A Personal Matter with a passion wondering how Bird's life would unfold. I was disappointed by the ending, not because of what Bird finally does, but how quickly Oe resolves such a complex issue, and neatly ignores all the real-life complications that are yet to surface for Bird

The Magic Flute is not Mozart's greatest opera. Do you catch my drift? "A Personal Matter" is not Kenzaburo Oe's greatest novel, but it is definitely great. Like many of Dickens's novels, the conclusion seems too deliberately conclusive and somewhat forced. Until the last chapter, however, this is a novel of such searing emotional terror that most readers will be grateful for its unexpected 'hopeful' ending.

"A Personal Matter" is easily Oe's most popular novel, outselling all others by a huge margin both in Japan and outside. That's easy to explain. It's his easiest, most traditional narrative, strictly chronological, told by an 'omniscient' narrator whose omniscience is obviously a mask for the author's projection of his own consciousness into his character named Bird. There is none of Oe's usual deliberate disorder and allusive/elusive obscurity. Plenty of 'shocking' scenes occur, but for Kenzaburo Oe this novel is almost chaste in its depictions of perversity and violence. If the reader is at all acquainted with Oe's other books, or with Oe's true 'personal matter' behind Bird's crisis, it's not hard to intuit that the author wanted and needed a simple structure, distanced from himself, to work out the anguish of his imagination.

Oe's personal matter was the birth of his first child, a son, with severe brain damage. That was in 1963. In 1964, Oe wrote two 'accounts' of his experience, this novel "A Personal Matter" and the short story "Aghwee the Sky Monster". Prior to 1963, most of Oe's writings had focused on the catastrophes of recent Japanese history: the war, the collapse of the Japanese identity along with the de-deification of the Emperor, and the bombing of Hiroshima. Since 1963, Oe's most powerful writing has traced the evolution of his fatherhood, of his intense bonding with his unique son. Oe the man has been a difficult, eruptive, unmanageable person, whose identity-pains inflate to fill any space he enters. From so much pain, so much humanity!

Oe would have been a great writer even if his son had been born in mediocre normalcy. Once in a while, I persuade myself that I can write, if not popularly at least honestly, but Oe's 'honesty' to his own craft as a writer and to his own humanity leaves me gasping in awe. This is the same honesty that I admire in the writings of WG Sebald. Neither Oe nor Sebald is bound to literal veracity, fact for fact, in their obviously autobiographical fictions. Both of them shape their lives imaginatively in their story-telling. But Oe's imagination comes closer to Reality than anyone else's 'swear-on-a-bible' truth. Think of the greatest autobiographers of the past -- Augustine, Rousseau, De Quincey, Lowell -- and get ready for an Oe who spills his guts more courageously than any of them.

A Personal Matter is a powerful, engrossing read. The language (in English translation), the connections, the descriptions, and the characterizations are taut and satisfying. With the exception of a few scenes and transitions which are palpably less crisp than others, the story sparks with brilliance and urgency. Oe neither shades his protagonist from the blinding light of reality and human dilemma nor indulges in superfluous philosophizing. The narrative is blissfully clean and existential. Highly recommended; a tonic for almost any imaginable mood.

My impression is that many readers are missing a major point here! Like Oe, I am also the parent of a severely handicapped child (who is now an adult). Different people react to the unexpected, shocking and profound experience of the birth of a handicapped child in different ways, but it is not easy for anyone. Reader, if this ever happens to you, you probably won't go through exactly what the protagonist goes through or in the same way that he does, but you will probably in some way go through as great an emotional struggle as he does. This is the only book I have ever read that will let those of you who have not had this experience yourself get a glimpse of the violent and conflicting emotions, the anguish, fear, love and dread and the struggle for acceptance and maturity that are involved. If you have a handicapped child, read this book - you will understand it all too well. If you know anyone with a handicapped child, give them this book to read. If you have trouble understanding the love and care that someone gives to his or her handicapped child, read this book! This book doesn't just describe an existential crisis experienced by some loser who has a minor problem arise - this book describes a human experience that will profoundly challenge anyone no matter how serene and controlled their previous life has seemed to be. Bird is not really an anti-hero, in many ways Bird is Everyman, confronted with an anguishing and terrifying situation. The ending is not glib but reflects a hard-won emotional maturity and responsibility that are very difficult to arrive at and that are in doubt until the very end.

Oh my, but this book is not light reading. Don't let its deceptive slimness fool you - every page is somewhat similar to being smashed in the head with a shovel. After reading Oe's description of Tokyo, you will no longer be afraid of Hell. Were this book converted into a movie, every single set of this movie would be coloured in dark shades of brown, and it would be raining in every single scene. This hellish vision makes the perfect setting for the hellish torment of Bird, the hapless protagonist. It is made all the worse because Bird is truly a man alone - out of all the characters in the entire book, he is the only one who could, under more fortunate circumstances, be capable of love. (Not even Himiko, the true woman of his life, is capable of love, which makes the desperate screaming need for her that Bird has all the more poignant.) The ending, like many have already commented, is indeed very abrupt and seems like an overly glib and easy solution to the painstakingly drawn emotional struggle that almost kills Bird. However, when you think about it, you see that this solution "solved" nothing - am I to believe that life with a hateful wife, a domineering mother-in-law, a condescending father-in-law and an invalid infant are in any way "good"? No, in a situation like Bird's there really is no way out. And that is precisely what the book is about - in some situations, there just -isn't- a way out, and the only difference between people when they receive such blows from life lies in how they take them.

Bird is one of the most selfish characters I have encountered in a book. By the time his wife makes an appearance in chapter eight, she says what the reader already knows, that he never thinks of anyone but himself. Set in Japan in the aftermath of World War II, and under the ongoing preoccupation of the nuclear arms build up of the 1960s, A Personal Matter tells the story of Bird, a 20 something Japanese man who has spent his life running from problems, trying to avoid stress and dreaming of an easy life. A recovered alcoholic, he teaches university prep classes, dreams of exploring Africa, has an unsatisfying marriage and is faced with the birth of a deformed baby. The Personal Matter deals with whether the baby should be cared for and allowed to live, with the possibility that he could live a vegetable like existence or have a limited mentality-- thus interfering with Bird's quest for a life he does not have, or whether he should be quietly neglected and allowed to die in a hospital. Bird both agonizes and debates the matter, often in the arms of his lover, a former student who easily gives in to his selfishness while at the same time using it for her own ends.

I think the book is exceptional. The author writes with so much feeling that you get to know Bird and Himiko, his lover, closely enough that you are both repulsed by and feel for them throughout the story. The book deals with human limitations, agony, and the price of selfishness so well that the differences in culture, custom and language (not knowing Japanese I read a translated edition); become less important, and you find yourself reading about people that you could know, or know about, today. We might even see ourselves in the pages.

While I enjoyed the entire book, the final two chapters were worth its price. Compelling and well written they present a redemption so powerful, and a resolution so satisfying that when I finished I was left wanting more.