A Personal Matter
by Kenzaburō Ōe
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Bird is an antisocial twenty-seven-year-old intellectual hanging on to a failing marriage with whiskey. He dreams of going to Africa where the sky sprawls with possibilities. Then, as though walloped by a massive invisible fist, Bird's Utopian fantasies are shattered when his wife gives birth to what he calls their "monster baby." Now, Bird is left with one question: How can he and his wife spend the rest of their lives with this damaged thing clinging to their backs? As shameful, show more disgraceful, and unthinkable a desire as it is, Bird has an answer. Not sealed. Not just yet. Not before Bird flees on a bender of indiscriminate (and frustratingly impotent) sex, hard liquor, self-delusion, and most terrifying of all-self-discovery. show lessTags
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This is an incredibly honest, brutal account of a young man's transformation from immature boy to responsible man, centred around the birth of his first child. The child is born with a brain injury, and this sends the main character Bird into a desperate flight from his responsibilities as a father. The language is as poised as Hemingway's or Vonnegut's. The book is a departure from the Japanese style of fiction developed by writers such as Mishima, Soseki and Tanizaki, and seems to pave the way for writers like Haruki and Ryu Murakami. There is definitely a more Western feel to the style. I loved it. It's a difficult subject, but Oe faces it head on, uses humour, and makes the characters seem fully human.
When his baby is born with his brain sticking out of his skull, Bird goes on a bender: fighting in the streets, showing up at work hung over, waiting at a paramour's house for the baby to die before he goes home to his wife. Before I picked up this book I had no special interest in babies with deformities or men behaving badly, but the writing grabbed me right away and kept me turning the pages. Himiko, the paramour, is quite a character and could teach the good girls of today a thing or two. The main character is strangely compelling too, as is the plot with its dogged moral logic. When the book came out in 1964, Japanese critics said Ōe's writing "reeked of butter" with its bluntness and vivid metaphors, contrary to the Japanese show more tradition of subtlety and indirectness, but I must admit I found it refreshing. The Swedish Academy must have liked it too because they gave Ōe the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994. show less
I knew from early on this was a great book, but I also hated it, right up to the end. Then it redeemed itself. It a great story about a horrendous, damaged people, in a cold and severe culture, dealing with deep pain and helplessness. The only bits of lightheartedness were Oe's over-the-top poetic treatments of the most disgusting and awful things-- like vomiting, certain sex acts, and deformed babies-- so dark humor to be sure.
Oe's writing really does draw the reader into the distastefulness of the situation and the characters though. You feel dirty and immoral in Himiko's cave. You want to smack the doctors across the face. And you feel nothing for the mother or baby, who ought to be sympathetic characters. The book made me want to show more take a shower. Although I can't say I enjoyed reading this book I have to admire writing that powerful. All the more so since Oe himself is the father of a disabled son. I agree with the other reviewers who comment that the ending seems contrived and unbelievable, but I'm okay with that. I'm glad that corner was turned.
I don't know who to recommend this book to. It's a great novel, but painful to read. I imagine those who can handle it know who they are. 4 stars. show less
Oe's writing really does draw the reader into the distastefulness of the situation and the characters though. You feel dirty and immoral in Himiko's cave. You want to smack the doctors across the face. And you feel nothing for the mother or baby, who ought to be sympathetic characters. The book made me want to show more take a shower. Although I can't say I enjoyed reading this book I have to admire writing that powerful. All the more so since Oe himself is the father of a disabled son. I agree with the other reviewers who comment that the ending seems contrived and unbelievable, but I'm okay with that. I'm glad that corner was turned.
I don't know who to recommend this book to. It's a great novel, but painful to read. I imagine those who can handle it know who they are. 4 stars. show less
it upset me aside from the upsetting premise — a man tries to kill his infant son because he can’t handle having a son who is “deformed” — but because the way he finds redemption for intentionally trying to kill his child is via an abortionist(?) gay man he abandoned during school and his girlfriend (not his wife) who he probably (?) sexually assaulted. these two people are prepared to help him do something terrible (murder his child) but when he realizes they are "ugly" -- the girlfriend is mixed race and bisexual, the doctor is weak, gay, victimized, he realizes he doesn't want to be like them, even though Bird has directly harmed both of these people and fantasizes about killing his girlfriend, and then when he shies away show more from murder again, he fantasizes about beating her into unconsciousness and raping her then.
the language was interesting, i admire the skill of the translator here. it is not the japanese i’m used to reading (via translation) and i desperately want to know what Mishima said to Oë to get into a fist fight. a really nauseating novel — lots of vomiting, shame, assault, just hateful behavior. the language was wheezy, collapsing, slurring, and not just because the narrator, Bird, spends a lot of time drunk and throwing up. strange assortments of words and sentences like someone talking really fast and then gulping air, but all within a single sentence or a paragraph. the compacted timeline adds to this, the whole novel is 150 pages or so and takes place over three or four days.
I understand that trying to kill your infant child is something you spend the rest of your life trying to get over but I don't want to take part in that any longer, and most if not all of Oë's fiction has his disabled child in it as a character. I'll read more Oë but not anymore of his fiction. show less
the language was interesting, i admire the skill of the translator here. it is not the japanese i’m used to reading (via translation) and i desperately want to know what Mishima said to Oë to get into a fist fight. a really nauseating novel — lots of vomiting, shame, assault, just hateful behavior. the language was wheezy, collapsing, slurring, and not just because the narrator, Bird, spends a lot of time drunk and throwing up. strange assortments of words and sentences like someone talking really fast and then gulping air, but all within a single sentence or a paragraph. the compacted timeline adds to this, the whole novel is 150 pages or so and takes place over three or four days.
I understand that trying to kill your infant child is something you spend the rest of your life trying to get over but I don't want to take part in that any longer, and most if not all of Oë's fiction has his disabled child in it as a character. I'll read more Oë but not anymore of his fiction. show less
I have never cringed so much while reading a book. And I don't mean cheap cringes like you'd get from reading about an awkward adolescence, I mean serious, serious shrinking of the soul, some of it sympathetic and some not. What a horrific setup for a hugely cathartic ending. Nothing can match Bird's surreal and overblown fear of the "monstrous" infant or his self-loathing, so the ending is marked not by happiness and resolution but by a return to normalcy. Of sorts.
"Kendini kandırma zehrini bir kez tadan insanlar, bir daha kendilerini asla kurtaramazlar..."
Büyükşehir ortamındaki yalnızlaşma ve yabancılaşma sancılarından kurtuluşu Afrika gezisi hayallerinde arayan dershane öğretmeni Bird. Karısı her an doğum yapmak üzeredir ve evlendiği anda iyice azalan Afrika gezisine çıkma umudu, çocuğun doğumuyla tümüyle sönecektir.
Bir de çocuk beyin fıtığı gibi ender rastlanan bir anormallik ile doğuverince, Bird kendini bir karabasanın ortasında bulur. Yaşadığı utanç ve korku onu önce alkole ve sorumluluklarından kaçmaya, sonra çocuğu yeryüzünden bir an önce silinmesi gereken bir düşman olarak görmeye kadar götürecektir...
Kişisel Bir Sorun, kendisi de show more engelli bir çocuk sahibi olan 1994 Nobel Edebiyat Ödüllü Japon yazar Kenzaburo Oe'nin tüm dünyada tanınmasını sağlayan en önemli eserlerinden biri. show less
Büyükşehir ortamındaki yalnızlaşma ve yabancılaşma sancılarından kurtuluşu Afrika gezisi hayallerinde arayan dershane öğretmeni Bird. Karısı her an doğum yapmak üzeredir ve evlendiği anda iyice azalan Afrika gezisine çıkma umudu, çocuğun doğumuyla tümüyle sönecektir.
Bir de çocuk beyin fıtığı gibi ender rastlanan bir anormallik ile doğuverince, Bird kendini bir karabasanın ortasında bulur. Yaşadığı utanç ve korku onu önce alkole ve sorumluluklarından kaçmaya, sonra çocuğu yeryüzünden bir an önce silinmesi gereken bir düşman olarak görmeye kadar götürecektir...
Kişisel Bir Sorun, kendisi de show more engelli bir çocuk sahibi olan 1994 Nobel Edebiyat Ödüllü Japon yazar Kenzaburo Oe'nin tüm dünyada tanınmasını sağlayan en önemli eserlerinden biri. show less
WARNING: May contain triggers for those who have experienced rape.
I've written before about how novellas sometimes sneak up on me, taking a while to build up and becoming truly engaging just as they're about to end. I suppose that one sure-fire way to avoid this syndrome is to start your novella like Kenzaburo Oe's A Personal Matter: full-throttle intensity from the first page, when the atmosphere of subtly grotesque alienation is already fully developed, and the reader seems to be thrust down into the midst of an interpersonal wound of a situation—one that that has obviously been festering for some time. Long before the protagonist Bird hears the news, on page 15, that there is something abnormal about the baby his wife has been show more laboring for hours to deliver, it's already plain that he perceives the world around him in a skewed and deeply estranged way. The most ordinary details around him, such as the "small and soiled" hands of a cashier, "the meagerness of her fingers recall[ing] chameleon legs clinging to a shrub," or the "mean sky that seemed ashamed, roughly violated by clouds like galloping shaggy dogs," suggest a grotesqueness, a fun-house quality that constantly prevents Bird from getting his bearings or even keeping his balance. His dreams are vivid and disturbing, and his life has the quality of a dream as well: seemingly stalled at an emotional age of about fourteen, he has somehow ended up married to a woman he seems hardly to know and to whom he feels little connection, with a job he dreams of chucking and fleeing to Africa, and he wakes up one morning after a fistfight with a gang of street toughs to discover that he is the father of baby with a severely malformed brain.
A Personal Matter is the story of a man's coming to terms with his deformed baby, but writing out the plot like that suggests a very different book than the one Oe has actually written. For one thing, it implies that Bird is a sympathetic character: who could withhold sympathy from a man who has just suffered such a horrendous blow? But in fact Oe's protagonist is deeply unsympathetic—a result, of course, of his own inability to feel love, connection, or sympathy with anyone around him. A more alienated (in the sociological sense) character I've seldom read: not only does Bird seem to lack any loyalty to or love for his wife, son, and family, but he has fantasies about extremely violent and taboo actions (like killing his mistress and raping her dead body, for example, not to mention the central conflict of the book: whether he will kill what he considers his "monster baby" or raise it as a son). Unsurprisingly, he also has the classic feeling of enacting a role, that all actions left to him are empty performances and that no mode of behavior has any "reality":
But it's not just Bird. The whole society in which he lives is similarly alienated. His mother-in-law actively encourages Bird to lie to his wife (her daughter) about what's wrong with the baby, and to encourage it to weaken and die, because otherwise (as she says), her "little girl will never agree to have another child." Honesty and the mental health of the wife/daughter/mother take second place to the vague cultural mandate that a woman should produce multiple babies; the behavior I expect from a woman's own mother is turned on its head. Similarly, in one of the most grotesque scenes in the novella, the doctor at the hospital where Bird's baby is born refuses even to refer to him as an infant, instead scoffing when Bird announces that he is "the father," asking whether Bird wants to "see the goods" (meaning his son), and giggling as he informs the Bird that his son appears to have two heads. At every possible turn, the people in the society depicted desert, betray, and fail to connect with one another; and while this doesn't make Bird's behavior likable, it at least provides a context in which to place him. As much as I might be repulsed by Bird at times, it is hard to come up with a more logical or compassionate mode of behavior, when everyone around him is also so alienated and even vindictive.
Oe does a good job of keeping the onus of Bird's complexes and dubious behaviors on his own shoulders, while at the same time examining the external factors at play. It becomes plain, about halfway through the novella, that one of the main sources of this society-wide disorientation is the outcome of World War II and the role of the nuclear bomb in ending it. Set in 1961, and involving Kruschev's announcement of the Soviet resumption of nuclear testing which eventually led to the Cuban Missile Crisis, A Personal Matter is also dealing with an overtly political matter: the devastating consequences of 200,000 dead and a traditional way of life shattered, with no viable alternative yet developed. Bird and those around him continue to act their parts, perform their roles as more or less traditional members of society (marrying, having children) despite the fact that those roles have lost their power to provide meaningful self-definition for those who practice them. The people of Bird's generation have been defined by a huge event which they nevertheless were too young to actively affect or understand:
Bird is defined by war, but has never been to war; he has never grown up, but is somehow a father in his late 20s. As much as I was sometimes very put off by the violence and alienation of Bird's consciousness, I think I understood the root and necessity of them by the end of the novella. It was harder work to like this book than Oe's 1990 novel A Quiet Life (the only other book by him I've read), and definitely harder to like its protagonist, but in the end I found it at least equally powerful.
And speaking of A Quiet Life, the contrast between the two books was fascinating. One could argue that both novels are thinly-veiled autobiography, but the events of A Personal Matter take place thirty years earlier, and whereas the earlier work is told from a limited third-person perspective focused on the young Bird, the later one (narrated in first-person by the Bird-like character's daughter) presents him character at a vast remove, a delicate yet enigmatic father-figure whose for whose periodic breakdowns every character has a different explanation. The atmospheres of the two books, though similar in their masterful craftsmanship, are likewise radically different, for while Ma-Chan lives in a more or less benign environment (bad things happen, but her existence is more or less quiet and thoughtful), Bird's world is so fraught with menace that he can barely step outside without being threatened by something or someone. In A Quiet Life, the wild lack of any foothold has been replaced with a semi-distant but nonetheless caring, engaged family life, and the mystery behind Ma-chan's father's persistent melancholia is a somewhat intellectual one. On the contrary, Bird can hardly get his breath in his surroundings, let alone think calmly or selflessly enough to engage in a passionate conversation about Vonnegut or Céline. Although I was initially wary when I heard that Oe returns again and again, in his novels, to the theme of his brain-damaged son, I'm now very intrigued and eager to read more of his novels, to explore the different angles from which he approaches his repeated subject. show less
I've written before about how novellas sometimes sneak up on me, taking a while to build up and becoming truly engaging just as they're about to end. I suppose that one sure-fire way to avoid this syndrome is to start your novella like Kenzaburo Oe's A Personal Matter: full-throttle intensity from the first page, when the atmosphere of subtly grotesque alienation is already fully developed, and the reader seems to be thrust down into the midst of an interpersonal wound of a situation—one that that has obviously been festering for some time. Long before the protagonist Bird hears the news, on page 15, that there is something abnormal about the baby his wife has been show more laboring for hours to deliver, it's already plain that he perceives the world around him in a skewed and deeply estranged way. The most ordinary details around him, such as the "small and soiled" hands of a cashier, "the meagerness of her fingers recall[ing] chameleon legs clinging to a shrub," or the "mean sky that seemed ashamed, roughly violated by clouds like galloping shaggy dogs," suggest a grotesqueness, a fun-house quality that constantly prevents Bird from getting his bearings or even keeping his balance. His dreams are vivid and disturbing, and his life has the quality of a dream as well: seemingly stalled at an emotional age of about fourteen, he has somehow ended up married to a woman he seems hardly to know and to whom he feels little connection, with a job he dreams of chucking and fleeing to Africa, and he wakes up one morning after a fistfight with a gang of street toughs to discover that he is the father of baby with a severely malformed brain.
A Personal Matter is the story of a man's coming to terms with his deformed baby, but writing out the plot like that suggests a very different book than the one Oe has actually written. For one thing, it implies that Bird is a sympathetic character: who could withhold sympathy from a man who has just suffered such a horrendous blow? But in fact Oe's protagonist is deeply unsympathetic—a result, of course, of his own inability to feel love, connection, or sympathy with anyone around him. A more alienated (in the sociological sense) character I've seldom read: not only does Bird seem to lack any loyalty to or love for his wife, son, and family, but he has fantasies about extremely violent and taboo actions (like killing his mistress and raping her dead body, for example, not to mention the central conflict of the book: whether he will kill what he considers his "monster baby" or raise it as a son). Unsurprisingly, he also has the classic feeling of enacting a role, that all actions left to him are empty performances and that no mode of behavior has any "reality":
Bird turned around, as if to make certain of an escape route: paused along the dim corridor, young women in their nightgowns were peering at him through the dimness. Bird considered scowling back but he merely shook his head weakly and turned his back, then gave a timid knock at the door. He was performing the role of the young husband who has been visited by sudden misfortune.
But it's not just Bird. The whole society in which he lives is similarly alienated. His mother-in-law actively encourages Bird to lie to his wife (her daughter) about what's wrong with the baby, and to encourage it to weaken and die, because otherwise (as she says), her "little girl will never agree to have another child." Honesty and the mental health of the wife/daughter/mother take second place to the vague cultural mandate that a woman should produce multiple babies; the behavior I expect from a woman's own mother is turned on its head. Similarly, in one of the most grotesque scenes in the novella, the doctor at the hospital where Bird's baby is born refuses even to refer to him as an infant, instead scoffing when Bird announces that he is "the father," asking whether Bird wants to "see the goods" (meaning his son), and giggling as he informs the Bird that his son appears to have two heads. At every possible turn, the people in the society depicted desert, betray, and fail to connect with one another; and while this doesn't make Bird's behavior likable, it at least provides a context in which to place him. As much as I might be repulsed by Bird at times, it is hard to come up with a more logical or compassionate mode of behavior, when everyone around him is also so alienated and even vindictive.
Oe does a good job of keeping the onus of Bird's complexes and dubious behaviors on his own shoulders, while at the same time examining the external factors at play. It becomes plain, about halfway through the novella, that one of the main sources of this society-wide disorientation is the outcome of World War II and the role of the nuclear bomb in ending it. Set in 1961, and involving Kruschev's announcement of the Soviet resumption of nuclear testing which eventually led to the Cuban Missile Crisis, A Personal Matter is also dealing with an overtly political matter: the devastating consequences of 200,000 dead and a traditional way of life shattered, with no viable alternative yet developed. Bird and those around him continue to act their parts, perform their roles as more or less traditional members of society (marrying, having children) despite the fact that those roles have lost their power to provide meaningful self-definition for those who practice them. The people of Bird's generation have been defined by a huge event which they nevertheless were too young to actively affect or understand:
If he had ever been to war, Bird thought often, he would have been able to say definitely whether he was a brave type. This had occurred to him before fights and before his entrance examinations, even before his marriage. And always he had regretted not having a definite answer. Even his longing to test himself in the wilds of Africa which opposed the ordinary was excited by his feeling that he might discover in the process his own private war.
Bird is defined by war, but has never been to war; he has never grown up, but is somehow a father in his late 20s. As much as I was sometimes very put off by the violence and alienation of Bird's consciousness, I think I understood the root and necessity of them by the end of the novella. It was harder work to like this book than Oe's 1990 novel A Quiet Life (the only other book by him I've read), and definitely harder to like its protagonist, but in the end I found it at least equally powerful.
And speaking of A Quiet Life, the contrast between the two books was fascinating. One could argue that both novels are thinly-veiled autobiography, but the events of A Personal Matter take place thirty years earlier, and whereas the earlier work is told from a limited third-person perspective focused on the young Bird, the later one (narrated in first-person by the Bird-like character's daughter) presents him character at a vast remove, a delicate yet enigmatic father-figure whose for whose periodic breakdowns every character has a different explanation. The atmospheres of the two books, though similar in their masterful craftsmanship, are likewise radically different, for while Ma-Chan lives in a more or less benign environment (bad things happen, but her existence is more or less quiet and thoughtful), Bird's world is so fraught with menace that he can barely step outside without being threatened by something or someone. In A Quiet Life, the wild lack of any foothold has been replaced with a semi-distant but nonetheless caring, engaged family life, and the mystery behind Ma-chan's father's persistent melancholia is a somewhat intellectual one. On the contrary, Bird can hardly get his breath in his surroundings, let alone think calmly or selflessly enough to engage in a passionate conversation about Vonnegut or Céline. Although I was initially wary when I heard that Oe returns again and again, in his novels, to the theme of his brain-damaged son, I'm now very intrigued and eager to read more of his novels, to explore the different angles from which he approaches his repeated subject. show less
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Author Information
140+ Works 8,426 Members
Kenzaburo Oe was born on January 31, 1935. He was born in a small village on the island of Shikoku, Japan. A winner of numerous Japanese literary prizes, Oe came to manhood during World War II and the occupation. At Tokyo University, Oe studied Jean-Paul Sartre and absorbed many popular leftist ideas. These influences appear in his early writings, show more which often deal with contemporary issues. With the birth of his deformed son, father and son became the new focus of his work. In his two books, A Personal Matter (1964) and A Healing Family (1996), Oe describes the pain involved with accepting his brain-damaged son and the small victories involved their lives as his son progressed. In 1994, Oe won the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- A Personal Matter
- Original title
- 個人的な体験 Kojinteki na taiken
- Alternate titles*
- Kojinteki na taiken
- Original publication date
- 1964
- People/Characters
- Bird
- Important places
- Tokyo, Japan
- First words
- Mentre mirava el magnífic mapa de l'Àgrica col·locat dins l'expositor, elegant i orgullós com un cérvol salvatge, en Bird va reprimir un breu sospir.
Bird, gazing down at the map of Africa that reposed in the showcase with the haughty elegance of a wild deer, stifled a short sigh. - Quotations
- “A childish nickname like Bird doesn’t suit you anymore.”
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Bird intended to look up forbearance.
- Original language
- Japanese
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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- General Fiction, Fiction and Literature
- DDC/MDS
- 895.635 — Literature & rhetoric Literatures of other languages Literatures of East and Southeast Asia Japanese Japanese fiction 1945–2000
- LCC
- PZ4 .O287 .P — Language and Literature Fiction and juvenile belles lettres Fiction and juvenile belles lettres Fiction in English
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