A Personal Matter

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

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

A young man in Japan in the 1960s. already shamed by his drinking and self-loathing, must come to terms with his handicapped newborn son.

It is a coming-of-age story, although the protagonist is in his late 20s when the book begins. Nicknamed Bird, he is an instructor in a cram-school and one of the least appealing protagonists I can recall in a modern novel, spending most of the narrative attempting to fly from the crises and failures of his life through a seamy mis-en-scene.

He undergoes a fairly explicit rebirthing journey characteristic of the genre, but it didn't feel cliched to me. The inventive writing evokes Tokyo's unglamorous side, where shame, despair, and anomie are the dominant feelings, to be overcome only with great show more courage. And the translation by John Nathan is fluid and almost totally without anachronisms.

At the end, I came to like Bird, and recognize his courage and evolution. 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

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