by Kenzaburo Oë
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Product Description
Oe’s most important novel, A Personal Matter, has been called by The New York Times “close to a perfect novel.” In A Personal Matter, Oe has chosen a difficult, complex though universal subject: how does one face and react to the birth of an abnormal child? Bird, the protagonist, is a young man of 27 with antisocial tendencies who more than once in his life, when confronted with a critical problem, has “cast himself adrift on a sea of whisky like a besotted Robinson Crusoe.” But he has never faced a crisis as personal or grave as the prospect of life imprisonment in the cage of his newborn infant-monster. Should he keep it? Dare he kill it? Before he makes his final decision, Bird’s entire past seems to rise up before him, revealing itself to be a nightmare of self-deceit. The relentless honesty with which Oe portrays his hero — or antihero — makes Bird one of the most unforgettable characters in recent fiction.
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Average Customer Review:
10 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
 Do you ever think seriously about anyone but yourself?, 2008-08-24
The heart of darkness can be anywhere; here it is in Tokyo, it can just as well be next door in Frankfurt, London, or Boston.
The hero of this dark tale is a young man like many others. Immature at 27, with a failing marriage, an unliked job, with a vague dream of escape, with a personal history of serious alcoholism. And then the jail gate seems to close on him: his wife gets pregnant. And worse: the baby is born with a seemingly hopeless problem, diagnosed as brain hernia, which makes the boy look as if he had two heads.
The hero has the silly nickname Bird, kept from childhood. Bird is deeply shocked. The wife hardly figures at all in the story. She only shows up twice, once in the middle and then at the end. Bird lives without her and fights with the monsters without her. He hopes for an early natural death, encourages negligence, considers and then plans infanticide. He sinks into drinking, gets entangled with an old girl friend, has a mad affair; she encourages him in his worst instincts... But she also cures his sexual problems, he stops being afraid, he begins to be schizzo: he believes he is happy and liberated, crafts on that pseudo-high status thoughts of a different future, of leaving his wife, of running away, to Africa, with the miracle healer of his manhood...
Tough and unsentimental, without excessive theorizing about the moral issues involved, taking the reader on eye level rather than as somebody to be taught. There is no need to sympathisize with Bird, he is a thoroughly unlikeable person, so is his girl friend; we don't get to meet anybody else intimately enough to form an opinion. This leads me to the question: how much of himself did KO put into Bird? Is this his story or is it only using elements of his own story? Of course for the quality of the novel, that is entirely irrelevant; but for understanding the driving psychological forces, it would be very interesting to know.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Both for laughs and cries, 2008-02-23
This book is a perfect example of how good writing conquers all. It ultimately doesn't matter whether the subject is gruesome, the main character completely despicable, the culture foreign or how dated the material is (people say things like "groovy"). How much of the beguiling effect is owed to the translation I don't know, but I assume that it is based on an outstanding original.
What to make of a young man whose wife has just delivered their first baby (while he was having a showdown with a street gang) and who responds to his son's physically appalling abnormality by going on a rampage of alcohol and sex, eagerly awaiting news of the baby's death? Nothing simple for sure. Oe not only makes it understandable that shame, fear and sadness can lead to seemingly incomprehensible actions--for those to whom the matter is not personal. He instills into Bird, the protagonist, a soul that the reader willingly follows him search. Bird's aimlessness, his dreaming of Africa, his reluctance to commit, are all not unusual for a 27-year old, and it may just be the extent of his tragedy that makes his wrestling with responsibility seem more crass than others. Throughout Bird's outrageously selfish few days of dealing with his own post-partum issues (and an emerging history of less than glorious encounters with morality), Oe supplies him with such ingenious self-irony that he ends up almost endearing.
Infusing a difficult premise like this one with humor is no easy feat, nor is the marvelous suspension of the plot, but that is why Oe's praise, up to the Nobel Prize, is so well deserved. Like Bird's inner world, the novel revolves around him, but does not operate in a vacuum. Although Japan in the early sixties places the action into a firm context, global upheavals of the old order (the women's lib movement, political unrest in academia, the Cuban missile crisis) give it universal appeal. Highly recommendable.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Seriously flawed, 2007-09-01
Bird, a teacher at a Japanese cram school, is shocked to learn that his new-born son suffers from a brain hernia. He is expected to die soon and will suffer from brain damage even if he survives. Bird, whose first impulse is to find a way to escape this predicament rather than deal with it, struggles to understand what he should do.
Oe Kenzaburo, who faced this situation in his own life, is at his best relating the surreal situation that Bird finds himself in as he confronts the impersonal hospital system with its uninvolved doctors. Other aspects of the novel are far less successful. Bird is presented as such a shlub that it is difficult to understand the devotion of his mistress Himiko, who alternately plays both mother (by providing him with unconditional sympathy and a shoulder to cry on) and mistress (by providing sex and the possibility of escape from his stifling daily routine). Neither Bird the character nor Oe the author seem very concerned about the wife and mother of the deformed baby in all this, as she is barely mentioned in the story, which makes Himiko seem like a pathetic bit of wish fulfillment who gives and gives without making any demands in return. Her dippy philosophical speeches don't help, either.
I was also puzzled by the abrupt change in tone at the book's conclusion. For most of its length, this is a very dark book, and its sunny resolution is both unconvincing and puzzling coming from a culture that often seems to have more affinity with sad endings than happy ones.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
"Bird, Fly": Oe's superb complement to Updike's classic, 2007-07-08
Oe's masterpiece unites personal experience with literary inspiration in the most extraordinary way. The most immediate source for the novel is Oe's own personal experience, the birth of a son with brain damage, a seeming misfortune that ultimately became a source of considerable happiness. In the novel, Bird's failing marriage is exacerbated by such a birth, which causes him to wish for his newborn's death (and to even attempt subversively lethal measures) and to fly to the arms of another woman while his seriously ill wife is recovering in the hospital. His efforts to escape his self-absorbed misery founders: "The baby continued to live, and it was oppressing Bird, even beginning to attack him."
Throughout, the novel recalls an extraordinary number of literary antecedents. I can only speak to the American influences, but "A Personal Matter" most obviously--and intentionally--resembles "Rabbit, Run" (which I happened to have read only weeks before). There are the surface resemblances (Rabbit = Bird); the plot parallels (each man escapes his familial duties by fleeing to the arms of a "sexual adventuress who had broken out of conventional orbit"); the thematic similarities (the lure of freedom versus the manacles of responsibility).
In fact, Oe was an avid and thorough reader of American fiction, from Mark Twain to Saul Bellow. (His American translator John Nathan met Oe shortly after "A Personal Matter" was published and "tried to confront him with things he didn't know": specifically, "Rabbit, Run." Oe, who was already quite familiar with the novel, in turn introduced Nathan to Updike's poems on basketball.) The many literary echoes enhance the work largely because Oe transforms Updike's cynicism into his own message of "hope." For all their similarities, the two novels are assertively different--in tone, in style, in their characters--and, together, they bookend the conflicting themes of expectation and disillusionment so prevalent in twentieth-century literature.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 What it takes to be a man, 2007-02-09
The fondest dream of Bird, the nickname of this novel's protagonist, is to travel to Africa, then write his memoirs upon returning home to Japan. This proposed trip is in actuality just another step in Bird's life long pattern (at the age of 27) of running away from responsibility. Bird's problem at the present time is that his wife has just given birth to a boy with a herniated brain. There appears to be little hope that his son will survive this terrible defect. Should Bird put the boy through an operation, only to die or at the most exist as a human vegetable? Bird eagerly awaits a telephone call from the hospital, while visiting his mistress, Himiko, telling Bird that "the monster" has died. Not a particularly a nurturing father's response, but it would set Bird free. He even considers strangling his son to death. Additionally, Bird treats his suffering wife with disdain and neglect. Also, Bird's extreme passivity is obvious when he fails to protest when he is summarily discharged from his teacher's job.
Kenzaburo Oe is an extraordinarily gifted writer with a rare ability to get inside a person's heart and soul. With keen powers of empathy and perception, Oe sensitively describes the pain, anxiety, anger and bewilderment of Bird as well as some of the other fathers at the hospital who also had children born with serious birth defects.
By the book's end, Bird discovers a measure of responsibility in himself and gets on with his life in a mature manner. Finding the courage to be an adult--rather than always escaping from it--finally becomes a personal matter to Bird.
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