A Personal Matter
by Kenzaburo Oe
Summary
Bird, a twenty seven year old Japanese man who spends much of his time fantasizing about a walking tour of Africa he will probably never take, learns that his newborn son has been born with a hernia bulging through the skull, a defect the doctors expect will leave the child severely disabled if he survives surgery at all. Rather than stay at the hospital with his wife, Bird drifts toward Himiko, a former lover, and passes the following days drinking, avoiding the ward, and quietly hoping the baby will simply die before he has to decide anything. Kenzaburo Oe leans on the irony in his own nickname throughout: a man called Bird who wants nothing more than to fly free of the responsibility that has just landed on him.
Bird loses the teaching post he holds at a cram school after vomiting, drunk, in front of a class, and with his money and his excuses both running out, he circles the two choices the novel keeps returning to: let the child die through neglect, or accept him outright. He decides the only honest options left are to strangle the boy himself or to raise him, since a slow death dressed up as an accident is neither. He agrees to surgery. The operation finds the swelling has not pushed as far into the skull as the doctors first feared, though the surgeon still warns some disability could remain. The baby survives, and Bird goes home changed, telling a former professor that living a real life turns out to mean living conventionally, a sentence a young man can only mean once he has stopped treating conventional life as a defeat.
Oe writes the crisis close to the skin, drink, sex and self disgust laid out with none of the dignity Bird would like to claim for himself, and the discomfort is the point: a reader is not meant to like Bird so much as recognize him. It reads fast for a novel this serious, just over two hundred pages, and it suits anyone who wants fiction to sit inside a moral failure in real time rather than describe one from a safe distance afterward.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Kenzaburo Oe the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature for writing that, with poetic force, creates an imagined world where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today, making him the second Japanese writer to win the prize after Yasunari Kawabata in 1968. A Personal Matter, published in Japanese in 1964 as Kojinteki na taiken and in English in 1968 in a translation by John Nathan, drew directly on Oe's own life: his first son, Hikari, had been born the previous year with a brain hernia that left him permanently disabled.
Oe later said Hikari's turn toward composing music taught him how to listen, and father and son worked in adjoining rooms for decades afterward. In his Nobel lecture, delivered in Stockholm, Oe set himself apart from Kawabata's own acceptance speech, saying he felt closer to the Irish poet William Butler Yeats than to his own countryman. In 1994, the same year as the prize, Oe publicly declined Japan's Order of Culture, saying he recognized no authority higher than democracy, a refusal that drew threats and kept his name in Japanese headlines well past the Nobel announcement.