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.
(Reviewed:30-Jan-00)
Grade: (A+)
