​Review of A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe

​A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe is a novel about a cram-school teacher, Bird, whose son is born with a brain hernia and Bird’s attempt at dealing with its ramifications. On the night of his son’s birth, Bird is not with his wife, but is instead buying maps to Africa, where he’s had a desire to go to. While waiting, he also gets in a fight with a street gang who initially thinks he’s an easy man to rob. Though, when his son is finally born, he’s told there’s something wrong. So, he rushes to the hospital where the doctor tells him of the brain hernia and that they can’t take care of the child. Instead, the child is taken to another hospital where the doctors try to stabilize it before surgery. After seeing the horror of his child, he goes to his father-in-law, who’s a professor, and tells him of the child. Knowing of Bird’s alcoholic past, his father-in-law gives him a bottle of Johnny Walker and sends him on his way. This is where Bird begins to spiral, where he goes to his old friend, Himiko, who he once raped in a lumber yard. He tries to push out the idea of the child by seeing Himiko, and they both get so drunk that the next day, Bird pukes in front of his cram-school class. Periodically, Bird checks in with his son, at times hoping the son to be dead so that he doesn’t have to tell his wife of their son’s defect. At one point, Bird lies to his recovering wife saying that he doesn’t know what’s wrong with their child. Eventually, Bird returns to Himiko wanting to have sex with her, but can’t stop thinking about getting her pregnant until she suggests anal. They get closer, and at one point they come up with the plan to take the child from the hospital and have him murdered by a shady doctor Himiko knows, and then they can flee to Africa. So, they take the child from the hospital before it’s to be operated on and drive to the shady clinic. They drop the baby off and go to a gay bar which, coincidently, is the same name Bird reluctantly gave to the child. There, he sees an old friend who he once betrayed. Upon talking with his old friend, Bird realizes he can’t have a doctor kill his child. So, he races back in a taxi to the clinic. Weeks later, it turns out that brain hernia was only a benign tumor which was successfully operated on. Bird then takes on the responsibility of being a father, ending with hope and possibility for him.
 
Ōe instills violence and sex into this narrative that felt powerful and at times terrifying. The run in with the gang, the man who he’d searched for when he was younger, the continual desire for his son to be dead. It’s an interesting way to show how Bird tries to rationalize the fact he’d prefer a dead son over one with a disability. Another thing that was interesting to me was how Bird expressed his sexuality. In one of the first scenes, he sees a trans woman (the novel is much more transphobic/homophobic than what is published today) and he, “…felt a surge of affection for the young man masquerading as a large woman.” Where he, “…would probably lie around naked, as close as brothers, and talk. I’d be naked too so he wouldn’t feel any awkwardness.” Later on in the novel, when Bird can’t seem to get hard due to Himiko saying there’s a potential for her to get pregnant, she suggests anal. And in Bird’s mind, “…he had longed for the most malefic sex, a fuck rife with ignominy.” In that same moment, Himiko also asks if Bird ever had sex with one of his male students. And what’s more interesting is at the end, after dropping off the baby at the clinic, Himiko and Bird decide on going to a gay bar. While Bird has a wife and mistress, it’s interesting to note the way Ōe approaches sexuality in tones close to Yukio Mishima’s (i.e. violence, power, shame). The novel flashes forward a few weeks at the end where we get to see Bird seemingly as a new person where even the gang doesn’t seem to recognize him. Though, because the rest of the novel is set within a span of a few days and I personally like ambiguity, I wonder what the novel would’ve looked like had the narrative stopped the moment Bird gets in the taxi to go back to the clinic. By then, we know the change that has come over Bird, and I would’ve liked to stew in the unknown the same way the rest of the novel sat in. Though, on the whole I really enjoyed the novel and, in the context of Ōe’s own personal life (his own son being born with a mental disability), it may have been too sad of an ending for Ōe to consider.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5