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
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Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburō Ōe follows the lives of fifteen reformatory boys as they are transported to a village to bury animals and then abandoned. They arrive at the moment where a soldier has defected and the remaining soldiers are sent out to look for him. The soldiers aren’t able to find the defector, but a larger more pressing matter occurs when a woman and loads of animals show up dead with bloated stomachs. The villagers see this as a plague that they must escape, so one night when the boys are left in an unlocked shack, the villagers leave. The next day, the boys find the village empty and learn that the exit out of the village is blocked off by a guard, so they are stuck there. While in the village, the boys gather food from the houses and try to survive in the cold winter. They go ice skating in the center square, they kill birds and have a feast, and the main character meets and then has sex with a girl that was also abandoned. The defected soldier is shown to them by one of the village boys, Li, who had stayed behind. The main character’s brother then finds and adopts a dog, but when it bites the girl, she comes down with the plague and eventually dies with the defector caring for her. The boys believe the dog had the plague, which causes one of the boys, Minami, to kill it. Then the main character’s brother runs away and never be seen again. The next day, the villagers return to berate and throw the boys into a shack, while the men search and find the defector. The villagers stab the defector and then send him with the military police, while the rest of the boys are beaten into submission and told to never mention the plague or their abandonment. The main character retaliates, which causes the villagers to send him away where they try to kill him. The novel ends with the main character on the ground in the forest ready to take on the villagers searching for him.
Ōe never seems to disappoint, and even with such a heavy and depressing book, there are beautiful moments and relationships that blossom. I was also intrigued with the way Ōe approaches the characters’ sexualities. One of the main characters, Minami, is shown as explicitly gay, discussing having sex with soldiers, doing his “morning make-up” which involves his butt, and his blunt lewd comments. There are other moments of sexual ambiguity among the boys watching their erections in a group together and displaying their penises to villagers. And it also occurs when the main character and the defector “…tasted a small miserable pleasure in each other. Silently we bared our poor goose-pimpled buttocks, losing ourselves in the motion of cunning fingers.” The main character’s sexuality is even more ambiguous when it’s shown he also thinks about and has sex with the girl. This openness to sexuality, particularly in the fifties when this was published in Japan, does seem quite out of the ordinary, but not an outlier (as one only has to look at Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask). It’s a dark book that gets worse as it goes, in displaying the villager’s brutality and the way life affects each character. However, it’s one that will stick with me. Final Rating: 5/5 A Quiet Life by Kenzaburō Ōe is a novel about a woman and her older brother who is handicapped. Their father and mother travel to California where the father is trying to get out of writer’s block, and believes being a writer-in-residence will help him. All the while, the woman, Ma-chan, the older brother, Eeyore, and younger brother, O-chan, continue to live in Japan. Ma-chan has taken up the responsibility of caring for Eeyore, taking him to music practice at Mr. Shigeto’s, taking him to his job at a handicap workshop, and eventually to swim practices with Mr. Arai. Throughout the novel, Ma-chan worries that Eeyore will either have his fits out in public, will be hurt by other people, or will act out his sexual urges. None of this comes to pass, but her worries become real when it’s alluded to that Mr. Arai was involved in two deaths on a cruise. They continue to get swimming lessons with Mr. Arai, until one day when Mr. Shigeto approaches him about an incident and then gets beat up. Finally, as Ma-chan talks about her dreams of marrying a Mr. Arai, Eeyore discusses this with Mr. Arai. Mr. Arai then decides to take them to his place, where he attempts to have sex with Ma-chan, but is beat up by Eeyore. The novel ends with their mother returning home and the father still toiling away in America.
Ōe creates such an interesting narrative through his use of Ma-chan’s voice, the discussions of movies, music, and of Ma-chan’s worry. It’s a novel that highly contemplates what it means to care for a disabled family member, and shows in some instances, the reverse (i.e. the care giver needs to be the one who is cared for) is true. This occurs while Eeyore protects Ma-chan from an oncoming crowd at a train station even while he is having a fit and in the last moment where Eeyore beats up Mr. Arai to save Ma-chan from being raped. It’s a compelling novel that shows the breadth of the care siblings have for each other. Final Rating: 5/5 Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness by Kenzaburō Ōe is a collection of 4 novella length stories detailing strange occurrences and of people going mad. The first, ‘The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away’, is about a man who believes he has liver cancer and is describing to the nurse about his father (who died from bladder cancer), his grieving mother, the emperor, and his brother who was killed during the war. It is a fascinating and sometimes confusing story where the man used to look up to his father but has difficulties understanding his place in the world. The second story, ‘Prize Stock’, is about a boy in a village that has captured an American pilot who crash landed in the forest. The boy is apprehensive and curious about the American while they begin to get along. However, when the American is about to be given over to the Japanese military, the American holds the boy hostage, which ends in the killing of the American by the boy’s father. I was drawn in by the way the boy sees and interacts with the American and how he digests his father’s actions. The third story, ‘Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness’, is about a father whose son has a disability and is fierce in trying to protect the boy’s innocence. Though, at a zoo, the father feels helpless in trying to protect his son, and it starts cracking his understanding of himself. This particular story was based on Ōe’s own experiences with his disabled son. And finally, the last story, ‘Aghwee the Sky Monster’, is about a young man who helps out a composer haunted by his dead son in the sky. The young man helps the composer right his wrongs, destroy his work, and say goodbye to the places he loved before the composer attempts to kill himself by walking in front of a truck.
Each story is beautiful, haunting, and powerful in how death, grief, and terrible life circumstances affect and change the outlooks of the characters. It is painful to see how each character’s “madness” reveals itself and what they must do to right their wrongs. It is a collection of what it means to be a father, a son, and what happens when the world between the two falls apart. Overall Rating: 4.5/5 |
AuthorMaxwell Suzuki is a writer, poet, and photographer based in Los Angeles. Archives
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