A Personal Matter
Bird is a 27-year-old Tokyo cram-school teacher whose dream of escaping to Africa collapses the day his son is born with a brain hernia. The doctors tell him the child will die or live as a vegetable. Across the next week, Bird flees the hospital, drinks himself sick, hides in the apartment of an old college friend named Himiko, and drifts into a fantasy of letting the baby die so the African trip can resume. Oe wrote the book a year after his own son Hikari was born with a similar condition, and he turns the autobiography into a tight, hallucinatory study of cowardice, masculinity, and the moral weight of the smallest decision a person can make.
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A young Tokyo teacher whose son is born with a brain hernia spends a week drinking, hiding, and considering whether to let the child die in this autobiographical Japanese classic.
A Personal Matter was written by Kenzaburo Oe and originally published in Japanese in 1964. Oe won the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature, partly for this novel and its companion works.
Partly. Kenzaburo Oe drew on the birth of his son Hikari, who was born with a brain hernia in 1963, the year before A Personal Matter was published. The novel fictionalizes the experience and changes the outcome significantly.
A Personal Matter is 165 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, A Personal Matter takes most readers 2 to 4 hours to finish.
A Personal Matter is a standalone novel by Kenzaburo Oe, not part of a series.
A Personal Matter is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
