Kenzaburo oe a personal matter pdf
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KENZABURO OË was born in 1935, in Ose village in Shikoku, Western Japan. His first stories were published in 1957, while he was still a student. In 1958 he won the coveted Akutagawa prize for his novella The Catch. His first novel was published in 1958—Pluck the Flowers, Gun the Kids. In 1959 the publication of a novel, Our Age, brought the critics down on Oë’s head: they deplored the dark pessimism of the book at a time supposed to be the new, bright epoch in modern Japanese history. During the anti-security riots in 1960, Oë traveled to Peking, representing young Japanese writers and there met with Mao. In 1961, he traveled in Russia and Western Europe, meeting with Sartre in Paris and writing a series of essays about youth in the West. In 1962 he published the novel Screams; in 1963, The Perverts, and a book memorializing Hiroshima called simply, Hiroshima Notes. In 1964, Oë published two novels, Adventures in Daily Life and A Personal Matter, for which he won the Shinchosha Literary Prize. In the summer of 1965 he participated in the Kissinger International Seminar at Harvard. Oë’s novel Football in the First Year of Mannen, completed in 1967, won the Tanizaki Prize.
Books by Kenzaburō Ōe published by Grove Press Somersault Rouse Up O Young Men of the New A
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A Personal Matter: H Story
Abstract
In the summer of 1963 Nobel Prize winning author, Kenzaburo Oe, visited Hiroshima to write the first of several essays, or “notes,” which were published serially in the monthly journal Sekai (World) and were later collected under the title Hiroshima Notes (Hiroshima Noto, 1965). Accompanied by illustrations reprinted from a small volume of A-bomb drawings, Pika-Don (Flash-Bang, 1950), Oe’s book is a deeply moving statement about the meaning of Hiroshima, written “on the spot” (in Hiroshima) while Oe’s first-born child lay in a Tokyo hospital incubator with an affliction that would leave the child with a permanent intellectual disability. At the same time as putting together his Hiroshima Notes, Oe produced a fictional work—a novel entitled A Personal Matter (Kojinteki na Taiken, 1964)—in which the child of the main character (“Bird”) has a monstrous deformity: a massive brain hernia. Briefly stated, the young father, Bird, is a character with anti-social tendencies who, when previously faced with life’s difficulties, has typically turned to drink and (sexual) violence. Confronted with the child’s deformity, Bird initially considers abandoning the infant—even killing it—before finally resolving to commit himself with “
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Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter (1964)
Citation preview
Philobiblon – Vol. XVI (2011) - No. 2 Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter [1964]: Personal History Connected to World History as a Meditation on the Crisis of Humanism Rodica FRENTIU Faculty of Letters, Babes-Bolyai University Keywords: personal history, world history, crisis, illness, the new humanism Abstract. An existentialist type of fiction, the novel A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe, examines the human condition (Ningen to wa nanika.) and the limits of possibility for humans. Privileging the anthropocentric world, subjecting it to insights not only into the past but, also, potentially, into the future, highlighting the crimes that man might commit against himself, the novel outlines a possible “human renaissance” (ningen kaifuku 人間恢) through an extreme personal dilemmatic situation, which is connected to world history. The present study proposes an investigation delving on existentialism and social anthropology, attempting to prove how in the afore-mentioned novel, Kenzaburō Ōe, the humanist, protests against and resists an inhuman world, with a view to defending and protecting fragile values such as humanism and the humaneness of man, the right to life and peace, which are under constant threat in contemporary