Notes on Oe Kenzaburo's, A Personal Matter

Photo of Oe and his son Hikari

A couple of things you may have noticed: the frequent reference to the poet Apollinaire with his bandaged head. Like Oe says on p. 32-33,

My son has bandages on his head and so did Apollinaire when he was wounded on the field of battle. On a dark and lonely battlefield I have never seen, my son was wounded like Apollinaire and now he is screaming soundlessly. . .

Bird began to cry. Head in bandages, like Apollinaire: the image simplified his feelings instantly and directed them. . .

Like Apollinaire, my son was wounded on a dark and lonely battlefield that I have never seen, and he has arrvived with his head in bandages. I'll have to bury him like a soldier who died at war.

Bird continued to cry.

So who was Apollinaire? Apparently, he was quite the early 20th. century figure in France. He was a poet and playwright, hooked up with painters and musicians, was instrumental in the Cubist movement--in short, he was a regular celebrity, a real "player" of his day. He volunteered to fight in WWI and was wounded in the head, hence the banadage references comparing Bird's baby to him. Here are a couple of images:

and a drawing:

To read more about Apollinaire, see http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/apollina.htm

and http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C01000D

http://art-bin.com/art/aguillaumee.html, or

http://www.firstworldwar.com/poetsandprose/apollinaire.htm

There is also a detailed description of a painting by William Blake (pp. 56-57) which Himiko has in her room. I could not find the exact one that was described in the text, one that has to do with the Plague in Ancient Egypt during Old Testament times, but here is an example of Blake's somewhat bizarre, but always religiously inspired art. Here is an image of a scaly sort of demon--The beautifully muscled body was covered with scales---that looks like it could be the one mentioned by Oe:

Here is another image, in color:

For more images of Blake', see the Tate museum exhibition page: http://www.tate.org.uk/learning/worksinfocus/blake/gothic/index.html

Fore more on Blake in general, see: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/wblake.htm

We learn of an African novel that Bird is reading, how he takes it withim to Himiko's and then is disappointed to see it just strewn around her room. In Ch. 10 he mentions the author and title: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola. Se also this site. Another is here. The story of a young boy lost in the bush and trying to get home has obvious appeal to Oe.

Below, please find some comments from Kumiko Sato that were in her literature pages, followed by some of my own thoughts.

Oe, Kenzaburo. Kojinteki na Taiken, A Personal Matter (1964).

(adapted from Kumiko Sato's web page) http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/k/x/kxs334/academic/fiction/oe_kojinteki.html

Summary

The protagonist is called "Bird" because he is always timid like a bird. He works at a prep school thanks to the authority of his father-in-law. His wife gave birth to their first baby, who seems to have some kind of encephalitis or a brain hernia. The baby almost looks like a monster who has two heads. Their family doctor tells them that the baby is going to live as a mere vegetable and better to die sooner, and they move the baby to a university hospital for more investigation. Bird secretly thinks that the baby is just a burden of his life, and asks a doctor to gradually starve the baby to death. Hoping to hear the news of the baby's death, he escapes to the apartment of an old girlfriend, Himiko, and starts drinking heavily and having an intense sexual relation with her. He reverts to his old pattern of heavy drinking. Days later, however, the baby seems still healthy (except the hernia), which makes Bird decide to take the baby out of the university hospital in spite of the doctors' advice and spiteful looks, in order to have the baby killed by an illegal doctor. Himiko and Bird go to a gay bar called Kikuhiko after leaving the baby to the hand of the illegal doctor. The owner of the bar, Kikuhiko, is an old friend of Bird, whom Bird "betrayed" when they were young. Kikuhiko reminds Bird of the fact of betrayal, which looks exactly the same as what he is doing to the baby right now. He runs back and takes the baby back to the university. It turns out that the baby actually has no encephalocele but just a nodule (?). He names his baby Kikuhiko, to remind him of his own escapism and hypocrisy.

Comments

It is important to note the idea of the personal/individual (=kojin-teki) in relation to the public in this novel. The public sphere for Oe means the age of the political movements in the 60s, in which Oe's generation was deeply involved. At the moment of Bird's struggle in the novel, anti-hydrogen bomb movements are taking place, and his friends eagerly ask him to join. This time, Bird sees more importance in "personal" matters, i.e., the matter of his own baby and family. It is a significant ideological switch from the political,public apparatus to the family apparatus. It seems to me that the new type of ideology of the family value is emerging here. Those political movments were generally aiming at the realization of the "world peace." Through this novel, we learn Oe's ethical assumption that the peace and happiness of each family will lead to the world peace, or a better human condition. At the same time, it is the assumption that the humanism of each individual (=kojin) will lead to humanism in the world at large. Although the matter, or "experience" to translate the title literally, is "personal" as he says, the ideology assumed in the "personal" matter is very political and public. The ethics of the family value circulates the public in very political ways, when Oe stresses the universal importance of the family and human nature.

Like many other novels that problematize social corruption and seach for human nature in the 60-70s in Japan, the plot of A Personal Matter itself reflects Oe's moralism. When Bird leads an unmoral life, things don't go well. Once he realizes his escapist tendencies and faces reality, things turn out well for him. I do not necessarily support this idea, because it implies that once we change our views and become moral, the world will become better as well. Once Bird makes the decision of living with "the burden," whatever disease the baby has, his parents-in-law start to look very cooperative, the baby's disease turns out to be nothing, his wife looks happy, Himiko (Bird's girlfriend) dissapears, etc. This happy ending actually shows NO solution of the problems, except for Bird's complacent "personal" experience. It seems that this "happiness" is simply universalized into the world happiness in the end, while neglecting his wife (does he ever mention her name in the novel?) and his lover, Himiko (how come she simply accepts Bird when he is weak, and lets him leave when he feels strong, without any complaints?). Oe's notion of the personal is thus quite tricky in the sense that his "personal" does not mean personal or individual after all, but indicates the matter of the Self, the universal, masculine, humanist subject of the modern age.

Kumiko Sato

10/6/1999

Further Comments:

I believe it is a fair comment to point out that Oe's self is more a masculinist, individualistic, modernist subject. Once again, as she suggests, we may be looking at a Japanese novel by a male author where the women's viewpoint is not fully developed or represented.

Here is another way to think about what Oe is saying about the public v. private issue. He could be arguing that if one hasn't had any deep, personal experiences in one's life, say an existential crisis of some sort, then one's political convictions don't really amount to much. They having nothing in which to be rooted. What was it John Lennon who wrote in his song Revolution? "If you've been carryin' pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow!" I guess the idea here is that if ALL you have been doing is demonstrating and protesting, and you haven't experienced a meaningful personal crisis in your life, or ever had a real relationship with anyone, then you really can't have very much to say.

Yet another point to consider, however, is that on the same day he published A Personal Matter, Oe also published a nonfiction work about the anti-nuclear movement called Hiroshima Notes suggesting that the two worlds--the personal and the political--were separable for him. I think he still believes in the value of political commitment but he also recognizes that one can never just be a shallow, unconnected human being and allow one's political "commitment" to become a way of life and a substitute for the experience of living, having human relationships and experiencing life fully.

Also, I have always been struck by the language in the text when Oe acknowledges that although an "entirely personal matter" may lead you "into a cave all by yourself, you must eventually come to a side tunnel or something that opens on the truth that concerns not just yourself but everyone." (p. 155) The notion of the "side tunnel" seems to be about the way one tries to find connections in one's life from the personal to the political. It seems like it is the lack of this very kind of search that Oe was expressing concern about when he criticized younger writers like Yoshimoto Banana and Murakami Haruki--and the reading public--for not seeking any such connections in literature. In an essay "On Modern and Contemporary Japanese Literature," Oe argues that "serious literature and a literary readership have gone into a chronic decline, while a new tendency has emerged over the last several years. This strange new phenomenon is largely an economic one, reflected in the fact that the novels of certain young writers like Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto each sells several hundred thousand copies. . .Murakami and Yoshimoto convey the experience of a youth politically uninvolved and disaffected, content to exist within a late adolescent or post adolescent subculture." (Oe, Japan the Ambiguous and Myself, pp. 49-50) In the 1999 Interview with the author conducted at UC Berkeley--and linked off of this syllabus page, Oe addresses this point clearly when he says:

When I named my first novel about my son A Personal Matter, I believe I knew the most important thing: there is not any personal matter; we must find the link between ourselves, our "personal matter," and society.

However "kojinteki" something may seem, it is never really completely divorced from outer or social concerns. Writers need to forge the links between their own struggles and those of the rest of humanity. He goes on to say elsewhere in the interview that he wants the young people of Japan to "confront their reality."

On the ENDING.

What about the ending? Certainly, it is a fair criticism to say that Bird's turnaround was too quick to be convincing. It is difficult to live with a character for 163 pages who behaves one way--shamefully devoid of a conscience, recalcitrant, self-centered, self-pitying and self-destructive--only to have him turn it around completely in the novel's last two pages!! Perhaps as readers we need a little more time to adjust to his transformation. But on this subject of transformation, an interesting article just came in the mail to me this week in a special edition of the Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Japanese Language and Literature 37:2 (October 2003) by Janet Walker called'The Epiphanic Ending." Now she is not talking about Oe at all, but about Shiga Naoya. Nevertheless, she is struck by the notion of an "epihanic ending" in Japanese literature, that is, novels that end with a certain epihany occurring in the mind of the protagonist. Or, as she puts it, there is such a thing as an epiphanic ending:

in which the alienated hero, in a moment of illumination or enlightenment that is constructed as the end to the spiritual quest, regains a sense of unity with both the cosmos and society. (168)

This seems not too dissimilar to what Bird has gone through. Although we might not initially regard Bird's journey a spiritual quest, he and his life have been fragmented and fractured by modernity, by modern political upheavals in which Japan was completely transformed from a state mobilized for total war to a democratic, peace-loving society with a new constitution and political framework. Bird is left yearning for something more, and this is expressd in his desire to flee Japan and go to Africa, where he hopes to restore his oneness with nature and his inner harmony. But his personal crisis makes him realize that he cannot depend on escape to Africa to complete this process for him; he must do it right here, right now with whatever tools he has at is disposal. And that means he must come to terms with his son. It is plausible to me that he would come to this realization; and it could even be a sudden illumination. But the narrative leaps from the night he realizes what he must do to a few months later--the end of autumn--and as readers we get no sense of how Bird managed to adjust his worldview.

Still, as difficult as it is to fully accept his rapid transformation, it is consisten with his epiphany and with some of the notions associated with existentialism. Mr. Delchef's reference to Kafka's wisdom that all a father can do is welcome his child into the world, was not there by accident. We will discuss existentialist thought some more in the days ahead, but in fairness to Oe, we should recall that this is one of his earliest novels, and it is not the most mature fiction he produced. Even The Silent Cry (1967) of just four years later, is much more richly layered, complex and fully realized novel. Despite this weakness of its ending, A Personal Matter is a powerful portrayal of an individual in crisis who must confront not only things which seem deeply personal, but also his relationship to society, politics, and the rest of the world as well.

Consider how in Kikuhiko's bar the question suddenly hits Bird: What is it inside himself that he has been so intent on protecting all along? "What was it in himself he was so frantic to defend? The answer was horrifying--nothing! Zero!" (161) He has the epiphanic moment in the midst of an existential crisis: there isn't really anything that he has to lose. [When you ain't got nothin', you got nothin' to lose. You're invisible now, you've got no secrets to conceal! How does it Feeeel? (B. Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone," 1965).] Kikuhiko has picked right up on the fact that Bird is running scared and he has never seen him like that before. When discussing his own sexual orientation, Kikuhiko that he "has chosen to let himself love a person of the same sex. I made that decision myself," to which Himiko replies, "I can see you have read the existentialists." (p. 160) She refers here to the fact that the existentialists believe that humans are operating on their own here, in a pretty bleak universe, and they have to take responisiblity for themselves and make their own decisions in order to survive. The novel ends, let's not forget, with an apparence by Mr. Delchef's dictionary with the Balkan word for hope scribbled in it; Bird wants to look up another word, nintai or "forbearance." Very Japanese, to be sure; but by summoning up the meeting with Mr. Delchef, we are brought back to his earlier remark about Kafka, a clear link to the existentialists.

RPL

11/06/03

See also a student project on Oe here.