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:
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:
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.