Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe, John Nathan (Translator)

From the Publisher

A Personal Matter is the story of Bird, a frustrated intellectual in a failing marriage whose utopian dream is shattered when his wife gives birth to a brain-damaged child.

Life

"Oe Writes like a new American realist.... His prose is as direct and frank as an ice pick."

The New Yorker

"Oe's themes of abnormality, sexuality, and marginality are outside the tradition of Japanese equipoise... His work has a gritty, grotesque quality, which makes him seem more akin to Mailer, Grass, or Roth than to many Japanese novelist."

What People Are Saying

Kazuo Ishiguro
"In Oe's books, everything has a peculiar sense of humor that is always on the verge of tragedy - a very dark humor." -- Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day

Masao Miyoshi
Without doubt Oe's awesome learning, frightening memory, complex ideas, unbridled imagination, resiliant political will, and indiscriminate modesty tempered by absolute self-assurance make him the most formidable figure in the literary world of Japan today.

Kazuo Ishiguro
In Oe's books, everything has a peculiar sense of humor that is always on the verge of tragedy -- a very dark humor.

Masao Miyoshi
"Without doubt Oe's awesome learning, frightening memory, complex ideas, unbridled imagination, resilient political will, and indiscriminate modesty tempered by absolute self-assurance make him the most formidable figure in the literary world of Japan now." -- Masao Miyoshi, author of Off Center: Power and Culture Relations between Japan and the United States

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