#a personal matter

[verseless-mike]

Taking a step away from tumblr. Don’t hit Mike up. Don’t hit me up.

[bimbolimbospam]

"You’re right about this being limited to me, it’s entirely a personal matter. But with some personal experiences that lead you way into a cave all by yourself, you must eventually come to a side tunnel or something opens on a truth that concerns not just yourself but everyone. And with that kind of experience at least the individual is rewarded for his suffering. Like Tom Sawyer! He had to suffer in a pitch-black cave, but at the same time he found his way out into the light he also found a bag of gold! But what I’m experiencing personally now is like digging a vertical mine shaft in isolation; it goes straight down to a hopeless depth and never opens on anybody else’s world. So I can sweat and suffer in that same dark cave and my personal experience won’t result in so much as a fragment of significance for anybody else. Hole-digging is all I’m doing, futile, shameful hole-digging; my Tom Sawyer is at the bottom of a desperately deep mine shaft and I wouldn’t be surprised if he went mad!" ― Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter

[feignedremote]

Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel Laureate and Critic of Postwar Japan, Dies at 88

With his powerful novels and essays, Mr. Oe tried to ensure that Japan learned the lessons of its 20th-century militarism.

Excerpt below the cut:

Mr. Oe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 for creating what the Nobel committee called “an imagined world where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.”

Though he often said he wrote with only a Japanese audience in mind, Mr. Oe attracted an international readership in the 1960s with three works in particular: “Hiroshima Notes,” a collection of essays on the long-term consequences of the atomic bomb attacks; and the novels “A Personal Matter” and “The Silent Cry,” which had their genesis in a crisis for him and his wife, the birth of a son with a deformed cranium.

Politically, he was a prominent voice for a generation of dissidents who opposed arming Japan’s defense forces and advocated paying war reparations to China, Korea and other Asian neighbors. He was frequently vilified and occasionally threatened with death by elements on the right, as when he declined to receive Japan’s Order of Culture in 1994 because it was bestowed by the emperor. “I do not recognize any authority, any value, higher than democracy,” he said.

As if in validation of his objections to the country’s whitewashing of history, he was sued for defamation in 2005 for an essay he had written in 1970 asserting that Japanese officers had coerced hundreds of Okinawans near the end of World War II to commit suicide by telling them they would be raped, tortured and murdered by advancing American troops. The plaintiffs were a 91-year-old war veteran and surviving relatives of another veteran, but the suit was seized upon by right-wing politicians who wanted references to the military’s involvement deleted from high school textbooks.

Mr. Oe was able to do little writing while the suit was in court, from 2006 to 2008, but the judge ultimately ruled in his favor: “The military was deeply involved in the mass suicides.”

[...]

...in 1963, came a confluence of events that would change his life. That June, his first child was born with a large mass protruding from a lesion in his skull. Without surgery, doctors told him, the boy would die. With surgery, he would have severe mental handicaps.

At first Mr. Oe just wanted to run away, and he did. While the weeks-old infant lay in a hospital, he accepted a journalism assignment to cover an international antinuclear conference in Hiroshima.

“I was escaping from my baby,” he told The New Yorker in a 1995 interview. “These were shameful days for me to remember. I wanted to escape to some other horizon.”

Mr. Oe set out to interview survivors of the blast 18 years earlier and began to draw courage from their example. They did not want to be “a data set of victims,” as he wrote in an introduction to “Hiroshima Notes.” They wanted to live their lives as free individuals. He met women who chose to have babies regardless of the risk that the children could develop leukemia and die, and he encountered many quiet heroes who, he wrote, “did not commit suicide in spite of everything.”

He was especially influenced by Dr. Fumio Shigeto, director of a Hiroshina A-bomb hospital and a survivor himself, who had become one of the first to understand radiation sickness. In The New Yorker interview, Mr. Oe recalled a story that Dr. Shigeto had told him about a young physician who despaired of being any use against such overwhelming suffering. The doctor said he replied, “If there are wounded people, if they are in pain, we must do something for them, try to cure them, even if we seem to have no method.”

Hearing this, Mr. Oe said, “I felt great shame that I was doing nothing for my son — my son, who was silent and could not express his pain or do anything for himself.”

He returned to Tokyo and chose surgery for the child, who was named Hikari — Japanese for “light.” Hikari lived, though he would need perpetual care and would not progress beyond the level of a 3-year-old in many respects. But he also had a gift for music that blossomed as his parents played recordings of bird song, Mozart and Chopin to soothe him. In time, he was able to express his deepest feelings in music and grew to be a popular composer of pieces for flute and piano.

[...]

These two early novels, with their motifs of a son with mental disabilities and a search for meaning in post-atomic-bombings Japan, were rootstock for many of his more than 40 subsequent novels and short-story collections, including “Aghwee the Sky Monster” (1964), “Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age” (1986), “A Quiet Life” (1990) and “Somersault” (1999).

“I’m a boring person,” he told the Paris Review in 2007. “I read a lot of literature, I think about a lot of things, but at the base of it all is Hikari and Hiroshima.”

He said one of his methods was “repetition with difference — I begin a new work by first attempting a new approach toward a work that I’ve already written. Then I take the resulting draft and continue to elaborate upon it, and as I do the traces of the old work disappear.”

[elizabethanism]

„I’m the one who’d like to send a telegram, AM RATHER IN TROUBLE—but addressed to whom?“

Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter

[flavia8]

Sorrow

[kate-ink-blog]

A Personal Matter

Lately, I've become jaded and a little sick of the gushing hyperbolic blurbs on the covers of my paperbacks. However, when I read that The New York Times called Kenzaburo Oe's novel A Personal Matter "very close to a perfect contemporary novel," I had to agree.

The book is about Bird, a Peter-Pan man who seems allergic to growing up. When the novel opens, Bird is buying maps of Africa for a fantasy trip while his wife is in the hospital, in labor with their first child. When the child is born with a brain hernia, Bird again flees from adult responsibility and seeks to numb reality with a whiskey and sex binge with a former girlfriend.

The honesty in this book struck me as nothing less than incredible. The descriptions of Bird's shame feel poignant and real, yet I can't remember ever reading descriptions of deep self-loathing and shame rendered in such a completely perfect way.

The book jacket as well as the reviews all tell me that Oe's own son was born disabled a year before A Personal Matter was published. Did that make me believe the book more? Or does a writer usually need to go through a profoundly painful event in order to write about it?

The book deals with shame as well as sexuality with a directness that feels formidable. There is so much power in honesty that I feel unable to read other books because the author is so clearly making the emotions up.

[warningsine]

― Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter, tr. by John Nathan