Quotes from book
A Personal Matter

Name: A Personal Matter
Author: Kenzaburō Ōe

A Personal Matter is a novel by Japanese writer Kenzaburō Ōe. Written in 1964, the novel is semi-autobiographical and dark in tone. It tells the story of Bird, a man who must come to terms with the birth of his mentally disabled son.

“One day Bird had approached his father with this question; he was six years old: Father, where was I a hundred years before I was born? Where will I be a hundred years after I die? Father, what will happen to me when I die? Without a word, his young father had punched him in the mouth, broke two of his teeth and bloodied his face, and Bird forgot the fear of death.”

Kenzaburō Ōe book A Personal Matter

A Personal Matter (1964)

“It takes a person of great care and insight to watch for any abnormality in the green grass even while it grows abundantly and healthily.”

Kenzaburō Ōe book A Personal Matter

A Personal Matter (1964)

“We naturally try to forget our personal tragedies, serious or trifling, as soon as possible (even something as petty as being scorned or disdained by a stranger on a street corner). We try not to carry these things over to tomorrow. It is not strange, therefore, that the whole human race is trying to put Hiroshima, the extreme point of human tragedy, completely out of mind.”

Kenzaburō Ōe book A Personal Matter

A Personal Matter (1964)

“If any suffering was fruitless it was the agony of a hangover; what he suffered now could not expiate suffering of any other kind.”

Kenzaburō Ōe book A Personal Matter

A Personal Matter (1964)

“Now I was just a transient in the valley, a one-eyed passerby too fat for his years, and life there had the power to summon up neither the memory nor the illusion of any other, truer self. As a passerby I had a right to insist on my identity.”

Kenzaburō Ōe book A Personal Matter

A Personal Matter (1964)

“It's a little bit like what Akari said to his grandmother in Shikoku, during her final illness: 'Please cheer up and die!”

Kenzaburō Ōe book A Personal Matter

A Personal Matter (1964)

“Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work.”

Kenzaburō Ōe book A Personal Matter

A Personal Matter (1964)

“The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live.”

Kenzaburō Ōe book A Personal Matter

A Personal Matter (1964)

“The people of Hiroshima went to work at once to restore human society in the aftermath of the great atomic flood. They were concerned to salvage their own lives, but in the process they also salvaged the souls of the people who have brought the atomic bomb.”

Kenzaburō Ōe book A Personal Matter

A Personal Matter (1964)

“Every time you stand at a crossroads of life and death, you have two universes in front of you; one loses all relation to you because you die, the other maintains its relation to you because you survive in it. Just as you would take off your clothes, you abandon the universe in which you are still alive. In other words, various universes emerge around each of us the way tree limbs and leaves branch away from the trunk.”

Kenzaburō Ōe book A Personal Matter

A Personal Matter (1964)

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