124th book of 2022.

This is far more human than the previous Ōe book I read (The Silent Cry), and therefore I preferred it. I wonder if I had read them the other way around, I would have been moved differently. A Personal Matter is a fascinating look into a man known as Bird as we follow the birth of his son, who is born with, so the doctors believe, a brain hernia that protrudes from his head like a second head. Ōe takes us into Bird's grotesque mind, following him in infidelity, sexual thoughts and the hope that his son dies so Bird does not have to raise a 'vegetable'. Bird, funnily enough, reminded me a lot of Updike's animal nicknamed "Rabbit" Angstrom from Rabbit, Run that was published four years before this. Both men attempt to flee their problems and act out in unsavoury ways. However, there is something imitable about Ōe's prose and dialogue: like in The Silent Cry the dialogue feels bizarre and the characters act realistically, but equally, like they are all actors cast as the wrong characters. The whole thing is like a deluded play, as I said in one of my updates. There's no way to put my finger on it, reading him is just unlike reading anyone else. His novels will continue to fascinate me endlessly, I have no doubt.