A Personal Matter: A great novel that may be difficult to love

By many measures, Kenzaburo Oe's A Personal Matter (1964) is a great novel, but it's a great novel that's hard to love, perhaps intentionally so. The protagonist, Bird, is both someone we detest - an irresponsible dreamer who at the greatest crisis in his life (the birth of his first child with a seemingly fatal brain malformation) abandons his wife and takes up with an old girlfriend and even plans to leave with her for an adventure in Africa, who resorts to serious bouts of drinking to try to wash away his troubles, and who toward the end decides, as his newborn son begins to make strides toward recovery and survival, determines that life would be too difficult with a brain-damaged infants and removes the child from the hospital and takes him to a shady clinic where he will be "put to sleep," so to speak. Terrible - yet we also feel sympathy for this poor young man, facing the burden of major medical decisions and a lifetime commitment to care w/ no support from anyone, especially the so-called caregivers in the 2 hospitals caring for the child (nor from his family: His father-in-law, for example, gives him a bottle whiskey to ease his troubles). The ending will come as no surprise to most readers, who will know well that Oe has been an inspirational father to his son with severe disabilities; not that this is a strictly autobiographical novel or a memoir - Oe may be entirely innocent of Bird's sins and crimes - but the novel does bring Bird redemption in the end, and we are left wondering: How would I behave? What would I do? What decisions would I make, were I in his shoes? Oe's writing is clear and powerful and suitably strange, sometimes surreal; the secondary character, Himiko, Oe's college girlfriend w/ whom he reunites, is a fascinating and troubled person, strong enough to carry a novel in her own right: She's a sexual adventuress, and the sex scenes in this novel, ranging from brutal to tender, are vividly depicted; we can't help but feel sorrow for Himiko and concern about her fate, as she's obviously a troubled woman, suffering from trauma of her own (her husband committed suicide), in ways in which Bird does not seem to recognize: Her behavior, toward him, her other boyfriends, and the helpless infant, is bizarre and abnormal, but Bird is so consumed by his own needs he recognizes nobody else, including his wife, who appears in only one brief scene in this novel. Oe himself deserves much praise for laying his life bare - or perhaps for creating a fiction that most readers will identify as Oe's life. The title itself is ironic: This intensely private family crisis is no longer a "personal" matter.