Personal Matter (9780802195449)

**From the Nobel Prize–winning author: ****“One of the great short novels of the 20th century” (Jonathan Franzen, *The Wall Street Journal*).**

Internationally acclaimed as one of the world’s most influential writers, Kenzaburō Ōe brings to the fore the post-WWII rage and anxiety of a decorous society in this “deathly black comedy . . . dripping with nuclear terror” (*The Japan Times*).

Bird is an antisocial twenty-seven-year-old intellectual hanging on to a failing marriage with whiskey. He dreams of going to Africa where the sky sprawls with possibilities. Then, as though walloped by a massive invisible fist, Bird’s Utopian fantasies are shattered when his wife gives birth to what he calls their “monster baby.” Now, Bird is left with one question: How can he and his wife spend the rest of their lives with this damaged thing clinging to their backs? As shameful, disgraceful, and unthinkable a desire as it is, Bird has an answer. Not sealed. Not just yet. Not before Bird flees on a bender of indiscriminate (and frustratingly impotent) sex, hard liquor, self-delusion, and most terrifying of all—self-discovery.

“[I’d] forgotten just how crazy it is . . . It feels so much like life to me . . . it tells me that Ōe is onto something correct. People don’t want to deal with reality.” —Jonathan Franzen, *The Wall Street Journal*

“Very close to a perfect contemporary novel.” —*The New York Times*

“An astonishing novel.” —*Mother Jones*