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(★)(Translated by John Nathan／ Titulo original : 個人的な体験 [Kojinteki na Taiken]／ Bird, the protagonist of ´A Personal Matter,´ is a frustrated young intellectual in a failing marriage whose utopian dream is shattered when his wife gives birth to a brain-damaged child. More than once when confronted with a problem, he has ´cast himself adrift on a sea of whiskey like a besotted Robinson Crusoe,´ but he has never faced a crisis as personal or grave as the prospect of life imprisonment in the cage of his infant son. Should he keep the baby? Dare he kill it? Before he makes his final decision, Bird´s entire past rises up before him, revealing itself to be a nightmare of deceit. The honesty with which Oe portrays his hero --or antihero-- makes Bird one of the most unforgettable characters in modern Japanese fiction.／ ◆Kenzaburo Oe, winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature, is internationally acclaimed as one of the most important and influential post-World War II writers. The author of numerous short stories, novels and essays, he is best known for his powerful accounts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and his own struggle to come to terms with a mentally handicapped son. Born in 1935 on the island of Shikoku, western Japan, Oe´s first stories were published in 1957, while he was still a student. In 1958, he won the coveted Akutagawa Prize for his novella ´The Catch´ ; in 1964, the Shinchosha Literary Prize for ´A Personal Matter´ ; and in 1967, the Tanizaki Prize for ´Football in the First Year of Mannen.´／ John Nathan, the Takashima Professor of Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of a definitive biography of the novelist Yukio Mishima and has translated the novels of both Mishima and Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe into English. He is also an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker.) |
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