# A Personal Matter

- Author: Kenzaburo Oe
- Translator: John Nathan
- Original title (Japanese): 個人的な体験
- First published: 1964
- Publisher: Grove Press
- This edition: 1969
- ISBN: 9780802150615
- Shelf: Tonight's Classic (one a night, from this pool); Japanese Literature in Translation

## Card

A young man called Bird learns that his newborn son has a grave abnormality, and runs from the hospital into the city.  
Raw, restless, and darkly comic, it stays close to a mind working hard not to face something.  
For a night when a decision cannot wait.  

## About this book

Bird, a twenty-seven-year-old cram school teacher who dreams of traveling to Africa, waits for his first child to be born. The baby arrives with a serious brain condition, and the doctors leave him a choice he does not want to make. Over a few days he drinks, hides with an old girlfriend, and lets himself drift. What stays is the plain honesty about fear, and the pressure of responsibility on someone not ready to carry it.

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