Complete 5 pages APA formatted article: Analysis of A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe.
Complete 5 pages APA formatted article: Analysis of A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe. For whatever reasons, Ōe resorted to inventing an alter ego whereby he could secretly act out a fantasy life and thereby handle the first year of his son’s life. De Bellis defined alter ego as “a psychological term that refers to an artist’s creation of a character .similar to himself” (11). Bird, the protagonist from A Private Matter, was Ōe’s alter ego simply doing all the sinful and mischievous things that Ōe so longed to do as he went about dutifully behaving as a proper husband and father.
Born in Japan in 1935, Kenzaburo Ōe spent his youth on the Japanese island of Shikoku (Ōe x). His childhood bliss was shattered in 1945, according to Neufeld, Y’Blood, and Jefferson, when the United States called for a surrender of Japan by strategically aiming bombs at 67 Japanese cities (124). When Japan refused to capitulate, Neufeld et al. continued, the United Kingdom and the Republic of China joined the United States and called for Japan’s surrender through the Potsdam Declaration. Japan ignored this as well. On two separate days in 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on two cities in Japan, with deaths reaching 90,000 to 166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000 to 80,000 .in Nagasaki within the following two to four months. At least half of the deaths occurred on the specific day of the bombing (124-125).
Whether the bombs of World War II physically touched Ōe or his family is unknown, but the war must have affected him tremendously. Later in his life, he wrote a book, Hiroshima Notes, in memory of what happened at Hiroshima. Ōe also wrote of his childhood pain when he learned the Japanese Emperor had surrendered in the war, and when Ōe realized the Emperor had a “human voice, no different from any other adult’s” (xi). “The values that had regulated life in the world he knew as a child, however fatally, were blown to smithereens after the war” (xi).
