Kenzaburō Ōe (1935–2023)

it upset me aside from the upsetting premise — a man tries to kill his infant son because he can’t handle having a son who is “deformed” — but because the way he finds redemption for intentionally trying to kill his child is via an abortionist(?) gay man he abandoned during school and his girlfriend (not his wife) who he probably (?) sexually assaulted. these two people are prepared to help him do something terrible (murder his child) but when he realizes they are "ugly" -- the girlfriend is mixed race and bisexual, the doctor is weak, gay, victimized, he realizes he doesn't want to be like them, even though Bird has directly harmed both of these people and fantasizes about killing his girlfriend, and then when he shies away from murder again, he fantasizes about beating her into unconsciousness and raping her then.

the language was interesting, i admire the skill of the translator here. it is not the japanese i’m used to reading (via translation) and i desperately want to know what Mishima said to Oë to get into a fist fight. a really nauseating novel — lots of vomiting, shame, assault, just hateful behavior. the language was wheezy, collapsing, slurring, and not just because the narrator, Bird, spends a lot of time drunk and throwing up. strange assortments of words and sentences like someone talking really fast and then gulping air, but all within a single sentence or a paragraph. the compacted timeline adds to this, the whole novel is 150 pages or so and takes place over three or four days.

I understand that trying to kill your infant child is something you spend the rest of your life trying to get over but I don't want to take part in that any longer, and most if not all of Oë's fiction has his disabled child in it as a character. I'll read more Oë but not anymore of his fiction.… (lisätietoja)