SOURCE: Reinsma, Luke M. “The Flight of Kenzaburo Oe.” Christianity and Literature 48, no. 1 (autumn 1998): 61-77.

In the following essay, Reinsma traces Ōe's treatment of existential matters in A Personal Matter and maintains that the novel is central to the author's oeuvre “for reasons that are at once literary and personal.”

There is a Shinto prayer about a woman who dies, and when she reaches the boundary hill of the nether world, she thinks back on a troublesome child she left behind; soul-freezing loneliness and terror assault her, forcing her to turn back to look at the world of the living. When I think about the ancient poet who composed that prayer, I recognize that soul-freezing cold whipped through the world in those times as well. But we don't live in his historic time, when a communal society existed. We live in a world which is fragmented, alienated, disintegrating...