Read it in: three or four days

I’m sorry slow readers (or should I call you thoughtful readers who chew and swallow thoroughly what they have read instead of devouring, a bit like me?) that are looking at the time limit on this post and thinking, “what does this person do with their life other than sit in a lounge room with a book?”  The answer is, nothing.  At this point in time, I was taking a reading holiday, where I literally – you guessed it – spent hours of the day in the lounge, in front of a nice wood fire, reading.  It was winter, alright.  There was very little else to do.  Also my goal this year is forty books, and I only had just over ten.

This was another recommended by the auntie, who often recommends fabulous books that I otherwise wouldn’t read, however, whenever I read some of these it makes me cringe in the same way that I cringe when I remember that my brother read all the sex scenes in Game of Thrones at the age of fourteen.  The one thing I find interesting about Kenzaburo Oe is the amount of sex in his works.  I always saw the Japanese as being very shy of the subject, yet this book is explicit to say the least.  The same goes for his short story “Seventeen” that I read parts of while doing an essay for my Japanese class.  Well, it probably means something deeper than my post-teenage mentality can fathom.

The story revolves around the protagonist’s coming to terms with having a son born with a horrible disfigurement.  The baby is born and the protagonist, Bird, doesn’t know how to react, hopes it will die to begin with.  He goes on a strange and turbulent journey in which he loses his job, is unfaithful to his wife and takes strange roadtrips into the countryside.  It is an interesting study of the mind of someone trying to come to terms with a dramatic change in life.  It has a surprising ending, however, that I did not expect in the least.  I won’t tell you what it is, because that’s my policy.  Go read it if you want to know (or just look it up on wikipedia).

Bird is the perfect anti-hero.  You can’t like him, but because he’s the protagonist and you spend a lot of time with him, you begin to at least empathise with him, and feel sorry for him at the very least.  He is weak both physically and morally, lost in life, subject to the same vices and wants as every other human being.  You watch him stumble through his struggle and wonder whether it will end.  And given the surprising ending, it’s one of those books that you just have to read again to fully understand.  It’s not long, and next time I’m at my aunty’s house without a book to read (that will be an unlikely situation…) perhaps I’ll re-read it.

But meanwhile, I’m sure there’s something less depressing I could dive into.  Actually, no, I find depressing books attractive.  Perhaps it makes me realise just how much my life isn’t as depressing as Bird’s.

Oe does a good job of helping us to understand the human psyche when it’s pushed to its limit, and in doing so both shocks us and reassures us.

Read it if you: want to read Japanese literature (Oe is one Japanese author you simply cannot miss out on), are feeling too happy and want to be more depressed, if the trials and tribulations of life interest you, if you want to see what happens when a weak man is pushed to his limit.

While reading, listen to: probably some Nick Cave, or somebody else with a low, sonorous voice who croons about human nature and things you can’t understand, or just some jazz.