Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter [1964]: Personal History Connected to World History as a Meditation on the Crisis of Humanism

An existentialist type of fiction, the novel A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe, examines the human condition (Ningen to wa nanika.) and the limits of possibility for humans. Privileging the anthropocentric world, subjecting it to insights not only into the past but, also, potentially, into the future, highlighting the crimes that man might commit against himself, the novel outlines a possible “human renaissance” (ningen kaifuku 人間恢) through an extreme personal dilemmatic situation, which is connected to world history. The present study proposes an investigation delving on existentialism and social anthropology, attempting to prove how in the afore-mentioned novel, Kenzaburō Ōe, the humanist, protests against and resists an inhuman world, with a view to defending and protecting fragile values ​​such as humanism and the humaneness of man, the right to life and peace, which are under constant threat in contemporary history. The individual, the society and the universe are all connected on a single tier, despite the crisis of the moment that seems to deconstruct humanism: here is a new myth, a new outlook on human history proposed by Kenzaburō Ōe.

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