A Personal Matter.

OE, Kenzaburo.

$2,000.00

Item Number: 139621

New York: Grove Press, 1968.

First edition in English (preceding the British edition by one year) of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s classic work. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, warmly inscribed by the author in Japanese on the front free endpaper to Howard Hibbett. The recipient, Howard Hibbett was a prominent Harvard scholar, translator of Japanese literature and friend of Oe’s. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket, with Hibbett’s occasional marginalia. Jacket design by Kuhlman Associates. Translated from the Japanese by John Nathan. An exceptional association, uncommon signed and inscribed.

Kenzaburo Oe, the winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature, is internationally acclaimed as one of the most important and influential post-World War II writers, known for his powerful accounts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and his own struggle to come to terms with a mentally handicapped son. The Swedish Academy lauded Oe for his "poetic force [that] creates an imagined world where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today." His most popular book, A Personal Matter is the story of Bird, a frustrated intellectual in a failing marriage whose Utopian dream is shattered when his wife gives birth to a brain-damaged child. “In writing novels there is no substitute for maturity and moral awareness. Kenzaburo Oe has both" (Alan Levensohn).