A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe
Published 1964 · 214 pages · 66,244 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is A Personal Matter to read?
A Personal Matter scores 47 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 40 out of 100
- Oe's dense Japanese prose in translation.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Psychological intensity in complex sentences.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Questions of responsibility, escape, and fatherhood.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Dense with psychological and existential content.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Bird's evasions and self-deception require interpretation.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Africa, the baby, the maps all carry symbolic weight.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Oe maintains complex distance from Bird's failures.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- Decision made but at great moral cost.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Essentially chronological crisis narrative.
How A Personal Matter is regarded
A Personal Matter holds a literary regard score of 80 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.