Fathers have always run away. But fathers of children with disabilities run away faster, and more often. There are exceptions, though—stories that restore your faith. Kenzaburō Ōe, the Japanese novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994, wrote often and with unflinching honesty about fatherhood and disability. His prose was lucid, sometimes poetic, whether direct memoir or filtered through a character's eyes. His own son Hikari was born with severe brain damage and autism and epilepsy. These conditions did not stop him—thanks largely to his parents' persistence—from becoming one of Japan's most celebrated composers.
Among Ōe's many novels, A Personal Matter (Garzanti 1996, translated by Nicoletta Spadavecchia) stands out as a fierce indictment of social prejudice against disability. The birth of his son with a disability transforms the protagonist, Bird, from what he had been until then: an eel in perpetual flight from everything and everyone.
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