[.uk] The Silent Cry: A Novel (ISBN 4770019653)

Weird and wonderful surreal tragi-comedy:
It has been said by some that to know a country is to read its novels; far better than to read its (manufactured) history. Novels too are manufactured but novels are more likely to expose the emotional and spiritual "truth" of the country concerned. In THE SILENT CRY the writer OE covers much historical, emotional, social, Japanese ground but does it in such a way as to make it a wonderfully entertaining journey for the reader. I for one would love to read a Freudian criticism of it. For example, a recurring motif is suicide, in various forms, one being hanging and that image is conveyed by a the anti-hero's best friend who removed all his clothes, painted his head red, shoved a cucumber up his arse and then hanged himself; another being the anti-hero's brother who shot himself in the head the remains of which reminded the brother of a pomegranate. Such vivid imagery recurs throughout this novel. Another distinguishing feature of it is its lack of cliches, its almost poetic prose, poetic in the sense of dense. You daren't skip a phrase let alone a line. It is a rich read. Historically, the novel covers the transition from an agrarian village life to the impact of the supermarket, racism, the vulnerability of the Japanese economy (this written in 1966- in 2001 have the Japanese finally faced up to real economic reform?)foreigners, and on the cover, an artistic representation of the Hiroshima ground zero. The one-eyed hero is self-effacing and has an alcoholic wife, retarded son and is a cuckold. His brother is vain, hostile, proud, an adulterer who has sex with his retarded sister. It is true that it is reminiscent of the Cain and Abel story or the Brothers Karamazov and I think it deserves mention in that mythical company. Its themes that resonate with me most tellingly are the need for one and one's country to come to terms with the truth about the past. The anti-hero Mitsu is on a search for the "truth" throughout the novel.As an individual I need to come to terms with my mother's suicide as well as other aspects of my personal history. As an Australian, my nation needs to come to terms with its past and our genocidal attitude to Aboriginal Australians. The second theme for me is that constant internal worrying and guilt can be self-defeating - at the close of the novel Mitsu feels "throughout the time remaining to me..a hundred pairs of eyes (of his cat, of his great grandfather, brother, wife) would glitter like a chain of stars in the night of my experience. And I would live on, suffering agonies of shame under the light of those stars, peering out timidly like a rat, with my single eye, at a dim and equivocal outer world..."(p.269) Yet, at the urging of his now pregnant wife, he chooses to accept a job in Africa instead of a job at a University, symbolic I would guess of his need to accept the past come to terms with it and get on with living, for some sort of peace. Survival becomes the key to that peace. Its weird at the end too because despite all the preceding horrors, the novel's ending creates in the reader a wry grin or satisfying chuckle as the anti-hero realises with his new job he may be able to achieve an important personal goal - building a thatched hut.A memorable read.

a moribund, melodramatic piece of Japanese weirdness...:
Despite all the glowing comments in previous amazon.com reviews I must confess that I really don't see how The Silent Cry can be judged as anything other than a strange (read: unbelievable, contrived), totally depressing piece of (otherwise well-written) literature. It compares poorly to some of Yukio Mishima's and Haruki Murakami's better works. Having lived in Japan for years I shudder to think what sort of image it projects about post-war Japanese youth. The story is a bit complex. Generally it portrays the lives of dysfunctional brothers returning to their ancient country estate, and somehow making parallels between their lives and those of their great-grandfather and his brother during the time of the Meiji restoration (1860s). Some of the insights are interesting, but sadly these are buried in what can be described as a mess. The modern day (actually, circa 1960) brothers and the friends and family have an impossibly depressing, unfortunate lives. The wife is an alcoholic, children/siblings/friends commit suicide and/or suffer from horrible physical/mental anomalies. In this 300 page book no one, and I mean *no one*, so much as smiles. So you think the Japanese people are a nature-loving, inherently serene people? If so I suggest you do NOT read this book! Having said all this, the story does pick up some pace towards the end (..after an extremely tedious first half). And generally speaking the author, and the translator, have produced nice prose. A shame it is all wasted on a strange story with neurotic (and uninteresting) characters. Bottom line: time would be better spent on reading some better examples of modern Japanese literature. Best give The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Murakami) a try and forget The Silent Cry.

its all about mirrors:
this is the first novel i read by kenzaburo oe. and its simply superb. the post war its brilliantly portraid in this book. when a couple of brothers return to their hometown, each one has some experiences that changes his vision of the world. but theres another aspect that i loved in it. there was a revolution a century ago, directed by their grandgrandfather. slowly, they go discovering more about this, and finally they mirror the characters and the revolution. its a success repeating itself. the time is a circle. Oe proves it brilliantly here. Its a bit hard to read, but its worth it. DO IT!

A difficult but brilliantly written novel:
Oe in " The silent cry" deals with the perplexing problem of finding ones root. The novel is a story of about two brothers who return to their village, each for their own reasons. The story deals with by the main characters search for answer to ýhow does a modern man communicate( in philosophical sense )?ý One brother thinks, we can communicate by death and in our silence. The other wants to communicate by connecting his present with the past of the society. It is a difficult novel due to the hard subject matter. But Oe does SPLENDID job in expounding the difficult issues through his excellent narrative.

Football in the Year 1860:
The American edition of Oe's novel may be called "The Silent Cry," but a more accurate translation of the title would be "Football in the Year 1860 (or the Man'an era)," the year Ii Naosuke, famous for brokering a commercial treaty with the U.S., was assassinated by a group of samurai loyal to the Emperor. It is also the year, in the novel, when the great-granduncle of two brothers, Mitsusaburo and Takashi, led a peasant revolt in their ancestral village. The decision to discard a more literal translation masks what Oe is trying to do here, as he continues to pile on parallels between 1860 and the early 1960s, when this novel is set. Favoring historical symbolism and mythological surrealism, the novel defies a summary that would make much sense to the reader. A skeletal outline would describe the rivalry between Mitsusaburo, who has left his handicapped child in an institution and returned to his childhood home with his alcoholic wife, and his younger brother Takashi, recently returned from America, who "seems to want his actions influenced by the 1860 affair." Takashi idealizes the embroidered family legends of heroism and leadership, and he arrays the village youth into a cult-like group to challenge the hegemony of a local business magnate known, not coincidentally, as "the Emperor." The story is filled with grotesqueries and violence, from the opening description of a friend's suicide (which is presented in a disconcertingly risible manner) to the rape and death of a local girl (an event that Mitsusaburo believes is invented) to Mitsusaburo's apparent nonchalance when he realizes that Takashi is sleeping with his wife. The result is a tale of Freudian weirdness in a claustrophobic mountain village that might remind readers of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Among Oe's works, it's not as accessible (nor, in my view, as good) as "A Personal Matter" and stories like "Prize Stock" or "Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness." But, in spite of its outmoded surrealism, there's something compelling and fascinating about the deranged rivalry between the two brothers who hijack the attention of this peculiar, mythical community.