The Silent Cry: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: a moribund, melodramatic piece of Japanese weirdness...
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Oe's search for himself
Review: I enjoyed this novel very much. It was writen in a style that I was not accoustemed to, but he accomplished what he set out to do. He wrote a japaneese book about a traditional family in an non orintal way.Not only did he find his own way in life but he helped to find his son's way in life. A very giffted writer.

Rating:
Summary: Weird and wonderful surreal tragi-comedy
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: An awesome landmark of a novel : a masterpiece
Review: Kenzaburo Oe's "The Silent Cry" is a masterpiece. No two ways about it. It's a dark, complex, and difficult piece of work and not easy to digest unless you have a modicum of knowledge of Japanese socio-economic history. The spirit of revival of the feudal uprising of 1860 is the central motif that renders the dialectical relationship and the unspeakable horror visited upon the two Nedokoro brothers, Mitsu and Takashi, ultimately comprehensible. While radical younger brother Takashi needs to relive the heroic (real or imagined) past of his great granduncle to bring a measure of validity to his own existence, older brother Mitsu's life crumbles when he sires a horribly retarded child whom he institutionalizes and then fails to come to terms with the ritualistic suicide of his best friend. So does Mitsu's marriage to his wife, Natsumi, who takes to the bottle and appears headed for disaster until brother-in-law Takashi imbues her with fire and converts her to his cause. But there's no happy ending and she's cruelly let down. Takashi's rabid vendetta against the Emperor, the Korean supermarketeer, and his cruelty towards his disciples is a perversion in his search for truth. Mitsu's inability to break out of his self imposed inner exile, his refusal to connect with the past and his corrosive negativism poisons everything about him, including his marriage to Natsumi, which is wryly but painfully observed. Oe employs the imagery of the dark encroaching forest over the valley to evoke a dangerous sense of foreboding that builds to a shattering climax when shocking family secrets are revealed but there's no relief, forgiveness or healing in the aftermath. Nevertheless, Oe avoids an entirely downbeat ending by pulling off a stunning surprise that forces Mitsu to re-examine and give his life another go. The ritualistic suicide of Mitsu's friend is the dramatic manifestation of the "silent cry" of truth he finds unutterable. At another level, "The Silent Cry" can be read as a study of an insular nation coping with the rising tide of foreign influences that threatens the old way of life. It's incredibly rich in its treatment of a universal theme that will guarantee its relevance forever. Oe writes with a rare intensity that perfectly captures the strangeness and beauty of the Japanese psyche. It's an awesome landmark of a novel that no serious lover of literature can afford to miss. Some may find "The Silent Cry" a dark and disturbing piece of work. Perhaps it is. But it's essential reading.

Rating:
Summary: An awesome landmark of a novel : a masterpiece
Review: Let me discuss "The Silent Cry" and Oe's work in general by first sketching in a broader view of Kenzaburo Oe's literary interests.

No other Japanese writer has seen as deeply into Mishima's suicide and the "vacuum" of modern Japanese life as has the 1994 Nobel laureate in literature, Kenzaburo Oe:

"His death was a performance for the foreign audience, a very spectacular performance. The relationship between Mishima and the emperor system was rather dubious; the Japanese knew that. But from foreigners' point of view--say, an American reader's point of view--the Japanese emperor system is something inexplicable. Therefore, that final act by Mishima, tied in with the emperor system, appeared to be a kind of mystical thing. In actuality, he did it in order to entertain foreign readers."

As in this excerpt from a 1986 interview, Oe, also influenced early on by Marxism and existentialism, especially Sartre, has had the vision and strength to confront in his writing not only the nostalgia of Mishima but also the past and present implications of the emperor system for Japan. In 1971 his novella "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears," written just after Mishima's suicide, courageously explores the nature and meaning of emperor worship. Having known Japanese students and friends who fiercely supported the emperor, loathed him, or were simply indifferent, with most falling into the last category, I believe it may be difficult for Americans to appreciate fully the scope of Oe's achievement in this novella. Oe tried to convey the challenge of his theme when he wrote in an essay, "A man who criticises Mishima and his works must have the determination to criticise the total culture that orients itself toward the Imperial hierarchy." Far from falling short of this determination, Oe creatively confronts the Japanese fascist and wartime past in "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears" and thereby truly serves the Japanese people and, I would argue, the emperor as well.

Oe grew up in a small village on the island of Shikoku where the events of "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears" and many of his stories take place. While in a Tokyo hospital dying of cancer, the persona narrates the densely complicated events of his father's fervent devotion to the emperor, filtered through his own consciousness as a child and a mentally unbalanced adult recalling his "happy days." His Japanese mother, who grew up in China, and whose own father was involved in the Daigaku Incident of 1910-11, an attempt to assassinate the emperor, believes her son has never been mentally stable since the age of three. Lying in his hospital bed, he recalls "hate-filled exchanges" between his mother and father about the role of his grandfather. Later in his life, she had always refused to discuss anything with her son about his father, a military official who returned from Manchuria a few years before the end of the war and who died attempting to lead an uprising in support of the emperor after his 1945 announcement of surrender on the radio. Respected by the village people, the father, suffering from cancer, secludes himself in the family storehouse. For the boy observing his father, he becomes a "kind of idol," obedient to the emperor. After his older brother deserts in Manchuria, the boy shouts in defiance at his mother, "I don't have no traitor's blood in my veins":

"Even now he could recall, with extreme vividness and reality . . . wanting to shout Long live the emperor! so that [his father] would acknowledge that it was his young son who was the true heir to his blood."

Oe slowly leads the reader to the realization that the young boy has grown up to repeat the obsessions of the father, destroying himself in the process. When the mother, "a simple old country woman," visits him as a thirty-five year old adult in the hospital, she struggles to no avail to get him to recognize what an absurd, cowardly figure his father actually was, while cancer literally and symbolically continues to eat him up. Near the end she says to the persona's wife, whose own marriage and life have been ruined, "Sooner or later the Japanese are going to change their attitude about what happened, and I intend to live to see it, yessir! THIS IS THE DREAM. THIS MUST BE THE DREAM!" This is clearly the dream of Oe and many Japanese. He more than any other modern Japanese writer has had the courage to write fiction that might help Japan to accomplish it.

Also set mostly in Shikoku, The Silent Cry (1967), presents two brothers who return to their country village nestled in a valley. Although a dialectical struggle takes place between them, reminiscent of Dostoevski's Brothers Karamazov, the older brother Mitsusaboro is the central figure of the novel, which is told from his point of view. In the opening paragraph, Mitsusaboro thinks to himself,

"Awakening in the predawn darkness, I grope among the anguished remnants of dreams that linger in my consciousness, in search of some ardent sense of expectation. Seeking in the tremulous hope of finding eager expectancy reviving in the innermost recesses of my being . . . still I find an endless nothing."

He crawls into a hole dug for a septic tank and claws at the sides with his bare fingers trying to get the walls to cave in on himself. At the end of the summer his best friend, who had been injured in front of the Diet demonstrating against the Japan-US Mutual Security Treaty, had painted his head red, stuck a raw cucumber up the anus of his naked body, and hung himself. Mitsusaboro reflects, "And I too have the seeds of that same, incurable madness. . . ." Beginning in the hole, haunted by despair, madness, and nihilism, he gropes and searches throughout the novel for something worth living for. At dawn sticking his head up "two inches above the ground," he notices,

"the backs of the dogwood leaves were a burning red... a red that reminded me of the flames in the picture of hell that I'd seen in our village temple every year on the Buddha's Birthday. . . .

Rating:
Summary: The Great Post-War Japanese Novel?
Review: Many critics believe The Silent Cry (not it's translated title: which would be Footbal in the First Year of Mannen) is the great post-war Japanese novel, ranking above even Mishima's The Sea of Fertility tetraology.

If there's one thing that should be mentioned first about this novel, is that it achieves for Japan exactly what Voss does for Australia, and what The Tin Drum achieves for Germany . Like all of these, an epic landscape is evoked to explore the major issues, profoudnly yet simply handled. It also has the markings of a masterpiece, in that it reads like both a summary and yet at the same time an advancement on all that the author has said to date, on a canvas of a biblical size (a definition that, in my opinion, ought to extend the franchise to other masterpieces: Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! or David Storey's Saville, for instance). This explores every facet of post-atomic, post-imperial Japan's inner life - all the more remarkable for being able to slice through the all-pervasive level of regimentation. It's also a wry commentary on the 'Emperor system' of thought that was so prevalent at the time, and led to the ritualistic suicide of Oe's friend, Yukio Mishima.

Rating:
Summary: A difficult but brilliantly written novel
Review: 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 'how does a modern man communicate( in philosophical sense )?' 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.

Rating:
Summary: its all about mirrors
Review: 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!