The Silent Cry

The Brothers and the Village

Mitsu, the narrator, is in a bad state when the novel opens. His friend has recently committed suicide — stuffing himself into a refrigerator and dying there — and Mitsu is drunk and withdrawn and unable to account for himself. His brother Takashi is charismatic, physically powerful, and obsessed with their family’s history: specifically with the story of their great-great-uncle, who led an uprising of peasants and outcastes in the family’s ancestral valley in Shikoku in 1860. The brothers decide, for reasons that are not entirely clear to either of them, to return to the valley and restore the crumbling storehouse on their family’s old land.

The valley is remote and economically depressed. A supermarket chain is buying up land, and the remaining villagers are selling. Among the inhabitants are a group of Korean workers whose presence in the community carries its own historical weight. Takashi begins organizing them — partly for genuine political reasons, partly because he needs a role to play, and partly because the role he is constructing is continuous with the story of the 1860 uprising that has become, for him, a mythology of resistance and heroic action.

Mitsu watches, drinks, and narrates. His relationship to the valley and to his brother is filtered through layers of guilt and complicity that Ōe reveals slowly — the truth about what actually happened in the 1860 uprising, the truth about Takashi’s relationship to their sister, the truth about what Mitsu has done and failed to do. The novel ends in violence and revelation, and what is revealed retroactively reorganizes everything that has preceded it in the way that only the most carefully constructed narratives can manage.

Two Uprisings

The structural achievement of The Silent Cry is the relationship it establishes between 1860 and 1960: two moments in which the same valley produces the same tragic pattern. The 1860 uprising was led by a charismatic young man who mythologized his own resistance and ended in defeat and degradation. A century later, Takashi is consciously reconstructing that pattern, casting himself as the heroic ancestor and the Korean workers as the outcaste peasants. He knows what he is doing — up to a point. The point at which his self-consciousness fails him is the same point at which it failed his ancestor, and the outcome is correspondingly terrible.

The Faulkner comparison is not casual. Like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels, The Silent Cry presents a community whose present is unintelligible without its past, and whose past is not available as simple fact but only as myth, distortion, family legend, and the silences around what cannot be said. Ōe had read Faulkner carefully, and what he took from him was not style but method: the sense that a place can carry a history in its soil and trees and crumbling buildings, and that the people who grow up in such places are shaped by events they were not present for.

What Ōe adds that Faulkner does not have is an explicit engagement with Japanese mythology — the folk traditions of the forest valley, the ritual dimensions of the uprising, the way the community’s understanding of its own violence is mediated through stories that are neither historical nor fictional but occupy some space between. Japan’s postwar identity crisis — the question of what survived 1945 and what should survive it — runs through the novel’s interrogation of the pre-Meiji past that the Meiji modernization officially superseded but did not actually eliminate.

Reading Ōe’s Major Work

The Silent Cry was published in Japanese in 1967 as Man’en Gannen no Futtobōru — literally Football in the Year Man’en, a title that gestures at the overlay of contemporary and historical time that the novel enacts. It won the Tanizaki Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award, in 1967. When the Nobel committee awarded Ōe the prize in 1994, they cited “poetic force” that “creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today” — a description that fits The Silent Cry more precisely than any of his other works.

John Bester’s English translation, which appeared in 1974, is among the finest translations of a major Japanese novel in the twentieth century: it preserves Ōe’s dense, convoluted syntax without making it impenetrable, and it handles the shifts between contemporary colloquial speech and the ritualized language of the myth sequences with considerable skill.

For readers coming to Ōe, the correct order is A Personal Matter (1964) first — shorter, more immediate, and easier to inhabit — and then The Silent Cry. A Personal Matter is about a young man confronting his son’s brain damage; it is Ōe’s most emotionally direct work and the one that most clearly establishes the autobiographical concerns that run through all his fiction. The Silent Cry is the place where those personal concerns are fully mythologized and historically situated, and it requires the foundation that A Personal Matter provides. After both, Hiroshima Notes (non-fiction, 1965) and Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (stories, 1977) extend the picture in different directions.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Ōe’s masterpiece: the most Faulknerian Japanese novel ever written, and the one that earns the comparison through the depth of its engagement with place, history, and the tragic repetition that haunts families who cannot escape their own stories.