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The Silent Cry A Novel Kenzaburo Oe John Bester 9784770004505 Books

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The Silent Cry A Novel Kenzaburo Oe John Bester 9784770004505 Books

I've only read three other Oe novels and this one is my favorite. It's also one of my favorite books in general and I'm an avid reader. It's a very mature book so I DON'T recommend it for a younger audience. As the other reviews say, it's dark and can even be painful to read at times. It's quixotic, brooding, bleak, and to borrow from another reviewer it does leave you unsettled and unnerved. However, it's also beautiful in an odd way... so if you're looking for something different this could be it. To summarize it, it's about two brothers who visit the village they were raised in. Although this may sound a little cliche the events and the history they discover are not.


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The Silent Cry A Novel Kenzaburo Oe John Bester 9784770004505 Books Reviews

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.
I finished The Silent Cry right before the window of July shut for eternity. My reading of the book is locked away from me by an invisible wall that materialized overnight. I am glad of this because Oe’s book terrified me. In fact, The Silent Cry is the most frightening book I've ever read.

The Silent Cry is about a depressed intellectual who returns to his ancestral village with his younger brother who plans to incite the young men to overthrow a local Korean businessman, "The Emperor of the Supermarkets."

This book is a staple of hardcore Japanese literature. It's a densely written, philosophically loaded story that deals with the darkness of living in a personal hell. Suicide and shame continuously haunt the characters, punctuated by outbursts of raw violence. The danger extends beyond fiction through Oe's writing that refuses to leave the reader as a faraway bystander. We are faced with the naked suffering of every character, from all angles, until we become soiled.

Though The Silent Cry is disturbing, it communicates its message Despite the worst humiliations and failures, we can generate the strength to begin again. Isn't this the story of Japan and the atomic bombs? The Silent Cry allegorized the shame of Imperial Japan’s defeat into a family that must face an existential horror akin to nuclear annihilation. The pain becomes communal. That is why this book turns so many people off.

Oe delivers a literary blow across the face that leaves us to solemnly reflect on our own personal hell and the will to start again, from nothing if need be.
Just couldn't relate to the story at all. I think you would need a deep understanding of Japanese culture to understand this book.
Needed it for school. All I remember is that I didn't like the story.
Complex, convoluted story of multiple generous mirroring each other. To me different from most recent Japanese writing, steeped in history. Set in an isolated part of the Japanese mountains
I've only read three other Oe novels and this one is my favorite. It's also one of my favorite books in general and I'm an avid reader. It's a very mature book so I DON'T recommend it for a younger audience. As the other reviews say, it's dark and can even be painful to read at times. It's quixotic, brooding, bleak, and to borrow from another reviewer it does leave you unsettled and unnerved. However, it's also beautiful in an odd way... so if you're looking for something different this could be it. To summarize it, it's about two brothers who visit the village they were raised in. Although this may sound a little cliche the events and the history they discover are not.