The Silent Cry. A Novel by Kenzaburo Oe[return][return]The Global Cry…., June 24, 2000[return][return]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.[return][return]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:[return][return] “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.”[return][return]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.[return][return]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”:[return][return] “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.”[return][return]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.[return][return]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,[return][return] “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.”[return][return]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,[return][return] “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. . . .”[return][return]Frederick Glaysher[return]http://www.fglaysher.com
Silent Cry, by Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe, takes place in Japan in the late 1960s, following Mitsusaburo, his wife Natsumi and his brother, Takashi as they return to the rural valley community where Mitsu's family has lived for over a century. Mitsu is an anti-hero of the lowest calibre -- weak-willed, ugly and inert -- and from the beginning of the novel there is a significant amount of tension in his marriage as Natsu has succumbed to alcoholism.The opening of the novel sees Mitsu finding himself crouched at the bottom of a hollowed-out pit formed for a Septic Tank, ruminating on the recent suicide of his friend. Alone and pitiful, he tells of his infant son locked away in an institution after an operation to remove a tumour from his head left him a near vegetable. Like so much refuse, he has no job and no one in which he can confide. He is called a rat, and he adopts the persona, becoming rat like in his behaviour.When his brother returns from America they travel, along with his brother's teenaged protégées, to the valley of their ancestors. Mitsu spurns Takashi for his juvenile behaviour, though Takashi is confident and charismatic, as his brother wants to follow in the footsteps of their great-great-uncle who, in 1860, started a rebellion in the village.A main notion in Silent Cry is that of truth and the consequences of it. Truth is hard to come by in the novel, with Taka and Mitsu often remembering their childhoods differently, correcting one another over and over as they relate their past experiences. In the same way, the truth about the affair in 1860 is revised constantly throughout the novel as more facts are revealed to the brothers. This is combined with an extensive use of dream imagery to deliberately mislead the reader, along with the main characters, so that the morality of their actions is never solidly identified. Gravely, Mitsu's entire view of history and his brother comes into question by the end of the novel, and the reader is brought into this upheaval in a very real way. Throughout the entire story, we are made, despite his imperfections, to sympathise with Mitsusaburo. Though pitiable, he is also the pillar of reason among the strange cult-like behavior of the other characters following his brother. In this way, not only do we blindly agree with his interpretation of the past, but we also spurn his brother -- both in action and in philosophy -- and consider him petulant, impulsive and ineffectual. By the end of the novel, however, this perspective is made to change. Just as Mitsu must re-evaluate his entire way of thinking about his brother, so too must we, as Mitsu's complicit followers, re-evaluate what we have read thus far, and how we feel about the characters.In one sense, it is extremely effective as the reader is led to believe certain truths exactly as the characters. In another, however, it's frustrating because by the end of the novel we are so ingrained in our repulsion towards Takashi that to change our opinions is nearly impossible. Looking for Mitsu to succeed for such a long time only to be disappointed when his success is dependent on his brother's philosophies is tough to swallow.More frustrating still is, aptly, the issue of the writing of the novel itself. Kenzaburo Oe writes exclusively in Japanese, and as such the novel is translated by a Western author. In a way that eerily parallels the passage of truth in the novel, we must read the text through the eyes and words of an interloper, an observer to the chaos we're reading. It is impossible to know what liberties have been taken -- what images are created by this third-party that are not, perhaps, what Oe intended. Due in part to the paranoid pursuit of truth demonstrated by Mitsu and Takashi, we also yearn for truth, both in the story and in its very construction. And yet, just as Mitsusaburo, we must place our faith in the words of another in order to do so.Though chaotic and dense, the novel is well-written and the characters are lively and numerous. The setting of the quiet valley town torn apart by modernization and a new generation is fleshed out well, and throughout the novel the internal monologue of the self-described rat, Mitsu, provides a framework through which we can relive events in his life and the lives of his ancestors in a unique and effective way.
Do You like book The Silent Cry (1998)?
Det är ingen lätt uppgift att kommentera den här boken. Å ena sidan gillar jag språket. Det är lagom filosofiskt och suggestivt. Men å andra sidan begriper jag inte själva handlingen, det vill säga jag förstår vad som händer i boken - den är inte komplicerad på det viset - men jag förstår inte vart författaren vill komma. Vad vill han säga med den här berättelsen? Beats me, får jag lov att erkänna. Är det att historien upprepar sig? Att man inte kan undkomma sitt öde? Att kampen mot övermäktiga krafter (marknadskrafter, makten?) är dömd att misslyckas? Ja, kanske det, eller något helt annat.Den här ovissheten kan man förvisso leva med. Vad som är värre är att jag inte känner sympati med någon av huvudpersonerna. Det tillsammans med den svårbegripliga handlingen gjorde det lite tungt, men inte utan ljusglimtar.
—Mänsomläser
This book reminds me of why I hate baseball. The action doesn't start until the batter steps up to the plate, but before that there's a lot of waiting. First he has to take some practice swings. Then adjust his cup. Then maybe spit. Only then...no wait, one more cup adjustment. The first 3/4 of this book was a bit of a slog to get through. I kept waiting for Oe to get to the plate, but then I got to the last two chapters and it's like he hit a stand-up triple. Everything suddenly made sense: One brother was punishing himself greatly because he had sinned greatly; the other brother is wretched because he's realized that while he's never sinned greatly, he's never achieved greatly either (which I suppose is in itself a greater sin.) In his job he doesn't create anything, but rather translates others' work. Even his marriage is unsatisfactory as symbolized by the birth of his son, who was born almost a vegetable. In his ancestral village where the bulk of the story takes place, he moves out of the main residence into the storehouse, a symbol of security. This points out the problem with the first part of the book: It's too symbol-laden. It includes all these plot points and characters that aren't interesting until you get to the end and you finally understand what the book is about and the main character takes on dimension. Only then is he portrayed as a full-blooded individual. By then I should feel pity for this character who realizes too late that his brother is the one who will leave his mark on history, but I just felt relief that the book was over.
—Dave Russell
Raske on hinnata midagi nii rasket ja rusuvat, aga samas paeluvat. Kuidas üldse hinnata midagi, mis toob endaga kaasa peaaegu vaid negatiivseid emotsioone? Minu jaoks oli kõige kummalisem, kuidas mõjuma ei jäänud mitte vägivaldsed, jubedad ja hirmutavad juhtumid inimestega, vaid kärbse tapmine. Põhjalik kirjeldus sellest, kuidas peategelane sai kätte kärbse ja lömastas selle näppude vahel, samas kirjeldades, kuidas see on tema jaoks vastik. Olin selle lugemisest kuidagi nii jahmunud, et ei suutnud mitu päeva raamatut uuesti kätte võtta. Kes suudab vägivallast ja verest üle olla, sellele julgen siiski soovitada. Aga võibolla ehk väikeste dooside haaval.
—Marge
