The Silent Cry is a novel by the Nobel Prize

Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...

 winning Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

ese author Kenzaburō Ōe

Kenzaburo Oe

is a Japanese author and a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature. His works, strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory, deal with political, social and philosophical issues including nuclear weapons, social non-conformism and existentialism.Ōe was awarded...

, first published in Japanese in 1967

1967 in literature

The year 1967 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Influential science fiction anthology Dangerous Visions published.*Cecil Day-Lewis is selected as the new Poet Laureate of the UK.-New books:...

 and awarded the Tanizaki Prize

Tanizaki Prize

The Tanizaki Prize , named in honor of the Japanese novelist Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, is one of Japan's most sought-after literary awards. It was established in 1965 by the publishing company Chūō Kōronsha Inc. to commemorate its 80th anniversary as a publisher...

 that year.

Plot summary

The novel tells the story of two brothers in the early 1960s: the narrator Mitsusaburo (one-eyed, a married English professor in Tokyo

Tokyo

, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...

) and his younger brother Takashi, who has just returned from the US

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. Mitsusaburo and his wife, Natsumi, have been through a series of crises. They have left their physically and mentally handicapped baby in an institution, while Mitsusaburo's friend has committed suicide (painting his head crimson, inserting a cucumber in his anus and hanging

Hanging

Hanging is the lethal suspension of a person by a ligature. The Oxford English Dictionary states that hanging in this sense is "specifically to put to death by suspension by the neck", though it formerly also referred to crucifixion and death by impalement in which the body would remain...

 himself). Natsumi has become an alcoholic

Alcoholism

Alcoholism is a broad term for problems with alcohol, and is generally used to mean compulsive and uncontrolled consumption of alcoholic beverages, usually to the detriment of the drinker's health, personal relationships, and social standing...

. Mitsusaburo leaves his job and they all travel to the brothers' home village, set in a hollow in the forest on Shikoku

Shikoku

is the smallest and least populous of the four main islands of Japan, located south of Honshū and east of the island of Kyūshū. Its ancient names include Iyo-no-futana-shima , Iyo-shima , and Futana-shima...

.

The brothers' family had been one of the leading families in the village. Takashi is obsessed with the memory of their great-grandfather's younger brother, who had led a peasant revolt in 1860. Mitsusaburo remembers the affair differently, believing that the leader of the rebellion had betrayed his followers. They similarly disagree over the death of their older brother, S, who had been killed in a raid on the Korean

Korean people

The Korean people are an ethnic group originating in the Korean peninsula and Manchuria. Koreans are one of the most ethnically and linguistically homogeneous groups in the world.-Names:...

 settlement near the village. Takashi revels in his warrior's death, while Mitsusaburo recalls him as volunteering to be killed in retaliation for the death of a Korean in an earlier raid. Their sister, also mentally retarded, had committed suicide while living with Takashi.

Takashi has agreed to sell the family's kura-yashiki — a traditional residence-storehouse — to 'the Emperor', a Korean originally brought to the village as a slave-worker but who has now gained a position of economic dominance, turning the village's other kura-yashiki into a supermarket which has put the smaller shops out of business. Secretly, he has also agreed to sell the Emperor all the family's land.

Takashi begins to organise the youths of the village into a group, beginning with football

American football

American football is a sport played between two teams of eleven with the objective of scoring points by advancing the ball into the opposing team's end zone. Known in the United States simply as football, it may also be referred to informally as gridiron football. The ball can be advanced by...

 training. When Mitsusaburo discovers Takashi's deception, he isolates himself from the others, but his wife sides with Takashi. Mitsusaburo goes to live in the kura-yashiki, while Takashi moves his group into the family's main building.

Takashi uses his group to begin an uprising against the Emperor, looting the supermarket and distributing the goods among the people. Takashi also begins a sexual relationship with Natsumi, and sends one of his followers to tell Mitsusaburo. The people eventually become disenchanted, however; eventually a girl is killed. Takashi claims that he tried to rape her and then murdered her. He is abandoned by his group and waits for the villagers to come and lynch or arrest him. Mitsusaburo, however, does not believe his story and says that Takashi is using the girl's accidental death as a way to engineer his own violent death. Takashi admits to Mitsusaburo that their sister killed herself after he ended an incest

Incest

Incest is sexual intercourse between close relatives that is usually illegal in the jurisdiction where it takes place and/or is conventionally considered a taboo. The term may apply to sexual activities between: individuals of close "blood relationship"; members of the same household; step...

uous relationship with her. After Mitsusaburo scorns Takashi's belief that he will be killed, Takashi shoots himself, writing as a final statement, 'I told the truth'.

The Emperor comes and begins demolishing the kura-yashiki. A secret basement is discovered in which the brother of the great-grandfather had spent the rest of his life hiding after the failure of his rebellion. Mitsusaburo and Natsumi decide to try to live together again, along with their handicapped baby and Takashi's unborn child, which Natsumi is carrying. Mitsusaburo decides against a return to his old job, instead taking up an offer to work as a translator with a wildlife expedition to Africa

Africa

Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...

.

Literary significance & criticism

The Japanese title connects the date of the rebellion (1860, the first year of the Man'en era

Manen

was a after Ansei and before Bunkyū. This period spanned the years from March 1860 through February 1861. The reigning emperor was .-Change of era:...

, and also the year of Japan's first embassy to the US) with the America

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

n influence on Japan represented by the Japan-US Mutual Security Treaty

Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan

The was signed between the United States and Japan in Washington, D.C. on January 19, 1960. It strengthened Japan's ties to the West during the Cold War era...

 of 1960 and by the (American) football

American football

American football is a sport played between two teams of eleven with the objective of scoring points by advancing the ball into the opposing team's end zone. Known in the United States simply as football, it may also be referred to informally as gridiron football. The ball can be advanced by...

 with which Takashi begins his own uprising. Ōe in a later essay compared the imagination of the writer to a clamp connecting the horizontal narrative with the vertical relationship between the two eras. Ōe also drew a parallel between the back and forth motion of the football being passed and the reciprocal relationship between the stories of the two eras. Michiko Wilson extends the comparison to the thesis

Thesis

A dissertation or thesis is a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings...

-antithesis

Antithesis

Antithesis is a counter-proposition and denotes a direct contrast to the original proposition...

 relationships between the violent and penitential sides of Takashi's character and between the passive, intellectual Mitsusaburo and the active Takashi who is in touch with nature.

Susan Napier emphasises the myth

Mythology

The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...

ical aspect of the story in her study of the novel. Like many of his earlier works, The Silent Cry has an unreal Arcadia

Arcadia (utopia)

Arcadia refers to a vision of pastoralism and harmony with nature. The term is derived from the Greek province of the same name which dates to antiquity; the province's mountainous topography and sparse population of pastoralists later caused the word Arcadia to develop into a poetic byword for an...

n setting, cut off from the rest of Japan and populated with grotesque characters. She argues that the climax of the book, Takashi's suicide, cannot be explained merely as prompted by his guilt over his relations with his sister. Rather, his death is a sacrifice

Sacrifice

Sacrifice is the offering of food, objects or the lives of animals or people to God or the gods as an act of propitiation or worship.While sacrifice often implies ritual killing, the term offering can be used for bloodless sacrifices of cereal food or artifacts...

 necessary, in terms of the myth, for the redemption of Mitsusaburo and of the village; his incest

Incest

Incest is sexual intercourse between close relatives that is usually illegal in the jurisdiction where it takes place and/or is conventionally considered a taboo. The term may apply to sexual activities between: individuals of close "blood relationship"; members of the same household; step...

uous relationship is merely a pretext for the sacrifice.

The Silent Cry is widely seen as a key work in Ōe's oeuvre. It is the only novel (other than The Game of Contemporaneity

The Game of Contemporaneity

The Game of Contemporaneity or 'dojidai gemu' is a novel by Nobel prize winner Kenzaburo Oe, published in 1979.The Game of Contemporaneity was originally inspired on Diego Rivera’s mural 'Dream on a Sunday Afternoon in the Central Alameda'...

) to which Wilson devotes a whole chapter in her survey of Ōe's works, while Napier sees it as a turning point in his output between his smaller-scale early works and the broader canvases of the later novels. As such it is, "perhaps his most successful effort to encapsulate Japanese history, society, and politics within a single tight narrative". The novel also marks an end to Ōe's series of works depicting pairs of brothers in pastoral settings, a hiatus which lasted until 1980s' The Trial of 'Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids'.