Plot: Soon after the suicide death of his best friend and the institutionalizing of his child, a young man returns to the village in rural Japan of his youth along with his wife and brother in order to sell a building on the family property to a Korean store owner. As his brother initiates an uprising among the locals, our hero becomes more depressed and unable to do much of anything. Events long in the past continue to resurface and are subject to competing interpretations.
Why read it?: An unrelenting work of despair,
The Silent Cry is an awesome work. Its dense, not easy, nor fun, to read. But it will affect you like few other works.
A few years ago, I read
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, Kenzaburo Oe's first novel. I had bought it for one of my daughters sometime before, but I don't believe she ever read it. It didn't make a great impression on me, truth be told; it was a very
Lord of the Flies style story of young boys fending for themselves. In this case, though, it is a group of reform school boys abandoned in a remote village by the townspeople, who all leave when a plague outbreak occurs. Unlike Flies, the boys here stay together for the most part; its the villagers who pose the biggest threat. The boys actually manage ok on their own, but vandalize the village while left to themselves. The villagers eventually return and are not only mad about the vandalism, but worry about what will happen if everyone finds out they abandoned the boys. Its an unsettling work that ends without much resolution.
Anyway, a few months back, I spotted The Silent Cry on a Goodwill shelf. It sat at home for awhile before I picked it up. Life will never be quite the same......
Few books start as full bore as this one does. Even fewer, perhaps none I have ever read, are able to keep it up for their entirety. The Silent Cry does. There's no escape within, even for a moment. This is not a fun, or even enjoyable, book to read. But it is brilliance, in the way that
There's A Riot Goin' On is as well. No escape, not even for a second.
The hero, Mitsu, is a mess. A young Tokyo translator, with a wife and a severely mentally handicapped son, who they have institutionalized, Mitsu is also dealing with the suicide of his best friend (as Oe will remind us over and over, he painted his entire head red (actually
crimson, there is a lot of
crimson in this book), stuck a cucumber up his anus and hanged himself). Mitsu's immediate family has a checkered history: his older brother was killed as a teen under hazy circumstances years earlier, a younger sister, also mentally handicapped, committed suicide, and their father disappeared in China during WWII. Mitsu himself is blind in one eye, the result of rock being thrown at him by fellow students when he was a boy. Mitsu soon finds himself, by choice, in the hole being dug for their new septic tank, furiously trying to make the hole cave in on itself. Oe puts in his characters in holes in the ground a few more times before the end. Haruki Murakami does the same thing in
A Wind Up Bird Chronicle, I'm assuming not by chance. Murakami, who writes about the next generation of Japanese, zeroes in on many of the same ideas of Japanese culture, just a bit more mature - his characters have overcome the guilt, but often feel lost and aimless in a society that favors conformity. Mitsu, not being a man of action, fails at that, like most everything he seems to do.
Mitsu's younger brother Taka, arrives from the US, where he is a student at Columbia. Taka had been a leader of student protests (against the Japan-US Security treaty in 1960) and is in many ways the opposite of Mitsu; Taka lives a life of grand external actions. Both brothers, however, are driven by their family's long history back in the home village. Along with Mitsu's wife, who has started drinking whisky by the barrelful, and a couple of Taka's acolytes(who also manage to pin the nickname Rat on Mitsu, who actually agrees with it), the two brothers head off to their ancestral home, where they plan to sell the family storehouse (as the intro to the book explains, its much more than that, but hard to describe; its big, its old and its neat) to a local Korean who owns a chain of supermarkets and wants to move their storehouse to Tokyo and make it into a restaurant.
We get a lot of the interplay between Mitsu and Taka - each has their own version of the family history - two important events are a peasant uprising in 1860 involving their great grandfather and his brother - the grandfather representing the existing social order and his brother the fight against it, yet still maintaining their blood loyalty; and the death of their older brother at the hands of the Korean slaves years ago. The differing interpretations of these events drives much of what happens in the novel, as Taka undertakes his own revolt, while Mitsu festers in his own pool of shame and guilt and despair. Of course, Taka does too, setting things up for a nasty climax.
A truly difficult read, because of the overwhelming sense of despair in all the characters, none of whom can seem to find redemption in anything they do. While I am not familiar with Japanese history and culture to be cognizant of all that is going on, the themes are universal. There is some small hope at the end, but that is only brought about by great sacrifices.
A brilliant novel.
