Kenzaburo Oe

Kenzaburō Ōe

The Silent Cry traces the uneasy relationship between two brothers who return to their ancestral home, a village in densely forested western Japan. While one brother tries to sort out the after-effects of a friend's suicide and the birth of a retarded son, the other embarks on a quixoticmission to incite an uprising among the local youth. Oe's description of this brother's messianic struggle to save a disintegrating local culture and economy from the depredations of a Korean wheeler-dealer called "The Emperor of the Supermarkets" is as chillingly pertinent today as it was whenfirst published in 1967. Powerful and daring, The Silent Cry is a thoroughly compelling classic of world literature.

The Silent Cry

It is the 1960s and the Nedokoro brothers have long-since left their family home in a remote forested valley on Shikoku, in the south of Japan: Mitsusaburo for Tokyo to work as a translator and English professor; his younger brother Takashi for the United States, to atone for his part in anti-American student protests. Takashi's return to Japan coincides with a local Korean supermarket magnate's offer to buy the brothers' ancestral storehouse, pitting Mitsusaburo and Takashi against one another and dredging up family histories perhaps best forgotten.Oe's dark masterpiece of family psychology is the most important Japanese novel of the post-war period and a strange, unsettling tale of how the call of blood and history echoes down the generations.

I can appreciate it for what it is, but the subject matter wasn't for me. 

Brady

The Silent Cry

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