The Silent Cry by Kenzaburō ōe

First published:Man’en gan’nen no futtoboru, 1967 (English translation, 1974)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The early 1960’s

Locale: The Okubo village in Shikoku, Japan, and Tokyo

Principal Characters:

• Mitsusaburo (Mitsu) Nedokoro, the narrator, who is withdrawn and world-weary
• Takashi Nedokoro, a reformed student-activist
• Natsumi Nedokoro, Mitsu’s wife, who is prone to alcohol abuse
• The Emperor, a Korean, a former laborer and now owner of a supermarket chain

The Novel

The Silent Cry tells of two brothers, Mitsusaburo (“Mitsu”) and Takashi Nedokoro, who return to their native village in Southeast Japan in order to find out about their family’s involvement in a peasant riot in 1860, and perhaps to begin a new life. The course of the events is related by Mitsu; far from being linear and objective, his deliberately stylized account is characterized by subjective similes and frequent excursions into the past.

The novel opens at predawn with the narrator’s descent into a septic-tank pit at his Tokyo home. While Mitsu is alone on the wet ground, his thoughts introduce all the events and topics, which like gigantic leitmotifs manifest the novel’s underlying symbolic structure. Suffering from the loss “of some ardent sense of expectation,” Mitsu remembers the bizarre suicide of his best friend, with whom he shared a successful career translating books about animals: The friend painted his head red, “stripped, thrust a cucumber up his anus, and hanged himself.” The narrator is convinced that this act was a silent cry to tell some important truth. With clues too equivocal, however, Mitsu cannot grasp what it might be and must go on with life quite literally half blind from a childhood accident which has rendered his right eye useless.

Upon his return from America, Takashi challenges Mitsu, whose wife has taken solace in cheap whiskey since their mentally retarded baby was given away to an institution. Takashi, who calls his brother a rat, confronts him with the idea of starting anew in their native village. There, “the Emperor,” a local upstart, plans to buy the family’s hundred-year-old storehouse in order to use it as a fancy restaurant in Tokyo. Furthermore, Takashi wants to learn the truth about their great-grandfather, who built the storehouse, and his younger brother, who led the peasant youths during the 1860 uprising. Supported by some historical evidence, Mitsu insists that the younger brother had sold out and died a member of the establishment; this is a vision which Takashi refuses to accept.

Upon their arrival in Okubo, Mitsu soon sets up solitary residence in the storehouse and refuses to become involved in the life of the village. Takashi, who brought with him a young mechanic, Hoshio, and a teenage girl, Momoko, takes a liking to Mitsu’s wife Natsumi and begins to get active on behalf of the village’s young men’s association, whose chicken farm has been wiped out as a result of food scarcity and an early cold. His commitment brings Takashi into conflict with the Emperor, the financial backer of the farm whose supermarket (one of a huge chain) has ruined the other stores in the village.

After the chicken disaster, Takashi sets up a football team to train the village youths. In his conversations with Mitsu, Takashi relishes his self-fashioned role of “effective evildoer,” and his inspirational addresses to his young followers on New Year’s Eve exploit tales from the 1860 uprising.

Cleverly, Takashi transforms an official “giveaway” at the supermarket into an episode of looting and encourages the villagers to participate in this lawless act. The fire of enthusiasm for the plundering is fanned by the well-known fact that the Emperor was once one of the Korean forced laborers who were brought to the village during World War II. Takashi has an additional emotional investment in the riot, since his elder brother S, upon his return from the war, was slain under controversial circumstances in the Korean settlement. Throughout the second day of what Takashi self-consciously terms a riot of the imagination, the leader rallies support by establishing a link to 1860. His men perform a topical version of the old ritualistic Nembutsu dance and coerce every household into “disgracing” itself by participating in the organized looting.

The following morning brings to Mitsu Hoshio’s eyewitness account of Takashi’s sexual intercourse with Natsumi; Takashi also confesses to her that he is torn between a desire for intense self-punishment and an impulse to be “a man of violence.” Confronting Mitsu, his brother is defiant and hints at his possession of a truth of such import that the teller—like Mitsu’s friend who killed himself—will not be able to live.

Just as Mitsu has returned to a translation which keeps him detached and occupied, Natsumi brings news that Takashi has tried to rape and has killed a village girl and, deserted by his followers, is awaiting collective revenge. In the main house, Mitsu fiercely challenges his brother and insists that the deed was an accident and the murder Takashi’s invention. Takashi, however, insists that he is guilty and retires with Mitsu to the storehouse.

In the aged building, Takashi confides his final truth to his brother. After the war, while living with faraway relatives, he initiated sexual relations with his mildly retarded sister. His sister followed his instructions for secrecy to the point of inventing a rape when she got pregnant; after her abortion and sterilization, she came to him searching for closeness. Horrified at her request immediately after the operation, Takashi rejected and slapped her. The next morning, his sister killed herself. Mitsu reacts coldly and accuses his brother that he, despite his need for self-punishment, will always find a “way out.” He even rejects Takashi’s offer of his retinas after his death and leaves him. Later that night, Takashi shoots himself, and his brother is left with a dream about a “retrial.”

When the Emperor finally comes into Okubo and orders the dismantling of the storehouse, a cellar is discovered where their great-grandfather’s younger brother lived in hiding after 1860, mysteriously reappearing above ground only once in 1871 to lead a nonviolent, successful upheaval. Shaken, Mitsu decides that he has misjudged his great-uncle and his brother and at night climbs into the dank cellar, thus entering his second pit at the novel’s close. There Mitsu realizes that it is he who cannot confront his “agonizing fear of death” and rise “above his private hell,” as the other two Nedokoros have done. Instead, he relies on a newly found notion of tenderness, which he discovered in a picture of the Buddhist Hell that his great-grandfather commissioned after the 1860 rising.

Greeted by his wife, the narrator leaves the pit and decides to bring back his son from the institution and to launch himself into a new job. Once, Takashi insisted that the touchstone for humanity after a possible nuclear war would be the decision regarding reconstruction of zoos; now, Mitsu will go as translator on an African expedition which aims to capture elephants for Japan.

The Characters

Mitsusaburo Nedokoro might strike the reader as being the most negative character of The Silent Cry; after all, he voluntarily isolates himself from life and cherishes a “profound insensitivity” toward others. Still, it is essential to remember that “the rat” is set on his “downhill journey” by the double impact of traumatizing blows; the loss of his retarded son and the suicide of his best friend have anesthetized him to the point where Mitsu stubbornly insists that even a rat has an identity.

His apparent intellectual delight in destroying his brother’s comfortable fantasies of the past are the end result of his merciless use of his analytical capabilities and his refusal to live a life built on lies. There is a silent heroism in Mitsu’s decision that all the “roots” linking him to his native village are ultimately as fictional as the old story that their family name means “the soul’s roots” in an Okinawan dialect. The protagonist-narrator’s indifference also serves as a means of surviving the insults of his brother, who clandestinely sells all of their estate and seduces his wife. In the end, Mitsu is saved by Natsumi, whose tenderness fills his inner abyss. Her drinking helped to drive her husband into isolation, but her final appearance at the pit offers the chance of redemption.

Takashi’s restless attempts at healing through action the inner wound his sister’s suicide inflicted stands in radical opposition to the detachment of his older brother. Takashi is violent both in his self-punishment (as in his masochistic encounter with a black prostitute whom he asks to “rape” him) and in his rebellion. His grandest action, the instigation of communal looting, earns for him the admiration of the local priest, who greets the upheaval as a sign that the young men have finally embarked on a farsighted course of action and gained freedom by having “created of their own free will a situation that can’t be cleared up by their own free will, and have taken responsibility for it.” This, too, describes what Takashi would like to achieve for himself by proclaiming himself a murderer; in the cruelest moment of The Silent Cry, however, his brother’s denial of Takashi’s capacity to carry out such an act of existential courage triggers his suicide.

Yet despite the riot’s collapse, Takashi’s imagination brings a desperately needed cultural revival. Most important, the village takes up his resurrection of the Nembutsu dance, a tradition which had been lost.

Critical Context

The Silent Cry bears the traits of Ōe’s fascination with existentialism, with which his study of French literature has thoroughly acquainted him, and whose influence has made Ōe the foremost post modern author of Japan. Mitsu’s hints at the “nausea” with which he regards his brother’s activities are a direct allusion to Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel of the same name, La Nausee (1938; Nausea, 1949). With his insistence on a freely conceived murder as an act of existential liberation, Takashi finds himself on the same level as the protagonist of Albert Camus’ L’Etranger (1942; The Stranger, 1946).

The Silent Cry achieves a vision which enables Ōe to close on a note of tenderness for the weak and the promise of a final defeat of futility for the adventurous. As with the protagonist of his earlier novel, Kojinteki na taiken (1964; A Personal Matter, 1968), Mitsu’s ultimate decision to bring his retarded son into his family constitutes a liberating moment in its submission to primal human values in the face of inexplicable truths and too many silent cries. As for the heroic, Takashi’s death shows the achievement of meaning on a mythic or fictional plane; like Mitsu’s friend, he will be remembered.

Bibliography

Kimball, Arthur G. Crisis in Identity and Contemporary Japanese Novels, 1973.

Ōe, Kenzaburō. “A Game of Football,” in Japan Quarterly. October-December, 1973, pp. 428-429.

Sakurai, Emiko. “Kenzaburō Ōe: The Early Years,” in World Literature Today. LVIII (Summer, 1984), pp. 370-373.

Wilson, Michiko N. “A Narrative of Simultaneity: The Football Game of the First Year of Manen,” in The Marginal World of Ōe Kenzaburō, 1986.

Yamanouchi, Hisaaki. The Search of Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature, 1978.