The Silent Cry (Serpent's Tail Classics)

I've only read three other Oe novels and this one is my favorite. It's also one of my favorite books in general and I'm an avid reader. It's a very mature book so I DON'T recommend it for a younger audience. As the other reviews say, it's dark and can even be painful to read at times. It's quixotic, brooding, bleak, and to borrow from another reviewer it does leave you unsettled and unnerved. However, it's also beautiful in an odd way... so if you're looking for something different this could be it. To summarize it, it's about two brothers who visit the village they were raised in. Although this may sound a little cliche the events and the history they discover are not.

Complex, convoluted story of multiple generous mirroring each other. To me different from most recent Japanese writing, steeped in history. Set in an isolated part of the Japanese mountains

I finished The Silent Cry right before the window of July shut for eternity. My reading of the book is locked away from me by an invisible wall that materialized overnight. I am glad of this because Oe’s book terrified me. In fact, The Silent Cry is the most frightening book I've ever read.The Silent Cry is about a depressed intellectual who returns to his ancestral village with his younger brother who plans to incite the young men to overthrow a local Korean businessman, "The Emperor of the Supermarkets."This book is a staple of hardcore Japanese literature. It's a densely written, philosophically loaded story that deals with the darkness of living in a personal hell. Suicide and shame continuously haunt the characters, punctuated by outbursts of raw violence. The danger extends beyond fiction through Oe's writing that refuses to leave the reader as a faraway bystander. We are faced with the naked suffering of every character, from all angles, until we become soiled.Though The Silent Cry is disturbing, it communicates its message: Despite the worst humiliations and failures, we can generate the strength to begin again. Isn't this the story of Japan and the atomic bombs? The Silent Cry allegorized the shame of Imperial Japan’s defeat into a family that must face an existential horror akin to nuclear annihilation. The pain becomes communal. That is why this book turns so many people off.Oe delivers a literary blow across the face that leaves us to solemnly reflect on our own personal hell and the will to start again, from nothing if need be.

I found reading this novel a sad experience. As I was being depressed by the story and the unpleasant characters, I was working hard at guessing why the author wrote it. In the end I concluded that my view of Japan as a sunny, law-abiding, and hard-working nation may be a bit askew. Further in, I did remember that in the 1960s Japan was cursed with angry student and Marxist demonstrations...and difficult political strugles on a higher level, that was the period when this novel was written and published. Finally, when the unpleasantness had ended with the end of the novel, I concluded that that reality was what gave birth to this book...though all such larger political upsets are offstage in the novel. So I learned something from this novel: no nation is free of conflict, chronic sorrow, and occasional despair on the part of some of its populace, and such periods give rise to their own literature.

The American edition of Oe's novel may be called "The Silent Cry," but a more accurate translation of the title would be "Football in the Year 1860 [or the Man'an era]," the year Ii Naosuke, famous for brokering a commercial treaty with the U.S., was assassinated by a group of samurai loyal to the Emperor. It is also the year, in the novel, when the great-granduncle of two brothers, Mitsusaburo and Takashi, led a peasant revolt in their ancestral village.The decision to discard a more literal translation masks what Oe is trying to do here, as he continues to pile on parallels between 1860 and the early 1960s, when this novel is set. Favoring historical symbolism and mythological surrealism, the novel defies a summary that would make much sense to the reader. A skeletal outline would describe the rivalry between Mitsusaburo, who has left his handicapped child in an institution and returned to his childhood home with his alcoholic wife, and his younger brother Takashi, recently returned from America, who "seems to want his actions influenced by the 1860 affair."Takashi idealizes the embroidered family legends of heroism and leadership, and he arrays the village youth into a cult-like group to challenge the hegemony of a local business magnate known, not coincidentally, as "the Emperor." The story is filled with grotesqueries and violence, from the opening description of a friend's suicide (which is presented in a disconcertingly risible manner) to the rape and death of a local girl (an event that Mitsusaburo believes is invented) to Mitsusaburo's apparent nonchalance when he realizes that Takashi is sleeping with his wife.The result is a tale of Freudian weirdness in a claustrophobic mountain village that might remind readers of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Among Oe's works, it's not as accessible (nor, in my view, as good) as "A Personal Matter" and stories like "Prize Stock" or "Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness." But, in spite of its outmoded surrealism, there's something compelling and fascinating about the deranged rivalry between the two brothers who hijack the attention of this peculiar, mythical community.

Oe in " The silent cry" deals with the perplexing problem of finding ones root. The novel is a story of about two brothers who return to their village, each for their own reasons.The story deals with by the main characters search for answer to �how does a modern man communicate( in philosophical sense )?� One brother thinks, we can communicate by death and in our silence. The other wants to communicate by connecting his present with the past of the society.It is a difficult novel due to the hard subject matter. But Oe does SPLENDID job in expounding the difficult issues through his excellent narrative.

Buch voller selbstzerstörerischer Charaktere, die nicht in der Lage sind, sich selbst zu vergeben oder in der Lage sind, für ihre Handlung zu Süden, was sie nie getan haben.

All good...

The distinctly unpromising set up - supermarket creating change in an unchanged Village - is transcended as a powerful economically written work grips. Family, Marriage and history are beautifully explored with some shocking effects. Oe's life mingles with his work to great effect here.

Great book always enjoy books with a bit of a dark side of human nature, also love Japanese folklore & tradions.

very good book very good condition on time love it like always!!!