The Silent Cry (1967)

- PICKED BY ESTHER-
February 2021

The Silent Cry is narrated in the first person by Mitsusaburo Nedokoro, who returns from Tokyo to the Shikoku village in which he grew up after the suicide of a friend and the institutionalization of his handicapped infant son. Although familiar with rural life and, upon his arrival, convinced ‘that everything was just as I'd seen it twenty years before,’ Mitsu soon finds that his time in Tokyo has alienated him from the village, making him feel ‘that the “I” bending down there now was not the child who had once bent his bare knees there, that there was no continuity, no consistency between the two “I’s,” that the “I” now bending down there was a remote stranger.’ Mitsu is an insider who has become an outsider, prompted by his brother Taka to return to the ancestral village in order to start a new life. This new life is symbolized by the notion of finding one’s ‘thatched hut, an idyllic place to put down roots that is also a place where lost roots can be recovered, in this case through Mitsu and Taka's obsessive quest to find out the truth about their great-grandfather’s and his brother’s roles in a farmers’ uprising in 1860.

By revealing the village – which has seen the arrival of Korean forced laborers and American troops, as well as a supermarket selling Scandinavian stoves – as a dynamically changing, globally connected space incapable of offering the idyllic seclusion and self-sufficiency of the ‘thatched hut’ desired by Mitsu, Oe’s novel suggests that it is not a reality but a fantasy stuck onto particular places that is harmful both to these places and to those who seek an idyllic existence in them.