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A review by cartoonmicah
The Silent Cry by Kenzaburō Ōe
4.0
I’m not certain whether it’s decades of aging, literary style, cross-cultural interpretation, or literal translation issues, but something subtle seems to be lost in translation with The Silent Cry. I would assume it is probably a combination of all of these factors. Ōe has a very obviously unique style and it’s hard to believe that nothing is lost in translation. He occasionally mentions very strange or grotesque observations and the translation of these concepts seems always to dull their point of impact. In fact, it is hard to get any sort of emotional read on the perspective in this story, which is itself so filled with violent emotional reactions explained in such a sterile way. The story itself is somewhat repetitive, bizarre, and literary, more interesting for the characters and treatment of memories, family ties, and discovering of meaning in heritage. The book leans heavily upon hundreds of years of fictionalized Japanese history, including a lot of perspective on WWII. Written in the 1960’s some of the current perspectives of the characters can also hard to interpret.
Mitsu and his younger brother Takashi are the last two members of a large family that was once like royalty in a small forest village in West Japan that is now decaying away in a postwar age of urbanization. Mitsu is a one-eyed college professor mourning both the loss of a close friend to suicide and the birth of a severely mentally handicapped baby that is basically in a vegetative state. He is a depressive himself who is prone to resist action in favor of the role of pessimistic observer. His brother Takashi has just gotten back from a stint roaming in the USA, an action-oriented revolutionary obsessed with heroic stories of rebel leaders from the past generations of their own family. The two could not be more opposite and could not have more different perspectives on their own heritage and the meanings in their memories of their childhood home and they’re deceased brothers and sister and mother. When Taka comes home with the idea of returning to their childhood home to sell of the valuable properties they still own, Mitsu and his newly alcoholic wife agree more out of torpor than anything else. The winter that follows is one of increasingly incredulous chaos and upheaval, in which Taka slowly incites the lazy rural farmers into a rebellion against the foreign owned supermarket which has run every other business in town out of business.
This story revolves around so many complex elements of history and family and economic dynamics. Every one of these elements feels half relatable and half foreign to me. The really compelling parts are the ways we manipulate memories and family history and how we build our own identities based on these factors. As the story goes on it feels both believable and surreal, until it is almost like a waking nightmare spoken in a realistic and monotone style. The biggest unspoken assumption that I thought of as key to interpreting this work is the assumption that everyone just wants to die. There are suicides and rebel leaders and everyone seems to want to die to escape pain or die to make some kind of meaning but the assumption seems always to be that the village and the family and the circumstances and the universe is something between meaningless and painful. In many ways, it’s relatable. In some ways, it’s a horror story.
Mitsu and his younger brother Takashi are the last two members of a large family that was once like royalty in a small forest village in West Japan that is now decaying away in a postwar age of urbanization. Mitsu is a one-eyed college professor mourning both the loss of a close friend to suicide and the birth of a severely mentally handicapped baby that is basically in a vegetative state. He is a depressive himself who is prone to resist action in favor of the role of pessimistic observer. His brother Takashi has just gotten back from a stint roaming in the USA, an action-oriented revolutionary obsessed with heroic stories of rebel leaders from the past generations of their own family. The two could not be more opposite and could not have more different perspectives on their own heritage and the meanings in their memories of their childhood home and they’re deceased brothers and sister and mother. When Taka comes home with the idea of returning to their childhood home to sell of the valuable properties they still own, Mitsu and his newly alcoholic wife agree more out of torpor than anything else. The winter that follows is one of increasingly incredulous chaos and upheaval, in which Taka slowly incites the lazy rural farmers into a rebellion against the foreign owned supermarket which has run every other business in town out of business.
This story revolves around so many complex elements of history and family and economic dynamics. Every one of these elements feels half relatable and half foreign to me. The really compelling parts are the ways we manipulate memories and family history and how we build our own identities based on these factors. As the story goes on it feels both believable and surreal, until it is almost like a waking nightmare spoken in a realistic and monotone style. The biggest unspoken assumption that I thought of as key to interpreting this work is the assumption that everyone just wants to die. There are suicides and rebel leaders and everyone seems to want to die to escape pain or die to make some kind of meaning but the assumption seems always to be that the village and the family and the circumstances and the universe is something between meaningless and painful. In many ways, it’s relatable. In some ways, it’s a horror story.