The Silent Cry

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Kodansha International, 1974 - Fiction - 274 pages
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.

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Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
22
Section 3
41
Copyright

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About the author (1974)

Kenzaburo Oe was born on January 31, 1935. He was born in a small village on the island of Shikoku, Japan. A winner of numerous Japanese literary prizes, Oe came to manhood during World War II and the occupation. At Tokyo University, Oe studied Jean-Paul Sartre and absorbed many popular leftist ideas. These influences appear in his early writings, which often deal with contemporary issues. With the birth of his deformed son, father and son became the new focus of his work. In his two books, A Personal Matter (1964) and A Healing Family (1996), Oe describes the pain involved with accepting his brain-damaged son and the small victories involved their lives as his son progressed. In 1994, Oe won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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