Kenzaburo Oe Books

Oe's giant stature as a writer is demonstrated here more than in any other of his books. All these stories are wonderful, but "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away" is one of the greatest works of fiction I've ever read. I mean that. Buy this book and read it. You won't be sorry.

The longest stories ever... But they were alright, I found them more interesting to talk about than to actually read...

If you haven't bought this book, then you should get it now. Kenzaburo Oe is one of the few left wing writers in Japan who has made a great impact world wide. His style is original, his themes often poignant. His own personal suffering and the suffering of his own brain-damaged child often feature in his novels in subtle and not so subtle forms. You will not find any cliches in this novel and Oe is never nauseatingly sentimental. A true gem.

Please do not be misled by the title or Amazon's classification of this work in "Psychology and Counseling." Oe writes about madness not from the perspective of a clinician but from that of an artist. The madness he urges us to leave behind is that of societal expectations.

Although "Prize Catch" might be difficult for those who have experienced racism to read, one has to remember that Oe recaptures (pardon the pun) the atmosphere of rural Shikoku seen through the eyes of a boy in the waning days of World War II. I suspect that the villagers would have had equal difficulty relating to a Caucasian American.

This is an excellent introduction to Oe's public and private lives.

I adore this book... I read it all at once, woke up my parents in the middle of the night talking about its descriptions of the sky, talked about it at my college interviews, which were about three years ago... Loved it. But Discovered that some of Oe's other work isn't as good. But wow! The language, plot, the strangeness, the beauty, inventiveness, and reach of the book is tremendous. :)

Seventeen and the two halves of J are three variations on a similar theme. In these stories, the protagonists are confronted with the realization that their private and public selves are irreconcilably different, and it is this schism that leads to the characters' self-destruction.

In Seventeen (4.5 stars), Oe masterfully portrays the story's anti-hero, a seventeen year old boy who awakens to many fears--death, status as outsider/outcast by family and peers, his own insecurity--as well as the antidote to these fears: masturbation (Oe's use of a Japanese euphemism that means "self-defilement" is telling of the protagonist's sadistic streak). In fact, the protagonist longingly states that it would be nice if life was just one long orgasm. By a few twists of fate, it is right-wing extremism that he chooses as his "suit of armor" to cover his vulnerable ego, and it is the emperor he chooses as the object of his quest for the lifelong orgasm.

Oe's choice of a seventeen year old protagonist is not coincidental. This story is patterned after the murder of a left-wing politician by a seventeen year old youth. Not surprisingly, Oe's interpretation of events enflamed a passionate response from Japan's ultranationalist right who were outraged by Oe's connection between right-wing activism and the masturbation of a lonely, frightened boy.

Again in J (4 stars), Oe uses sex as the vehicle for his message about the strain between acting on one's true impulses and desires and conforming to social norms and expectations. The contrast is illustrated immediately as the Tokyo-ites observe the silent, condemning crowd outside of the house of an adulterer. The scene is repeated later at J's cottage after the "free love" goings on of the young socialites is witnessed by a young boy from the village. The villagers retreat, but the damage is done. The socialites are overcome with a feeling of defilement and emptiness, crushed as a result of not meeting the expectations of a disapproving society.

The second half focuses on the struggle between expression and conformity in the odd "pervert's club" of J, an old man, and a youth. At different stages, they realize that there is no compromise--they must either give in to their true nature or commit entirely to conforming to society. In the end, they all reject society and meet inglorious ends.

In Seventeen and J, Oe uses rather extreme situations to highlight the difficulty or even impossibility of reconciling personal expression and social expectations. Both the vehicle and the content of Oe's message are oddly gripping and memorable. These stories will not be enjoyed by all readers, but I think they will reward those who keep an open mind and search for the meaning that Oe instills in his works.

_Seventeen & J_ was one of the many books resting and collecting dust that I bought on a whim and reall had little intention of reading soon. I have read two other Oe novels before these two short novels, _Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids_ and _A Personal Matter_ and his reknowned short story "The Catch," but while I did enjoy these works I was caught up in the recent literature of two of my favorite writers: Murakami Haruki and Yoshimoto Banana, and withing their numerous pages concerning sheepmen and girls who love to sleep in the kitchen, I was kind of bored when I entered Oe's more mundane world.

However, after a couple of years and haing read many of the works of Natsume Soseki, Tanizaki Junichiro, Mishima Yukio, and Kawabata Yasunari, I decided to try another Oe novel. After all the man did win the Nobel Prize for literature, and that must mean something, hehe.

I am glad that I did read these short novels, because they give the reader a view of the tumultuous early 60s in Japan.

_Seventeen_ stars a a young high school student who has just turned seventeen years old. While he is in the bathroom, he feels on top of the world and that with a little effort he will be able to accomplish anything. However, after he leaves the restroom, his high hopes fall back to earth and he gets into a poltical argument with his sister. He supporting the left, communists, and she supporting the right, basically nationalists. The sister wins the argument and succeeds in reducing her brother to tears. However, he pays her back with a swift kick to the eye. One can almost tell that "Seventeen" wants someone to say something to him, but the onl thing that happens is that his father says his sister won't help pay his college tuition.

The next day is even worse. The boy fails several important tests, but worse of all he wets himself while running 800 meters. Later a friend takes Seventeen to a rightest political rally, which the young high schooler becomes entranced by. He soon joins the rightest group, and even though he spouts all of the correct rightest slogans, one can tell he is only doing so because he feels that he finally belongs to a group of people.

The hero of _J_ is quite different than Seventeen. He is the 29 year old son of the president of a steel company and has money coming out of the yin yang. He also has a group of artists, a poet, an actor, a jazz singer, a camera man, a sculpter, his younger sister, a poet, and a film maker, his wife, at his beck and call. The novel starts out with J and his friend getting drunk in his jaguar as they head to his father's country houe to film a movie directed by his wife. They enjoy their time there, well mot of them at least, drinking, having sex, and telling dirty stories. However, things go wrong when they catch a little boy inside the cabin who escapes by crashing through a window. Everything works out fine in the end, but not before some very harsh words are spoken among the friends. Their close personal web of friendship, thought to be quite strong, was, in fact, quite weak.

The second part of the _J_ novel, finds J teamed up with a 60 year old man. They are both chikans, men who find sexual arousal through rubbing themselves on young girls on crowded trains, buses, subways, etc. However, they are quite cautious when they do it, that is why they are quite moved by a young man who performs chikan almost completely out in the open to gain experience so he can write a grand poem about sexual perversity.

Both novels are quite good. _Seventeen_ seems a bit stunted, but that is because the second half was not translated. The second part has never even been reprinted in Japanese because its original publication brought Oe much criticism from the left and the right. So, in all honesty, to protect his life, the story was never reprinted or translated.

A great book that gives to reader a raw view of the extremist in Japan during the early years of the sixties.

This is quintessential Oe.

If we fail to see ourselves reflected in society often we become outcasts or are labeled as deviant. The images of Seventeen and J are not reflexive. Therefore, by acts of violence and sexual molestation, they superimpose their images on a world which refuses to see.

With Seventeen and J, Oe depicts the transmution of post-war Japan. This is cleverly evidenced by J's truncated name and the attitude of Seventeen's father. While the political aspect of Japan is more apparent in Seventeen, the politics in J are presented in a more abstract level.

They have each architected an inner world populated with the shadows of despair, doubt, and disgust. Oe lets us become voyeurs of the private and sometimes painful world of these two young men who are self-described "others".

Seventeen and J are both "Solemn Tightrope Walkers". Yet, what they are trying to balance is their existence in a world which they despise with a raison detre. This is demonstrated by Seventeen's fanatical involvement with a right-wing political group and J's flirtation with being a "chaikan".

These two novels should be read by anyone who gives a damn or have stopped.

Oe Kenzaburop is a genius. I gave a copy of this book to two people-once three or four years ago to my high school English teacher, and once again this year to a fellow college student at Binghamton University.

The first person liked Seventeen better. He thought the masturbation scene in Seventeen was masterful. I thought so too. The scene is supposedly the first masturbation scene in a Japanese novel, and it was enthrallingly detailed. Seventeen was a good depiction of a boy coming of age, and his confused entry into the world of Japanese politics. The second person to whom I gave the book, loved the part in which the protogonist of Seventeen kicks his sister in the face, breaking her glasses.

As the first person to whom I gave the book liked Seventeen better than J, the second person to whom I gave the book liked J better than Seventeen. I too liked J better. J was a more vivid depiction of Japan and its contemporary personage's. J is written in two parts. The first part of the book takes place in the country, it presents J as a person confused about sex and his own sexuality, and at some point he even comes across as homosexual. The second part shows him in the city. He no longer contents himself with the answers life grants him, he decides to go out into the world and chance finding the sexual answers he desires by taking action. He becomes a "chikan," a sexual predator, who rides trains looking for his next victim (he exposes his naked parts to innocent train passengers, usually young school girls heading to school or returning home). Riding the trains he meets two persons with whom he will develop a great bond. This novel introduces some of the most memorable characters in fiction. In the world of Japanese literature Oe Kenzaburo ranks with Saikaku Ihara, Yasunari Kawabata, and Mishima Yukio.

J is about sex, it is about the pain of being a sadist-the suffering a sadist has to go through because he is miss understood. Reading this book, and seeing the unfairness in it, is enough to make a person question the way we view people, and society for that matter.

This book is essential for anyone who's interested in sex, or is just a straight out pervert. The first person to whom I gave the book was an erudite, whom I felt needed to read the book to be further learnt in literature. The second person was one who wanted me to suggest some books for him to read, for he wanted to be well-read. I felt this book was essential for such a goal.

This book shares the Nobel Prize speech and other lectures given by Kenzaburo Oe. The book is split into four chapters. 1. Speaking on Japanese Culture, 2. On modern and contemporary Japanese literature, 3. Japan's dual identity and 4. Japan, the ambiguous and myself. The book is a translation of his speeches given in Japanese to English.
The author provides insights into a wide range of topics including "the Yamato spirit", Japanese consumerism and character, Japanese literature and his speech when accepting the Nobel Prize. An informative and interesting book about Japanese literature, the author's life and Japanese culture.

I discovered this book thanks to Orson Scott Card, who speaks of it in "Children of mind". It is a powerful book, but hard to read. You can't feel the same way before and after havieng read this book. Oe writes with his heart, each word is a part of his mind. He's a very smart person, but seems so nice! I can't describe my true feelings about this book. The vision and explications of the "peripherical nations" is so interesting, whereas it's an uneasy subject. One advice: read this book. I'm a french reader, and I did it ("Japan, the ambiguous and myself" isn't translate in french). So you can!!!

The stories display the human side of the late war years. There is no glamor, no guns blazing, no heroic lives or deaths. It offers insight into the human soul.

Also in this issue:
Alexander Cockburn and Michael Moore A Recipe for Subversion
Douglas Cooper The Moron David Hammon 's Visions of the Street
In his Own Words: The Radicalization of Andrew Kopkind
Kenzaburo Oe His first novel and a dialogue with Kazuo Ishiguro
Louise Lawler Inside New York's Bedrooms and Boardrooms
Living Underground N.Y.C.: Life Under the Streets by Terry Williams;
photographs by Margaret Morton
Orhan Pamuk The Black Book
Manhattan Images by Louis Faurere
Jackson Pollock and others captured in
B.H. Freidman's journals
Charles Simic Three Poems ---from book's back cover

I read Pinchrunner Memorandum in the fall of 2001. It was the final book for the assigned reading for a class taught by the translator, Professor Michiko Wilson. After reading the novel I became a single goose bump as the significance sunk in. I later found out that this book was the final in a series often called the Handicapped Son, and I have read the rest of the series that has been translated. It is comparable to Mishima's tetralogy, except that it is much less trite and self-indulgent.

Oe encompasses all of humanity in Pinchrunner Memorandum by delving into the marginal world and explicating how it reveals the darker side of society led by a force seeking chaos through subliminal tyranny. Similar to Oe's parody of Mishima in One Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, Oe takes the role of court jester and reveals the panting, self-destructive struggle of humanity through his use of grotesque realism as a man and his son attempt to save the world from the annihilation it so desperately seeks. They brave savage riots of students from the left and right, nuclear terrorists, and maniac capitalists. One common trait among all these people is that suicide is a foregone conclusion for victory. Those who are not willing to die condemn themselves to defeat.

Kenzaburo Oe was introduced to myself less than a year ago and since that time I regard him as my favorite writer. He has a tragic history in life and he portrays the reality of his pain so deeply within his stories. Yet, his writing is far from depressing. His imagination is on a far different level than any other writer I have run into. He writes what most are afraid to hear or describe. His prose is incredibly poetic, concise, and he leaves no room for candy coated happy endings. Everything he writes is real and I feel comes from deep in his soul. If you want to read about real life read Oe. His work flows like a story from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but includes a darker side. I find myself reading Oe over and over again I hope I have sparked someone else's interest.

My initial thought after having finished this book was "interesting." It's a good book that gives you an idea of the current social dilemmas Japanese society faces today. Bird is afraid to speak and assume the role as a father as he tries to figure out how he should deal with his new born son who he only sees as a social stigma. The book follows him through is personal ordeal.

Bird, a teacher at a Japanese cram school, is shocked to learn that his new-born son suffers from a brain hernia. He is expected to die soon and will suffer from brain damage even if he survives. Bird, whose first impulse is to find a way to escape this predicament rather than deal with it, struggles to understand what he should do.

Oe Kenzaburo, who faced this situation in his own life, is at his best relating the surreal situation that Bird finds himself in as he confronts the impersonal hospital system with its uninvolved doctors. Other aspects of the novel are far less successful. Bird is presented as such a shlub that it is difficult to understand the devotion of his mistress Himiko, who alternately plays both mother (by providing him with unconditional sympathy and a shoulder to cry on) and mistress (by providing sex and the possibility of escape from his stifling daily routine). Neither Bird the character nor Oe the author seem very concerned about the wife and mother of the deformed baby in all this, as she is barely mentioned in the story, which makes Himiko seem like a pathetic bit of wish fulfillment who gives and gives without making any demands in return. Her dippy philosophical speeches don't help, either.

I was also puzzled by the abrupt change in tone at the book's conclusion. For most of its length, this is a very dark book, and its sunny resolution is both unconvincing and puzzling coming from a culture that often seems to have more affinity with sad endings than happy ones.

This book is a perfect example of how good writing conquers all. It ultimately doesn't matter whether the subject is gruesome, the main character completely despicable, the culture foreign or how dated the material is (people say things like "groovy"). How much of the beguiling effect is owed to the translation I don't know, but I assume that it is based on an outstanding original.

What to make of a young man whose wife has just delivered their first baby (while he was having a showdown with a street gang) and who responds to his son's physically appalling abnormality by going on a rampage of alcohol and sex, eagerly awaiting news of the baby's death? Nothing simple for sure. Oe not only makes it understandable that shame, fear and sadness can lead to seemingly incomprehensible actions--for those to whom the matter is not personal. He instills into Bird, the protagonist, a soul that the reader willingly follows him search. Bird's aimlessness, his dreaming of Africa, his reluctance to commit, are all not unusual for a 27-year old, and it may just be the extent of his tragedy that makes his wrestling with responsibility seem more crass than others. Throughout Bird's outrageously selfish few days of dealing with his own post-partum issues (and an emerging history of less than glorious encounters with morality), Oe supplies him with such ingenious self-irony that he ends up almost endearing.

Infusing a difficult premise like this one with humor is no easy feat, nor is the marvelous suspension of the plot, but that is why Oe's praise, up to the Nobel Prize, is so well deserved. Like Bird's inner world, the novel revolves around him, but does not operate in a vacuum. Although Japan in the early sixties places the action into a firm context, global upheavals of the old order (the women's lib movement, political unrest in academia, the Cuban missile crisis) give it universal appeal. Highly recommendable.

Oe's masterpiece unites personal experience with literary inspiration in the most extraordinary way. The most immediate source for the novel is Oe's own personal experience, the birth of a son with brain damage, a seeming misfortune that ultimately became a source of considerable happiness. In the novel, Bird's failing marriage is exacerbated by such a birth, which causes him to wish for his newborn's death (and to even attempt subversively lethal measures) and to fly to the arms of another woman while his seriously ill wife is recovering in the hospital. His efforts to escape his self-absorbed misery founders: "The baby continued to live, and it was oppressing Bird, even beginning to attack him."

Throughout, the novel recalls an extraordinary number of literary antecedents. I can only speak to the American influences, but "A Personal Matter" most obviously--and intentionally--resembles "Rabbit, Run" (which I happened to have read only weeks before). There are the surface resemblances (Rabbit = Bird); the plot parallels (each man escapes his familial duties by fleeing to the arms of a "sexual adventuress who had broken out of conventional orbit"); the thematic similarities (the lure of freedom versus the manacles of responsibility).

In fact, Oe was an avid and thorough reader of American fiction, from Mark Twain to Saul Bellow. (His American translator John Nathan met Oe shortly after "A Personal Matter" was published and "tried to confront him with things he didn't know": specifically, "Rabbit, Run." Oe, who was already quite familiar with the novel, in turn introduced Nathan to Updike's poems on basketball.) The many literary echoes enhance the work largely because Oe transforms Updike's cynicism into his own message of "hope." For all their similarities, the two novels are assertively different--in tone, in style, in their characters--and, together, they bookend the conflicting themes of expectation and disillusionment so prevalent in twentieth-century literature.

The fondest dream of Bird, the nickname of this novel's protagonist, is to travel to Africa, then write his memoirs upon returning home to Japan. This proposed trip is in actuality just another step in Bird's life long pattern (at the age of 27) of running away from responsibility. Bird's problem at the present time is that his wife has just given birth to a boy with a herniated brain. There appears to be little hope that his son will survive this terrible defect. Should Bird put the boy through an operation, only to die or at the most exist as a human vegetable? Bird eagerly awaits a telephone call from the hospital, while visiting his mistress, Himiko, telling Bird that "the monster" has died. Not a particularly a nurturing father's response, but it would set Bird free. He even considers strangling his son to death. Additionally, Bird treats his suffering wife with disdain and neglect. Also, Bird's extreme passivity is obvious when he fails to protest when he is summarily discharged from his teacher's job.

Kenzaburo Oe is an extraordinarily gifted writer with a rare ability to get inside a person's heart and soul. With keen powers of empathy and perception, Oe sensitively describes the pain, anxiety, anger and bewilderment of Bird as well as some of the other fathers at the hospital who also had children born with serious birth defects.

By the book's end, Bird discovers a measure of responsibility in himself and gets on with his life in a mature manner. Finding the courage to be an adult--rather than always escaping from it--finally becomes a personal matter to Bird.

The bizaare, dark, and somewhat tragic tale of a group of delinquent boys taken to a secluded mountain village during World War II, then abandoned by the villagers when a mysterious plague strikes...
I found the relationship between the narrator and his younger brother very moving. In some ways, I was reminded of Golding's Lord of the Flies, however, this novel had more positive moments shared between the boys. Very immersing, I read it in one day.

That's what my wife told me when I picked it up to begin reading it. But that's what a good book is supposed to feel like. And it did. It was dark, cruel, and painful,, and contained vivid descriptions of inhumanity, though it was not without its moments of humor.

I have a friend once suffered from pneumonia. She read this book in the hospital when she had broken one of her ribs from a coughing fit. That is how pained and weak she was at that time. After she read the book she said she forgot her own anguish and cried for the suffering characters in this touching and tender book. I picked it up and have never been the same again. It made me angry, sad, and I wanted to do something about the injustice in this world. It made me a better person.

Oe lachrymosely indulges every anti-Japanese propagandist in the american media conglomerate (Ingram) with ample opportunity to smack their lips over the "moral failings" of Japan. The fact that this ineffectual moralist won the Noble prize while it was denied to Mishima speaks volumes on what supine expectations the american propaganda industry expects from Japan. Both left and right. Writer like Oe and Murakami... are parasites getting fat by preening all the morbid phobias of a degenerate american elite, allowing them to wallow in self-adulation. What would Mr. Oe have done during the war? Sheepishly meet the demands of an expansionist american navy? Allowed China to invade the country so as not to offend their sensitivities?...Japan chose WAR rightfully, even with the foreknowledge that it was a lost cause. And Japan would not even exist today if Mr. Oe were around then.

Instead of Oe or Murakami or Bannana Yoshimoto's insipid writing for privileged sectors in the american market (The Nanny Diaries) feeding that markets endless appetite for peeling scabs and self-abasement try and find a video of the Shunya Ito film Pride, which angered ALL the right people in the world and was one of the most popular films in recent Japanese cinema. Or any of the great Yukio Mishima's books, who was indeed what he described himself to be "the conscience of post war Japan".

My introduction to Kenzaburo Oe, "Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids" struck me with the force of a bamboo spear. With his beautiful prose (and the complementary translation by Mackintosh and Sugiyama), Oe paints his characters with the brush of traditional Japan but in the style of a contemporary miscreant. Throughout, the book conveys relentlessly brutal portraits of an altered, horrific reality.

From the moment the reformatory boys are introduced to the end of their abandonment and the narrator's final, fearful sentences, Oe drags the reader through the hell of his ambiguous setting. Pulled along with the narrator, his brother, and their reform school compatriots, the reader follows into the nightmare of a plague-infested village and their utter isolation. While the boys struggle to eke out their existence and build lives in their newfound freedom, one is constantly on edge awaiting the collapse of their delicate system. When, finally, the villagers return and the madness of the world indeed crushes their fragile independence, the reader emulates the boys in their sense of relief and subsequent betrayal.

One of Oe's first novels, the deft manipulation of the reader's emotions and interactions between the characters promised great things for the young writer. As I begin another of his books, I cannot help but agree that he deserved his Nobel.

It has been said by some that to know a country is to read its novels; far better than to read its (manufactured) history. Novels too are manufactured but novels are more likely to expose the emotional and spiritual "truth" of the country concerned. In THE SILENT CRY the writer OE covers much historical, emotional, social, Japanese ground but does it in such a way as to make it a wonderfully entertaining journey for the reader. I for one would love to read a Freudian criticism of it. For example, a recurring motif is suicide, in various forms, one being hanging and that image is conveyed by a the anti-hero's best friend who removed all his clothes, painted his head red, shoved a cucumber up his arse and then hanged himself; another being the anti-hero's brother who shot himself in the head the remains of which reminded the brother of a pomegranate. Such vivid imagery recurs throughout this novel. Another distinguishing feature of it is its lack of cliches, its almost poetic prose, poetic in the sense of dense. You daren't skip a phrase let alone a line. It is a rich read. Historically, the novel covers the transition from an agrarian village life to the impact of the supermarket, racism, the vulnerability of the Japanese economy (this written in 1966- in 2001 have the Japanese finally faced up to real economic reform?)foreigners, and on the cover, an artistic representation of the Hiroshima ground zero. The one-eyed hero is self-effacing and has an alcoholic wife, retarded son and is a cuckold. His brother is vain, hostile, proud, an adulterer who has sex with his retarded sister. It is true that it is reminiscent of the Cain and Abel story or the Brothers Karamazov and I think it deserves mention in that mythical company. Its themes that resonate with me most tellingly are the need for one and one's country to come to terms with the truth about the past. The anti-hero Mitsu is on a search for the "truth" throughout the novel.As an individual I need to come to terms with my mother's suicide as well as other aspects of my personal history. As an Australian, my nation needs to come to terms with its past and our genocidal attitude to Aboriginal Australians. The second theme for me is that constant internal worrying and guilt can be self-defeating - at the close of the novel Mitsu feels "throughout the time remaining to me..a hundred pairs of eyes (of his cat, of his great grandfather, brother, wife) would glitter like a chain of stars in the night of my experience. And I would live on, suffering agonies of shame under the light of those stars, peering out timidly like a rat, with my single eye, at a dim and equivocal outer world..."(p.269) Yet, at the urging of his now pregnant wife, he chooses to accept a job in Africa instead of a job at a University, symbolic I would guess of his need to accept the past come to terms with it and get on with living, for some sort of peace. Survival becomes the key to that peace. Its weird at the end too because despite all the preceding horrors, the novel's ending creates in the reader a wry grin or satisfying chuckle as the anti-hero realises with his new job he may be able to achieve an important personal goal - building a thatched hut.A memorable read.

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 ýhow does a modern man communicate( in philosophical sense )?ý 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.

this is the first novel i read by kenzaburo oe. and its simply superb. the post war its brilliantly portraid in this book. when a couple of brothers return to their hometown, each one has some experiences that changes his vision of the world. but theres another aspect that i loved in it. there was a revolution a century ago, directed by their grandgrandfather. slowly, they go discovering more about this, and finally they mirror the characters and the revolution. its a success repeating itself. the time is a circle. Oe proves it brilliantly here. Its a bit hard to read, but its worth it. DO IT!

Many critics believe The Silent Cry (not it's translated title: which would be Footbal in the First Year of Mannen) is the great post-war Japanese novel, ranking above even Mishima's The Sea of Fertility tetraology.

If there's one thing that should be mentioned first about this novel, is that it achieves for Japan exactly what Voss does for Australia, and what The Tin Drum achieves for Germany . Like all of these, an epic landscape is evoked to explore the major issues, profoudnly yet simply handled. It also has the markings of a masterpiece, in that it reads like both a summary and yet at the same time an advancement on all that the author has said to date, on a canvas of a biblical size (a definition that, in my opinion, ought to extend the franchise to other masterpieces: Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! or David Storey's Saville, for instance). This explores every facet of post-atomic, post-imperial Japan's inner life - all the more remarkable for being able to slice through the all-pervasive level of regimentation. It's also a wry commentary on the 'Emperor system' of thought that was so prevalent at the time, and led to the ritualistic suicide of Oe's friend, Yukio Mishima.

Despite all the glowing comments in previous amazon.com reviews I must confess that I really don't see how The Silent Cry can be judged as anything other than a strange (read: unbelievable, contrived), totally depressing piece of (otherwise well-written) literature. It compares poorly to some of Yukio Mishima's and Haruki Murakami's better works. Having lived in Japan for years I shudder to think what sort of image it projects about post-war Japanese youth.

The story is a bit complex. Generally it portrays the lives of dysfunctional brothers returning to their ancient country estate, and somehow making parallels between their lives and those of their great-grandfather and his brother during the time of the Meiji restoration (1860s). Some of the insights are interesting, but sadly these are buried in what can be described as a mess. The modern day (actually, circa 1960) brothers and the friends and family have an impossibly depressing, unfortunate lives. The wife is an alcoholic, children/siblings/friends commit suicide and/or suffer from horrible physical/mental anomalies. In this 300 page book no one, and I mean *no one*, so much as smiles. So you think the Japanese people are a nature-loving, inherently serene people? If so I suggest you do NOT read this book!

Having said all this, the story does pick up some pace towards the end (..after an extremely tedious first half). And generally speaking the author, and the translator, have produced nice prose. A shame it is all wasted on a strange story with neurotic (and uninteresting) characters.

Bottom line: time would be better spent on reading some better examples of modern Japanese literature. Best give The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Murakami) a try and forget The Silent Cry.