The Silent Cry

Mitsusaburo, hollowed out by his infant son's institutionalization and his wife Natsumi's drinking, follows his younger brother Takashi back to their family's village deep in the Shikoku forest expecting nothing in particular. Takashi arrives with a plan: organize the village youth into a football team, then turn that team into the muscle for a raid on the Korean-run supermarket that locals resentfully call the Emperor's, consciously restaging the peasant uprising their great-grandfather's younger brother is said to have led there in 1860. Takashi needs the reenactment to be true, because his own sense of who he is depends on descending from a man who acted rather than watched. Mitsu, incapable of that kind of belief, mostly watches.

That asymmetry between the brothers, one performing history, the other unable to feel anything strongly enough to perform it, is the novel's real subject, and Oe keeps it literal in Mitsu's own damaged eye and slack passivity, a man whose 'silent cry' names an anguish with no outlet rather than an absence of feeling. Digging through the family storehouse for evidence to support Takashi's version of the uprising, Mitsu instead starts finding an older woman's contradicting testimony, and the myth Takashi has staked his violence and his self-image on starts to come apart in his older brother's hands well before it comes apart for Takashi himself.

The supermarket raid is never a spontaneous outburst; Takashi drills the football team like a militia and times the looting to fall on the same date, by the old calendar, as the ancestral uprising. Oe uses the Korean ownership of the store to needle at a specific postwar wound, the resentment Japanese communities directed at ethnic Korean shopkeepers who prospered while surrounded by rural poverty, and lets Takashi's youths dress their opportunism in the language of righteous rebellion without ever quite noticing the difference between the two.

Family legend holds that the great-grandfather's brother died leading the 1860 uprising, a martyrdom Takashi has built his entire self-conception around repeating. The elderly women Mitsu interviews in the village remember it differently, and the documents in the storehouse back them: the ancestor survived, and his survival came at a cost the family myth has spent a century scrubbing out. Mitsu says almost nothing about what he's learned. He doesn't need to; the novel lets the gap between what Takashi believes and what Mitsu now knows do its own quiet work.