The Silent Cry

The Silent Cry (Japanese 万延元年のフットボール; Man'en Gannen no Futtoboru, literally 'Football in the First Year of Man'en') is a novel by Japanese author Kenzaburō Ōe, first published in Japanese in 1967 and awarded the Tanizaki Prize that year.

The novel tells the story of two brothers in the early 1960s: Mitsusaburo, the narrator, a one-eyed, married English professor in Tokyo; and his younger brother Takashi, who has just returned from the US. Mitsusaburo and his wife Natsumi have been through a series of crises. They left their physically and mentally handicapped baby in an institution, while Mitsusaburo's friend committed suicide (he painted his head crimson, inserted a cucumber in his anus and hanged himself). Natsumi has become an alcoholic. Mitsusaburo leaves his job and they all travel to the brothers' home village, set in a hollow in the forest on Shikoku.

The brothers' family had been one of the leading families in the village. Takashi is obsessed with the memory of their great-grandfather's younger brother, who led a peasant revolt in 1860. Mitsusaburo remembers the affair differently, believing that the leader of the rebellion betrayed his followers. They similarly disagree over the death of their older brother, S, who was killed in a raid on the Korean settlement near the village. Takashi revels in his warrior's death, while Mitsusaburo recalls him as volunteering to be killed in retaliation for the death of a Korean in an earlier raid. Their sister, also mentally retarded, had committed suicide while living with Takashi.

Takashi has agreed to sell the family's kura-yashiki — a traditional residence-storehouse — to 'the Emperor', a Korean originally brought to the village as a slave-worker but who has now gained a position of economic dominance, turning the village's other kura-yashiki into a supermarket which has put the smaller shops out of business. Secretly, he has also agreed to sell the Emperor all the family's land.

Takashi begins to organise the youths of the village into a group, beginning with football training. When Mitsusaburo discovers Takashi's deception, he isolates himself from the others, but his wife sides with Takashi. Mitsusaburo goes to live in the kura-yashiki, while Takashi moves his group into the family's main building.

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