Return to the Interior
In the commendation for his Nobel Prize in 1994, the Swedish Academy cites The Silent Cry (1967) as an exemplary work. It is a pitiless, knotty, and unrelenting read. It is a story following two brothers returning to their ancestral home in the countryside of the remote island of Shikoku in the Inland Sea, south of the central island of Honshu and east of Kyushu. The narrator Mitsu, who is a lecturer at a university, starts the novel in grief after the suicide of his best friend. Mitsu calls his friend’s act the “silent cry.” Mitsu’s friend was severely injured after a police club to the face after demonstrating outside the National Diet, which led to mental deterioration. Takashi, Mitsu’s younger brother, had met the friend when in America when he was a part of an apology tour of a co-opted student movement group. Takashi broke from the group, returns to Japan, and convinces Mitsu to accompany him to his hometown to help sell their family’s “storehouse,” a symbol of their once prominent place in the community.
When they return to their hometown in the “hollow” of a valley, they both uncover, question, and enact the story of the “uprising” a hundred years ago (1860). Takashi sees himself in their great-grandfather’s brother, who led a violent peasant revolt against land reform, while the great-grandfather has some similarities to Mitsu who tried to maintain order in the community. However, Mitsu is always considered an outsider for leaving the valley for an education and not participating in Takashi’s increasing violent leadership of a gang of young men and later much of the town trying to wrest control of a supermarket from a ready-made villain, the ethnic Korean “Emperor of the Supermarkets.”
Takashi has no exit plan and hopes to instigate the fighting spirit of the town more than anything. He reenacts the Bon festival dance in which people dress up as “spirits” of the past to promote communal renewal and the community participates fully and shamelessly in the accompanying looting and mayhem until Takashi’s uprising meets his inevitable collapse. While Takashi is condemned for expressing externally his personal plea for violent punishment, Mitsu also reflects, discovers, and realizes that his understanding of the past roles of his family members had been incomplete, that his view of Takashi was partially wrong, and that he had been too passive and largely deserved the moniker “Rat” attributed to him. In this end, there is a desire for a wholeness to his character to accept the urge for leaps into the future with a healthy sense of wariness about the perils of change and a sense of detachment.
A Way to Resist
Oe critiques and praises the feats of (political) imagination to react and instigate change in the community. Oe seems to praise the Takashi’s idol, their great-grandfather’s brother, who had not abandoned the cause of the revolt as Mitsu and Takashi had believed, but lived in self-isolation, before leading a peaceful demonstration against the establishment of Prefectures during the Meiji Restoration.
The great-grandfather’s brother indicates a relationship between the “outside” of the new Prefectural government from the “inside” of valley or rural culture that is healthy. People from the inside stand up for their rights and culture in the face of oppression from others while not succumbing to excessive guilt, self-pity, or passivity. The people of the “inside” also organize themselves in a way that is not oppressive in turn (like the first violent revolt), principled, not self-defeating as in Takashi’s revolt. Whether the great-grandfather and his brother are historical figures or not, it appears that their struggles with modernity served as a model for Oe’s own activism.