The Silent Cry
Kenzaburō Ōe
 The novel tells the story of two brothers in the early 1960s: the narrator Mitsusaburo (one-eyed, a 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 have left their physically and mentally handicapped baby in an institution, while Mitsusaburo's friend has committed suicide (painting his head crimson, inserting a cucumber in his anus and hanging 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 had led a peasant revolt in 1860. Mitsusaburo remembers the affair differently, believing that the leader of the rebellion had betrayed his followers. They similarly disagree over the death of their older brother, S, who had been 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 &mdash; a traditional residence-storehouse &mdash; 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. Takashi uses his group to begin an uprising against the Emperor, looting the supermarket and distributing the goods among the people. Takashi also begins a sexual relationship with Natsumi, and sends one of his followers to tell Mitsusaburo. The people eventually become disenchanted, however; eventually a girl is killed. Takashi claims that he tried to rape her and then murdered her. He is abandoned by his group and waits for the villagers to come and lynch or arrest him. Mitsusaburo, however, does not believe his story and says that Takashi is using the girl's accidental death as a way to engineer his own violent death. Takashi admits to Mitsusaburo that their sister killed herself after he ended an incestuous relationship with her. After Mitsusaburo scorns Takashi's belief that he will be killed, Takashi shoots himself, writing as a final statement, 'I told the truth'. The Emperor comes and begins demolishing the kura-yashiki. A secret basement is discovered in which the brother of the great-grandfather had spent the rest of his life hiding after the failure of his rebellion. Mitsusaburo and Natsumi decide to try to live together again, along with their handicapped baby and Takashi's unborn child, which Natsumi is carrying. Mitsusaburo decides against a return to his old job, instead taking up an offer to work as a translator with a wildlife expedition to Africa.