{"id":723,"date":"2011-07-18T09:29:50","date_gmt":"2011-07-18T13:29:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/?p=723"},"modified":"2011-07-20T08:35:50","modified_gmt":"2011-07-20T12:35:50","slug":"silent-cry-kenzaburo-oe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/2011\/07\/18\/silent-cry-kenzaburo-oe\/","title":{"rendered":"Silent Cry. Kenzaburo Oe."},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Kenzaburo<\/a>

Kenzaburo Oe<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Silent Cry: A Novel. Kenzaburo Oe.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Global Cry\u2026.<\/strong> June 24, 2000<\/p>\n

Let me discuss \u201cThe Silent Cry\u201d and Kenzaburo Oe\u2019s work in general by first sketching in a broader view of Kenzaburo Oe\u2019s literary interests.<\/p>\n

No other Japanese writer has seen as deeply into Yukio Mishima\u2019s suicide and the \u201cvacuum\u201d of modern Japanese life as has the 1994 Nobel laureate in literature, Kenzaburo Oe:<\/p>\n

\u201cHis death was a performance for the foreign audience, a very spectacular performance. The relationship between Mishima and the emperor system was rather dubious; the Japanese knew that. But from foreigners\u2019 point of view\u2013say, an American reader\u2019s point of view\u2013the Japanese emperor system is something inexplicable. Therefore, that final act by Mishima, tied in with the emperor system, appeared to be a kind of mystical thing. In actuality, he did it in order to entertain foreign readers.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As in this excerpt from a 1986 interview, Oe, also influenced early on by Marxism and existentialism, especially Sartre, has had the vision and strength to confront in his writing not only the nostalgia of Mishima but also the past and present implications of the emperor system for Japan. In 1971 his novella \u201cThe Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears,\u201d written just after Mishima\u2019s suicide, courageously explores the nature and meaning of emperor worship. Having known Japanese students and friends who fiercely supported the emperor, loathed him, or were simply indifferent, with most falling into the last category, I believe it may be difficult for Americans to appreciate fully the scope of Oe\u2019s achievement in this novella. Oe tried to convey the challenge of his theme when he wrote in an essay, \u201cA man who criticises Mishima and his works must have the determination to criticise the total culture that orients itself toward the Imperial hierarchy.\u201d Far from falling short of this determination, Oe creatively confronts the Japanese fascist and wartime past in \u201cThe Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears\u201d and thereby truly serves the Japanese people and, I would argue, the emperor as well.<\/p>\n

Oe grew up in a small village on the island of Shikoku where the events of \u201cThe Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears\u201d and many of his stories take place. While in a Tokyo hospital dying of cancer, the persona narrates the densely complicated events of his father\u2019s fervent devotion to the emperor, filtered through his own consciousness as a child and a mentally unbalanced adult recalling his \u201chappy days.\u201d His Japanese mother, who grew up in China, and whose own father was involved in the Daigaku Incident of 1910-11, an attempt to assassinate the emperor, believes her son has never been mentally stable since the age of three. Lying in his hospital bed, he recalls \u201chate-filled exchanges\u201d between his mother and father about the role of his grandfather. Later in his life, she had always refused to discuss anything with her son about his father, a military official who returned from Manchuria a few years before the end of the war and who died attempting to lead an uprising in support of the emperor after his 1945 announcement of surrender on the radio. Respected by the village people, the father, suffering from cancer, secludes himself in the family storehouse. For the boy observing his father, he becomes a \u201ckind of idol,\u201d obedient to the emperor. After his older brother deserts in Manchuria, the boy shouts in defiance at his mother, \u201cI don\u2019t have no traitor\u2019s blood in my veins\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cEven now he could recall, with extreme vividness and reality . . . wanting to shout Long live the emperor! so that [his father] would acknowledge that it was his young son who was the true heir to his blood.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oe slowly leads the reader to the realization that the young boy has grown up to repeat the obsessions of the father, destroying himself in the process. When the mother, \u201ca simple old country woman,\u201d visits him as a thirty-five year old adult in the hospital, she struggles to no avail to get him to recognize what an absurd, cowardly figure his father actually was, while cancer literally and symbolically continues to eat him up. Near the end she says to the persona\u2019s wife, whose own marriage and life have been ruined, \u201cSooner or later the Japanese are going to change their attitude about what happened, and I intend to live to see it, yessir! THIS IS THE DREAM. THIS MUST BE THE DREAM!\u201d This is clearly the dream of Oe and many Japanese. He more than any other modern Japanese writer has had the courage to write fiction that might help Japan to accomplish it.<\/p>\n

Also set mostly in Shikoku,\u00a0The Silent Cry<\/em> (1967), presents two brothers who return to their country village nestled in a valley. Although a dialectical struggle takes place between them, reminiscent of Dostoevski\u2019s Brothers Karamazov, the older brother Mitsusaboro is the central figure of the novel, which is told from his point of view. In the opening paragraph, Mitsusaboro thinks to himself,<\/p>\n

\u201cAwakening in the predawn darkness, I grope among the anguished remnants of dreams that linger in my consciousness, in search of some ardent sense of expectation. Seeking in the tremulous hope of finding eager expectancy reviving in the innermost recesses of my being . . . still I find an endless nothing.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He crawls into a hole dug for a septic tank and claws at the sides with his bare fingers trying to get the walls to cave in on himself. At the end of the summer his best friend, who had been injured in front of the Diet demonstrating against the Japan-US Mutual Security Treaty, had painted his head red, stuck a raw cucumber up the anus of his naked body, and hung himself. Mitsusaboro reflects, \u201cAnd I too have the seeds of that same, incurable madness. . . .\u201d Beginning in the hole, haunted by despair, madness, and nihilism, he gropes and searches throughout the novel for something worth living for. At dawn sticking his head up \u201ctwo inches above the ground,\u201d he notices,<\/p>\n

\u201cthe backs of the dogwood leaves were a burning red\u2026 a red that reminded me of the flames in the picture of hell that I\u2019d seen in our village temple every year on the Buddha\u2019s Birthday. . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Frederick Glaysher<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let me discuss “The Silent Cry” and Kenzaburo Oe\u2019s work in general by first sketching in a broader view of Kenzaburo Oe\u2019s literary interests. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[200,3],"tags":[468,444,62,457,463,454,465,467,464,466],"class_list":["post-723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book","category-beyondpostmod","tag-bungaku","tag-fiction","tag-japan","tag-japanese","tag-kenzaburo-oe","tag-literature","tag-mishima","tag-shikoku","tag-the-silent-cry","tag-yukio-mishima"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}