Something that's interesting to me about this novel in translation is the difference in titles. As far as I'm aware, there's only been a single English version, published in 1974 and translated by John Bester, titled "The Silent Cry." Subsequent translations adopted the title format, although there are a few outliers, such as the French (which I unfortunately couldn't find locally) "Le jeu du siècle," Russian "Футбол 1860 года," Polish "Futbol ery Manen," Estonian "Sajandi mäng," Swedish "Tid för fotboll," and so on. So what's the truth? Is it the silent cry, the time for football, the game of the century, football in the Man'en era, or football in the 1860s?

Well... the Polish and Russian translations are closest. The Japanese title is [万延元年のフットボール], which can be broken down into 万延 (Man'en) 元年 (first year) の (of) フットボール (football). The Man'en era was a real 年号 (nengô) from 1860 to 1861. The title would literally be translated as something like, "Football in the First Year of Man'en."

Tradition is a tricky thing. Inertia is always easier, and being a salmon often ends in a bear's jaws. As Ôe Kenzaburô describes in [万延元年のフットボール], a relatively short novel in which the protagonist and his brother, each roughly representative of two extremes (I say "roughly" because they're really both representative of both extremes), return to their small rural hometown. The protagonist's brother has just returned from a trip to America; he's a political extremist, abusive, and incredibly difficult to like. The protagonist himself, on the other hand, is arrogant yet views himself as more reserved, more traditional. Neither of them is a good person, as is made increasingly evident as the novel confronts issue after issue, everything from fascism to suicide. The villagers themselves are also representative of this struggle between tradition and modernity: they're excited by the promises of cultural and technological advancement, which include the introductions of things like televisions and supermarkets, but still wary of what would ultimately turn out to be a justified fear of globalism. (It wasn't called that at the time, but that's what it would become.) And then there's the culturally specific element: written in 1967, set in the early- to mid-sixties, the book describes a culture still struggling to reconcile the authoritarian and loyalist imperial shôgunate with the rising tide of globalism and modernisation that would, consummately, efface Imperial Japan entirely. The post-war period was not exactly a time of great stability for Japan and the Japanese, and the blame could be placed solidly on America—the embodiment of all things modern and Western. But the peasant rebellion against the emperor, as described in the novel, is emblematic of both an international struggle and a uniquely Japanese conflict: society, tearing itself apart.

Or, y'know, something like that.