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A review by dukegregory
The Silent Cry by Kenzaburō Ōe
5.0
A novel in the most inexplicable sense. Totally sui generis.
Oe feels like a master of tone, because this novel is somehow a dream, a horror novel, a political treatise, a fascist allegory, a pacifistic representation of violence, a post-nuclear bomb banshee shriek, and a glacial narrative that constantly upends the foundations you stand on. There are so many themes that are given enough space without distorting the novel into an essay.
Our lives are but echoes of our forefathers', and our struggle to become our own people becomes a struggle to escape history, which happens to seem to be an implausible impossibility. The Silent Cry feels like the most brutal and direct (and yet indirect?) handling of the postwar Japanese consciousness I've ever read. This novel is relentlessly honest about Japan's imperialist history and the Japanese military's horrifying WWII tactics. His leftist, anti-nuclear perspective leads him down a narrative path that attempts to untangle the consciousness of those that are passive to humanitarian atrocities alongside those that actively believe in an artificial heroism that fosters more and more suffering for all. The domestic becomes the political and the political infects the domestic. Everyone is embroiled in a metaphysical battle between the self and the fractured reality of contemporary life, because how can someone live knowing that we are all residing on bone-ridden earth. How can a person or a culture hold themself/itself accountable? How can you hold yourself accountable when the idea of "truth" is crumbling at the seems? In doing so, Oe adopts an uncanny tone that is, at once, both Lynchian and French existentialist, utterly surreal yet oh so heartbreakingly, viscerally otherwise.
Totally incredible work that it feels like no one else has ever been able to conceive and execute except Kenzaburo Oe, and no one will craft a book like this one ever again. Essential reading.
Oe feels like a master of tone, because this novel is somehow a dream, a horror novel, a political treatise, a fascist allegory, a pacifistic representation of violence, a post-nuclear bomb banshee shriek, and a glacial narrative that constantly upends the foundations you stand on. There are so many themes that are given enough space without distorting the novel into an essay.
Our lives are but echoes of our forefathers', and our struggle to become our own people becomes a struggle to escape history, which happens to seem to be an implausible impossibility. The Silent Cry feels like the most brutal and direct (and yet indirect?) handling of the postwar Japanese consciousness I've ever read. This novel is relentlessly honest about Japan's imperialist history and the Japanese military's horrifying WWII tactics. His leftist, anti-nuclear perspective leads him down a narrative path that attempts to untangle the consciousness of those that are passive to humanitarian atrocities alongside those that actively believe in an artificial heroism that fosters more and more suffering for all. The domestic becomes the political and the political infects the domestic. Everyone is embroiled in a metaphysical battle between the self and the fractured reality of contemporary life, because how can someone live knowing that we are all residing on bone-ridden earth. How can a person or a culture hold themself/itself accountable? How can you hold yourself accountable when the idea of "truth" is crumbling at the seems? In doing so, Oe adopts an uncanny tone that is, at once, both Lynchian and French existentialist, utterly surreal yet oh so heartbreakingly, viscerally otherwise.
Totally incredible work that it feels like no one else has ever been able to conceive and execute except Kenzaburo Oe, and no one will craft a book like this one ever again. Essential reading.