万延元年のフットボール (Escape from the Wasteland...)

The story's by Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe, takes place in Japan in the late 1960s, following Mitsusaburo, his wife Natsumi and his brother, Takashi as they return to the rural valley community where Mitsu's family has lived for over a century. Mitsu is an anti-hero of the lowest calibre, weak-willed, ugly and inert and from the beginning of the novel there is a significant amount of tension in his marriage as Natsu has succumbed to alcoholism. 

The opening of the novel sees Mitsu finding himself crouched at the bottom of a hollowed-out pit formed for a Septic Tank, ruminating on the recent suicide of his friend. Alone and pitiful, he tells of his infant son locked away in an institution after an operation to remove a tumour from his head left him a near vegetable. Like so much refuse, he has no job and no one in which he can confide. He is called a rat, and he adopts the persona, becoming rat like in his behaviour. 

When his brother returns from America they travel, along with his brother's teenaged protégées, to the valley of their ancestors. Mitsu spurns Takashi for his juvenile behaviour, though Takashi is confident and charismatic, as his brother wants to follow in the footsteps of their great-great-uncle who, in 1860, started a rebellion in the village. 

The Silent Cry is a more serious work than many of his other novels and give us plenty to contemplate. The plot develops and builds steadily toward a shocking climax. This is arguably Oe Kenzaburo's masterpiece. The story is filled with plenty of psychological tension in under three hundred pages. Like all his novels, it is about family, the protagonists being two brothers, who return to their hometown from Tokyo after many years of absence. 

There is a stream of conflict, which builds quietly, but when the brothers are confronted with some hidden truths upon selling their family home, it turns their lives upside down. This leads to more conflict, through a subsequent series of stark revelations and a betrayal. 

Oe sets up the entire story so methodically that we can not help but admire his skill. His portraits of the brothers are emotionally affecting. He carefully probes into man's psychological state with a keen understanding of our fears and desires. This story will reverberate in your mind long after you are finished.