This is a disconcerting read for so many reasons. Not the least is the 68-year-old author's 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature; a sense of expectation settles in before you even part its pages. And all the more with The Silent Cry, published originally in 1967, held up by the awarding Committee as the very pinnacle of Oe's achievement. There is an almost unique burden upon relatively slender shoulders.

Nor does it stop there. Our narrator is Mitsu, with his one eye, dipsomaniac wife and institutionalised child who 'showed no more response than a vegetable.' His real troubles, though, come in the shape of philandering sibling Takashi, who returns from American misadventures with thoughts of the family home. Soon the brothers up sticks for rural Japan, intent on selling the homestead and recovering a fondly recalled hut 'with its well-remembered scent of green thatch.'

What Mitsu and Taka find, however, is the force of tradition and history intent on intercession. There is a sitting tenant – literally – in the considerable shape of 'Japan's fattest woman', Jin, tensions between the indigenous population and immigrant Koreans, memories of a sister's suicide, and thoughts of a celebrated 1860 rising.

All of which rather generates a false sense of security in this absorbing, occasionally crude comedy of manners. For the latter half is far stranger, far darker, finding as it does Taka as nominal leader of a new rising in the valley. One that no longer masks its hatred for the Koreans, one that loots the local supermarket, and one which culminates in tragedy and, just possibly, redemption.

Spirits haunt the pages of this complex, challenging book, with their formidable questions of guilt and responsibility rendered with a clear head and in deceptively accessible prose. And, yes, there is a murder, the book does turn violent and confrontational (shades of J.G. Ballard) as order breaks down, but The Silent Cry isn't easily labelled as crime fiction. It is not a book to be approached that lightly nor forgotten so quickly.

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