Silent Cry

In Oe`s masterpiece of the human condition and family psychology, estranged brothers Mitsusaburo and Takashi have long since left their family home in a remote forested valley on Shikoku, in the south of Japan: Mitsusaburo for work in Tokyo; his younger brother Takashi for the United States, to atone for his part in anti-American student protests. Takashi`s return to Japan coincides with a local Korean supermarket magnate`s offer to buy the brothers` ancestral storehouse, pitting the brothers against one another and dredging up family histories best forgotten. The Silent Cry is the most important Japanese novel of the post-war period and a strange, unsettling tale of how the call of blood and history echoes down the generations.