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(*)(trans. by John Bester) (★)(Titulo original : 万延元年のフットボール [Man-en Gan-nen no Futto-booru] 1.For the hero of ´The Silent Cry,´ the return of his younger brother from America is a straw that, half unwittingly, he clutches at to save himself from drowning in a flood of disaster. Reeling from a series of shocks that include the bizarre suicide of his best friend and the birth of a deformed baby that threatens to drive his wife to alcoholism, he falls in with his brother´s suggestion that they all start a new life together far from the city. So begins a journey of regression for the Nedokoro family, a journey that takes it back not only to its home --to the village set in the brooding valley-- but also into its own past. As the younger brother sets out to establish his own and the family´s ´identity´ by reliving for himself the experiences of ancestors who lived a century ago, past interweaves with present to form a complex fabric in which ideas and action [suicide, incest, adultery, and mob violence included] are skillfully blended. The richness of this fabric allows the author to examine a wide range of contemporary problems, yet the novel is first and foremost a tale that involves us in the fate of its central triangle of two men and one woman. With a striking power of imagery, in a succession of memorable scenes and atmospheres, it moves inexorably toward its shattering climax. Ultimately, it is Oe´s ability to awaken echoes in the very depths of the human subconscious that has made him one of the best known of Japanese novelists, not only in his own country but in the West as well. ´The Silent Cry,´ both imaginatively and formally, is his most daring and powerful work to date. 2.Oe is Japan´s first truly modern writer, a revolutionary who has moved the Japanese novel out of a stagnant tradition into postwar world literature. He was born in 1935 in a village in Shikoku, the island southeast of the mainland of Japan. After studying French literature at Tokyo University, he won his first literary award --the coveted Akutagawa Prize-- for a short story,´The Catch,´ when he was twenty-three. Despite the acclaim this attracted, a novel published in the following year [´Our Age´] was savagely attacked by critics for the nihilism it expressed in a supposedly bright new era of Japanese history. During the anti-Security Treaty riots of 1960, Oe went to Peking as representative of young Japanese writers. A year later he traveled to Russia and Western Europe where he came to know Sartre, whom Oe acknowledges --along with Norman Mailer and Henry Miller-- as a major influence and literary hero. From 1962-64 he brought out four more novels. The best known of these,´A Personal Matter,´ is an account of a man confronting the birth of a nightmarishly abnormal child ; it was the first of his novels to be translated into English, and received the Shinchosha Literary Prize. In the summer of 1965 he took part in the Kissinger International Seminar at Harvard. Two years later he published ´The Silent Cry,´ only the second of his novels to come out in English. Oe, who lives in Tokyo with his wife and three children, completed his latest novel in 1973 ; this won the Noma Prize, the only major literary award that had not so far come his way.) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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