Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) 川端 康成 “The Old Capital” 古都 , 1987 was a Japanese novel by the Nobel laureate; and, was the topic of an earlier blog post.
The first sentence of each chapter is shown BELOW.
#1. “Awakening in the predawn darkness, I grope among the anguished remnants of dreams that linger in my consciousness, in search of some ardent sense of expectation.”
#2. “On the afternoon of the day that a telegram came from my brother announcing the abrupt curtailment of his wanderings in America and his impending arrival at Haneda airport, my wife and I met my brother’s teenage friends at the airport.”
#3. “In the very heart of the forest the bus halted without warning as though the engine had stalled.”
#4. “On the morning of our first day in the valley we ate breakfast around the open fireplace in board-floored room next to the spacious earthen-floored kitchen of the main building, which had a stove and a well covered with heavy planks.”
#5. “One clear, bitter cold morning when the hand pump in the kitchen had frozen, we drew water from the outside well.”
#6. “As I slept I could hear, in the blackness enveloping my dark form, the sound of bamboo splitting in the cold.”
#7. “The next morning, on walking, I realized at once that I was sleeping alone as I normally did in Tokyo, that I could twist and turn in response to the pains scattered among the various parts of my body and the desolate lack deep down behind my ribs without that feeling of panic lest my wife, sleeping by my side, should see me.”
#8. “As Takashi and Hoshio came into the storehouse carrying the oil stove, which was totally enclosed and remote in color from any associations of warmth, I saw powdery snow, dry and hard like sand, lying on their shoulders.”
#9. “Time passed, but the powdery snow went on falling, betraying my private hope that it would change into larger, petal like flakes, and I remained alien to it.”
#10. “The music for the Nembutsu procession, large and small hand drums with gongs, had been continuously audible since before noon.”
#11. “The following morning, the ‘rising’ was still in progress, but the music of the Nembutsu dance was not to be heard, and the whole valley was wrapped in somber silence.”
#12. “In silence my wife, the young man, and I plowed our way across the front garden, our heels crunching unsteadily into the half-frozen slush.”
#13. “The damp, heavy wind that all night long had circled the hollow in the forest came blowing in, forming constant small eddies of air in the cellar where we crouched.”
Here I presented: Kenzaburo Oe 大江 健三郎, “The Silent Cry” 万延元年のフットボール, 1967 which was a Japanese novel by the Nobel laureate.
SUMMARY.
“The Silent Cry” 万延元年のフットボール tells the story of two brothers who return to their childhood village in the countryside of western Japan, each preoccupied by their own personal crises. One brother grapples with the recent suicide of his dearest friend, the birth of his disabled son, and his wife’s increasing alcoholism. The other brother sets out to incite an uprising among local youth against the imposing franchise of a wheeler-dealer Korean businessman nicknamed the ‘Emperor of the Supermarkets’. When long-kept family secrets are revealed, the brothers’ strained bond is pushed to its breaking-point.
Allegory is the nature of “Silent Cry”: 万延元年のフットボール. This title is literally “the first year of football”; and, is referring to the Meiji Restoration era & United States opening of Japan.
Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) 川端 康成 “The Old Capital” 古都 , 1987 was a Japanese novel by the Nobel laureate; and, was the topic of an earlier blog post.
