Plural Spaces, Concentric Sovereignties: A-legality and Bifurcation in Ōe Kenzaburō’s The Silent Cry

Jingqiu “Moriori” Chen, CAS & Tisch '26

Bachelor of Fine Arts: Film and Television Production

Instructed by Annemaria Shimabuku

Introduction

Ōe Kenzaburō’s The Silent Cry (1967) is a landmark of postwar Japanese literature that interrogates the psychic and historical residues of Japan’s modern history. Centering on Nedokoro Mitsusaburō, a middle-aged English professor, and his younger brother Takashi, a disillusioned former student activist, the novel unfolds as they return to their ancestral estate in rural Shikoku. While initially framed by personal crises: Mitsu’s disabled child, alcoholic wife, and a friend’s grotesque suicide; Takashi’s failed political engagements and venereal disease. The narrative soon descends into a hallucinatory struggle over family memory, communal history, and political action. Through this return, multiple storylines unfurl across disparate temporal and spatial registers. The intertemporal and interspatial repetition and resonance of events are central to the decoding of this text as well as a history philosophy on Japanese modern history and the historical manifestation of violence, as Karatani Kojin comments “(Oe is) writing a Hegelian-style novel and attempting to salvage Japan's modern history within it.”

This paper examines the pluralized temporal-spatialities of the novel as a means to diversify the modes of engaging historiography, thereby challenging the hegemonic, symbolic, and teleological national history oriented around sovereign logic. This radical, simultaneously temporal and spatial approach to history subverts the Aristotelian and Newtonian notions of time that underlie modern literature and historiography. The second part of the paper focuses on how the a-legality of space nurtures the relationship between Takashi and Mitsusaburō: a relationship that remains fraught yet generates new potentialities for historical narrativization that transcend the repetition of symbolic violence.

Landscape or Space? Oe’s Mountain and Forest

Landscape, as opposed to interiority, is said to be a product of modernity and can only be perceived through parallax vision and the depth device. Karatani Kojin (1993) writes in his Origins of Modern Japanese Literature: “Landscape is tied closely to a solitary mental condition… landscapes are identified by those who neglected their own externality (p. 25).” Landscape, unlike a lived space, is always-already exterior to the subject, which has now withdrawn into a form of pure interiority. It is an external object or phenomenon to be captured by a subject positioned at a distance from it. Landscape is thus a product of a Newtonian notion of spatiality.

In literary representation, the discovery of landscape is a two-step process. First, a modern self must be constituted; second, one can identify landscape. In attempts to capture Japanese national uniqueness, writers inheriting from the Romanticist tradition, such as Kawabata Yasunari, depict landscapes to recreate the pathos of things (mono no aware). Things as landscape function both as a challenge to and a reaffirmation of human subjectivity, thereby reinforcing the subject-object relationship. However, if we trace back to one of the unconventional premodern Japanese classics, what is usually perceived as “landscape” was presented rather differently—Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji presents no landscape, but only sites already imbued with social relations and sets of expectations for social performances (Jackson, 2021). The relationship between people and their surroundings is therefore less that of an observer to a landscape and more that of an integrated ecology: people exist only as beings-in-the-world.

The people-surroundings relationship in The Silent Cry resembles that of The Tale of Genji: the pastoral setting, the forest, the valley, the temple, the old Nedokoro house, the bamboo forest, the football field, the supermarket, and other sites are all lived spaces, rather than landscapes bearing symbolic significance beyond social relations. These social relations and performances, together with historical legacies, create multi-layered temporal experiences of these spaces. The polyphony of different temporal-spatialities gives rise to uncertainty and potentiality, opening up the village and its history to various interpretations that allow for different forms of action and inaction in the present moment. For example, when Mitsu walks into the temple and looks at the hell painting, he feels as if he has entered the painting and is suffering the eternal torment felt by the dead. This can also be read as the burden of history that tormented the brother of the great-grandfather. Through entering this space, Mitsu experiences an overlaid temporality that is distinct from linear spatialized time.

The polyphonic spaces and the absence of state sovereignty in the village are reminiscent of the a-legal situation of Okinawa, as discussed by Annmaria Shimabuku (2019) in her book Alegal: Biopolitics and the Unintelligibility of Okinawan Life. A-legality is defined as “that which is irreducible to a binary of legal versus illegal or extralegal… alegal is neither legal nor illegal/extralegal, just as amoral is neither moral nor immoral… alegal is discontinuous with the law because it always exceeds its intelligibility (p. 1).” Ōe’s village in the valley occupies an a-legal status not only because it is distant from the state, but also because its polyphonic temporal-spatiality consistently refuses incorporation into national history or commonly defined legality. This a-legal status does not produce a space of pure plurality, but rather a terrain of constant contestation, which, throughout modern history, has often taken the most violent forms among different actors. Ōe is acutely aware of the structural similarities between the village in the valley and Okinawa:

When I was 30, I visited Okinawa and the United States for the first time and stayed briefly in both places. I was deeply impressed by Okinawa’s unique culture, which transcends modernity and directly connects to ancient times, as well as by its structure of multicultural coexistence—existing alongside the vertically hierarchical order centered around the emperor on mainland Japan. Through this experience, I was able to rediscover the cultural structure of villages in the forest.

The a-legality of the village, like the a-legality of Okinawa, enables the condition of possibility for the emergence of sovereign power, as sovereignty exists only insofar as it calibrates infinite possibilities into a finite binary of legal versus illegal/extralegal (Shimabuku, p. 2). In The Silent Cry, both the supermarket emperor’s expansion of commodity relations and Takashi’s rebellion operate within this sovereign logic, aiming to conquer the village’s diversified spatio-temporal construction.

Territorialization: Supermarket Emperor and Takashi

Inherent in the name “supermarket emperor” is a double concentric, arboreal structure: both the distribution system of modern department stores and the emperor—who remains central to Japanese constitutional sovereignty today—are closely tied to the concept of a transcendental legality that subsumes different spatio-temporal constructions under a universalizing logic. The character is allegorically positioned at the intersection that makes clear the complicity between the economic base of capitalism and the ideological superstructure of emperor worship. However, instead of embodying this complicity in someone of Japanese or U.S. descent, Ōe chose to make the owner of the supermarket a member of the marginalized Chōsenjin community—residents on the periphery of the village ecosystem. In my view, the significance of this character has been understudied in most literary analyses of The Silent Cry.

Rather than portraying the Chōsenjin community at the base of the mountain as exterior to the village totality, Ōe depicts them as intrinsically connected to the village’s ecosystem. For instance, the priest recounts a story in which Chōsenjin lumberjacks were instructed to bring dumplings into the forest. They followed the villagers' request but added garlic to the dumplings, a subtle change that ultimately influenced the eating habits of the entire village (Ōe, p. 123). It is through such reciprocal relationships that the villagers and the Chōsenjin coexisted.

With this in mind, the fact that the spread of commodity relations began with the marginal Chōsenjin community becomes especially significant. Because the villagers occupied the center of a diversified yet concentric system in the past, they may have been more resistant to the encroachment of commodification when it eventually arrived. The Chōsenjin, on the other hand, had to do whatever was necessary to survive, and their adoption and introduction of the supermarket reshaped the hierarchical structure of the mountain village. Thus, like Takashi, the supermarket emperor can be seen as both a rebel and a sovereign within this a-legal space. The multiplicity of spatio-temporalities in the village should therefore not be understood as the natural state of a pre-alienation utopia that must, or can, be restored after commodification. Rather, this multiplicity is rooted in the village’s always-already entangled and hierarchical past. It is precisely through this multiplicity that the commodity relations introduced by the supermarket can be seen in comparative terms, offering the possibility for counteraction and agency.

This same multiplicity also gives rise to the ambiguity of Takashi’s political stance. As Karatani notes in his analysis of the novel, although Takashi is introduced as a leftist student activist, it is nearly impossible to read him as either left- or right-leaning. The irreducibility of Takashi’s actions to any fixed ideological framework is what makes his rebellion singular rather than particular. However, the singularity of Takashi’s rebellion should not be treated as a conclusion, but rather as the starting point for further inquiry into the incident. That it is singular does not necessarily mean it is just; in fact, the “regulated rebellion” unfolds at the expense of totalizing the village’s diversified spatio-temporal constructions. Takashi’s rebellion is not only directed against hierarchy—it also enacts a repetition of transcendental violence and its spatial expansion. From the outset, it begins with the production of a spatio-temporal field—the football field—designed to mediate the spirit of the Man’en rebellion. Through the act of passing the football and shaping the space, the historical event of the Man’en rebellion is no longer experienced as a distant occurrence from a hundred years ago, but rather as a proximate potentiality and an unfinished responsibility in the Jetztzeit (now-time). The framing of the Man’en rebellion within the temporal context of “Man’en” introduces tension between the temporality of the football field and the broader national history structured by the Western calendar. This layering of historical temporalities produces a hierarchical experience of space: as the inheritor of the great-granduncle’s rebellious legacy, Takashi occupies the center of this field—both as a medium of history and as the coach of the football players. The temporal-spatial composition of the football field is thus folded, deconstructive, yet nonetheless concentric.

This space then expands—concurrently with, and in some instances even preceding, the spread of the actual rebellion. In the chapter The Freedom and the Ostracized, Mitsu discovers that Takashi and his followers have stocked whiskey and sake on the supermarket shelves—commodities alien to the supermarket’s original purpose (Ōe, p. 184-185). Before the uprising, alcohol consumption had been rejected by Takashi, who had advocated for a life of sobriety focused on productive living. Yet on the verge of rebellion, he reverses this stance, mobilizing alcohol for its Dionysian potential to incite a carnival spirit. It is precisely through this carnival that Takashi succeeds in temporarily liberating the village’s multiplicity of spaces from the dominant logic of commodity relations and incorporating them into his revolutionary project. Another striking phenomenon that unfolds alongside Takashi’s rebellion is the snowfall. Snow, with its capacity to cover and flatten the landscape, can be interpreted as a mechanism of suspension. At the same time, it isolates the village from the outside world. Snow thus becomes an embodiment of the rebellion itself: it subjugates temporal-spatial diversity under a unifying, all-encompassing force.

But what, ultimately, is the cause of Takashi’s rebellion—and what are its outcomes? As for its cause: Takashi’s return to the village is driven simultaneously by the expansion of the market—manifested in the supermarket emperor’s offer to buy the Nedokoro estate—and by a personal desire to rediscover his roots. These are not separate motivations, but two sides of the same coin…

Nedokoro: Where it All Starts and Ends

Takashi’s turn from opposing U.S. imperialist security treaties to seeking revolutionary agency through the rediscovery of his roots is not unique to him, but representative of a broader phenomenon among Japanese leftists active during the 1960s. The impulse to resist capitalist market expansion by rooting oneself in identity and local history has recurred at various moments throughout Japanese modernity. However, such attempts to ground resistance in identity risk reproducing the same sovereign logic mobilized by capitalist and imperialist powers in their projects of domination. As Naoki Sakai (1997) cautions:

When people establish and praise national identity as the sole foundation of historical practice, how can they effectively critique modernity? Their critique of modernity, at best, amounts to a complete endorsement of Japan’s modernity—including its expansionist impulses and their inevitable consequences—under the guise of anti-imperialism (p. 154).

So, is there a way to break from this binary of either embracing imperialist modernity or endorsing an “alternative” imperial modernity disguised as local tradition? Within the structure of the novel—and the genealogical structure of the Nedokoro family—Ōe seems to suggest a possible response: to keep identity bifurcated. This structure does not merely permit a split identity; it enables a position that neither fully accepts nor fully rejects the totalization of Japanese modern history. Rather than submitting to a teleological narrative, it insists on perceiving history through fissures and ruptures, thereby allowing for singularity to emerge. Acts such as the consumption of wine, the robbery of shops, and the performance of the nembutsu dance can all be read as efforts to restore those fissures, keeping the present scene bifurcated. It is only from such heterogeneity and irreconcilable division that new possibilities can arise.

Significantly, the history of the Nedokoro family itself is marked by a recurring motif of bifurcated twins (Karatani, 2012, p. 110). The ambiguity between twins—rather than the negation of one by the other—functions as a generative negativity that continuously fissures and gives rise to the new. It is within this tension and antagonism between the twins that history and historicity remain unreconciled. Mitsu and Takashi do not merely inherit the past—they inherit unresolved debates over the past. These debates are not abstract intellectual exercises; they produce material consequences. Takashi grounds his rebellion in the mythic cycle of revolutionary violence, and his eventual suicide is in part a response to Mitsu’s interpretation of that very history. Importantly, these debates do not take place between equals, but rather emerge from their very irreducibility to one another. The relationship between Takashi and Mitsusaburō mirrors that between practitioner and intellectual, revolutionary and historian, or literary work and literary criticism. The former seeks to create a singular, unrepeatable event, even at the risk of reenacting historical violence; the latter recontextualizes and dissects the event to locate its meaning within a transcendental or teleological framework. While the latter seems to possess more power by virtue of its capacity to retrospectively define and interpret the past, it ultimately operates only within the realm of what has already happened.

One tool that serves a similar purpose to Mitsu’s “retrial” is the nembutsu dance, which allows the scapegoats of past struggles to mediate history and transmit it into the present. In doing so, it opens a bifurcation through which multiple spatio-temporalities can be reactivated in the Jetztzeit:

The hollow was also visited by another, different type of evil, or rather evildoers, who, since they had originally belonged among the valley folk themselves, could not by their very nature be dealt with by simple rejection and expulsion. Every year during the Bon festival, they came back to the valley in a single-file procession that followed the graveled road down from the upper reaches of the forest. I learned from an article by a well-known folklorist that these beings who came back from the forest to be greeted with such reverence by the inhabitants were “spirits” who sometimes exerted a harmful influence from the other world (the forest) on the present world (the valley). Any persistent floods that ravaged the valley, or any particularly virulent rice pest, were attributed to these “spirits,” and it was to placate them that people devoted so much energy to the Bon festival.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the plurality of temporal-spatialities within the village—stemming in part from its marginal relationship to the state and its legal frameworks—creates a fertile terrain for the localized expansion of both capitalism and state legality. Resistance to this encroachment mobilizes across disparate spaces, temporarily imposing an order “from above.” Yet, with the eventual dissolution of such resistance—often marked by the sacrifice of individuals—a new temporal sensibility begins to emerge. This altered experience of time becomes embodied and rendered representable through the nembutsu dance. As a form of performed, reflective nostalgia, the dance sustains a bifurcated scene, allowing multiple temporal-spatialities to persist and be reactivated in defiance of linear historicism. The Silent Cry is not only a Hegelian novel but also a fictional and allegorical counterpart to Karl Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte—a work of historical materialism.

Amid the layered ambiguities of the fictional narrative and of modern history itself, envisioning a Benjaminian “real state of emergency” or a Sorelian “divine violence” may appear elusive. Yet it remains possible to trace how terrains of possibility are progressively subsumed, and how bifurcations emerge through performative acts of nostalgia. Perhaps only by taking this detour into the woods and valleys—guided by Ōe Kenzaburō—can we begin to imagine an emancipation from sovereignty itself, that historical construct of abstract domination under modern capitalism.

References

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Ōe, Kenzaburō. The Silent Cry. Translated by John Bester. Kodansha International, 1994.

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