Two brothers, Takashi and Mitsu, return from Tokyo to the village of their childhood. The selling of their family home leads them to an inescapable confrontation with their family history. Their attempt to escape the influence of the city ends in failure as they realize that its tentacles extend to everything in the countryside, including their own relationship. In 1994, Kenzaburo Oe was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Signalling out "The Silent Cry", the Nobel Committee stated that "his poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament". Kenzaburo Oe is one of the great writers of the century and "The Silent Cry" is his masterpiece.