Kenzaburō Ōe, the 1994 winner, wrote in the extraordinarily fast-changing post-war Japan. He's clearly a forebear of Murakami but, on the evidence of this book, so much better. The Silent Cry was published in 1967 in Japan and the translation came 21 years later.
The title of the translation, although presumably approved by Ōe, is terrible (more suited to a Channel 5 afternoon telemovie); another example of titles losing their idiosyncrasy in translation. (The Japanese title, 万延元年のフットボール (Man'en gan'nen no futtobōru), translates as Football in the first year of Man'en - which needs a decent knowledge of Japanese history to make any sense.)
That title and an alarmingly overwritten (or overtranslated) opening paragraph hardly disposed me to this book.
But, dear reader, I pressed on and as the temperature of the prose dropped I found myself increasingly drawn in to what is a weird and strange story - precisely the kind of encounter I have hoped for from this Nobel exercise.
The narrative format isn't anything outlandish. An unreliable first person (these days there is no other kind) pushes the story along and helpfully the novel is divided into chapters of about 20 pages each.
There's a decent page about the book on Wikipedia but it does retell the plot in detail so don't go there if you don't want to spoil the plot. It would have helped me, however, to know something about Japanese history from 1860 to 1960. Literary translators seem to think footnotes are admissions of defeat, but some would help here. If they are acceptable in classic English novels to explain references that most current readers won't get, why not in translations?
But I'm grateful that the book has led me to learn more about Japan's history. And it was, above all, an engrossing read. I can't help feeling it would be more so if I knew more about the cultural background. I also think this book would strongly reward a second reading, but there's no time for that now. Off I go to a book whose title rhymes with this one.
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