The theme of pacifism comes up in Kenzaburo Oe’s The Silent Cry again and again. The narrator, Mitsu, is an avowed pacifist: he is an aristocratic academic who is described by his wife using words like “languid stillness,” “weak state,” “painless,” “passivity,” “goodness,” “peace,” “calmness.” In addition to this, Mitsu avoids reading his eldest brother’s diary, remarking to the priest that if it contains anything which might “offend a good pacifist,” he had “better give it to Takashi. . . . I’m the kind that refuses to be inspired to heroic thoughts.” The familial bond of pacifism is shown when Mitsu observes from his great-grandfather’s younger brother’s letters “that the brutal leader of the 1860 rising had also had, beneath the surface, a vein of gentle solicitude.”

This novel depicts the riot, and the collapse of the relationship between two brothers, against the larger background of a century of family history. Mitsu at one point tells Taka that he is “too eager to find types in our family line,” and later, in a discussion with the priest, he remarks that there are “various human types in the Nedokoro family.” The action of the looting led by Taka unfolds as Mitsu discovers information about the 1860 uprising, and the brothers in both time periods play similar roles: Mitsu is like his great-grandfather in that he hides in the storehouse to defend himself; Taka is like the great-grandfather’s younger brother in that he leads the village youths in violent revolt, this time against a wealthy Korean man known as the Emperor. There is also repeated mention of the violent incident immediately following World War II, in which Mitsu and Taka’s older brother, S, was murdered. As well as this, Taka invokes the memory of their oldest brother later on when he tells Mitsu, “I’m an ‘effective evildoer,’ like our eldest brother.” Mitsu then reflects on this and decides that, because their great-grandfather’s brother “got away and lived on to enjoy a peaceful old age,” Taka will also go on to “escape to start a new, ordinary, and eminently uneventful married life.” Of course, both aspects of this end up being very far from the truth: their great-grandfather’s brother actually lived in a self-imposed exile, and Taka dies by suicide after murdering a young woman.

The novel itself shows a number of civil unrest incidents: the “current time” incident of Taka’s looting and riot; the 1860 peasant uprising against land taxes; the 1871 resistance to the nationwide abolition of clans and establishment of prefectures; and the 1945 retaliatory murder of Mitsu and Taka’s older brother, S. These incidents are all situations where an overwhelming groundswell of support created a violent situation in which some kind of revenge or frustration was exacted on a member of the wealthy Nedokoro family. The civil unrest is blamed on racial and class tensions, but Taka tells Mitsu that he just wants to “experience as intensely as possible what great-grandfather's brother went through.”