They left their physically and mentally handicapped baby in an institution, while Mitsusaburo's friend committed suicide (he painted his head crimson, inserted a cucumber in his anus and hanged himself).

Mitsusaburo leaves his job and they all travel to the brothers' home village, set in a hollow in the forest on Shikoku.

A secret basement is discovered in which the brother of the great-grandfather had spent the rest of his life hiding after the failure of his rebellion.

Mitsusaburo decides against a return to his old job, instead taking up an offer to work as a translator with a wildlife expedition to Africa.

Ōe in a later essay compared the imagination of the writer to a clamp connecting the horizontal narrative with the vertical relationship between the two eras.

[1] Ōe also drew a parallel between the back and forth motion of the football being passed and the reciprocal relationship between the stories of the two eras.

Like many of his earlier works, The Silent Cry has an unreal Arcadian setting, cut off from the rest of Japan and populated with grotesque characters.

[5] The novel also marks an end to Ōe's series of works depicting pairs of brothers in pastoral settings, a hiatus which lasted until 1980's The Trial of 'Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids'.