The Stones Cry Out [Hardcover]

Hikaru Okuizumi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 25, 1999

At the end of World War II, Tsuyoshi Manase returns to civilian life, runs a bookstore, marries, and has two sons. Despite his efforts to maintain an ordered existence and suppress a troubled conscience, his past as a solider insinuates itself in Manase’s life in this haunting tale of guilt, memory, and expiation. Winner of Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize. Translated by James Westerhoven.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Hikaru Okuizumi's The Stones Cry Out traces 20-odd years in the life of World War II veteran Tsuyoshi Manase, a timid bookseller and amateur geologist who struggles to suppress a troubled conscience. More novella than novel, this brief but keenly realized story--for which Okuizumi won the Akutagawa Prize, one of Japan's highest literary awards--is a stark, disturbing, but ultimately redemptive meditation on remembrance and mortality.

At the novel's outset, Manase, weakened by malaria and hunger, finds himself languishing in a jungle cave with other hapless soldiers, many of whom are near death. The scene is hellish, fuel for future nightmares. "Even the most ordinary pebble has the history of this heavenly body we call earth written on it," a faltering lance corporal explains, a cryptic and riveting truth that sustains Manase and that he spends the rest of the novel attempting to unravel. When the war ends--and with the corporal's words still lingering--he opens a bookstore and then devotes himself to collecting stones. This obsession puzzles the woman he marries but becomes his only means of mooring a war-shadowed life.

Throughout, like some mute audience, is his immense and patiently gathered stone collection, evidence of Manase's desire for order and his need to understand something more enduring than his own passing life. The Stones Cry Out is a heartbreaking and harrowing tale, one whose most remarkable achievement is that, like the stones of its title, it reveals something greater than itself. --Ben Guterson

From Publishers Weekly

Winner of Japan's prestigious Akutagawa Prize, Okuizumi's English-language debut, originally published in Japan in 1993, is a lyrical, riveting study of obsession, family disintegration and war's dehumanizing effects. Reclusive Manase, a WWII veteran who runs a bookstore in a mountainous town northwest of Tokyo, is haunted by the atrocities he witnessed, during the war's final months, in a cave on the island of Leyte in the Philippines. When his captain ordered the execution of malarial, skeletal Japanese soldiers considered "dead weight," Manase stood by silently, full of guilt and shame, while his invalid comrades were massacred. In addition to his recurrent nightmares of this war crime, Manase carries another legacy from the cave?the dying words of a Japanese geologist, who said, "Even the most ordinary pebble has the history of this heavenly body we call earth written on it." This Blakean pronouncement propels Manase, after the war, to become a fanatic collector of rocks and fossils, an amateur geologist whose obsession with finding, polishing and classifying specimens is his way of coping with suppressed guilt and pain. Then the unsolved murder of Manase's young son Hiroaki in a cliffside tunnel triggers family breakup. Manase's alcoholic wife is inconsolable. She becomes violently abusive, deliriously accuses Manase of killing the boy, accusations, we later learn, that cannot be totally dismissed, because Manase may have been present that day on the cliffside. Suspicion falls more emphatically on an uncaught serial killer, and also on Manase's emotionally neglected younger son, Takaaki. The second half of this sensitive, beautifully translated novel focuses on Manase's frigid relationship with brooding, resentful Takaaki, who becomes a militant student radical in the riots of 1968, then goes on to join a revolutionary faction. The cinematic denouement, where Manase visits the quarry where Hiroaki died and hallucinates that he is back in Leyte, is not entirely satisfying or convincing, but Okuizumi is a natural storyteller, his deceptively simple, low-key style magnetizing.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1st edition (January 25, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151003653
• ISBN-13: 978-0151003655
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,403,884 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wires, October 27, 2000

By 

taking a rest - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Stones Cry Out (Paperback)

"and his face resembled a skeleton of wires covered with parchment"

The metaphor of a person wasting away is not unique. What is usually different between Authors is what they say about the material that covers the bones. What it is like that is not human, and denotes fragility. The quote I reference is on page one, and the metaphor of wires I found unique, as I found the entire book. Mr. Hikaru Okuizumi is a talented writer who transfers enormous amounts of information and emotion in a very small space. In the case of "The Stones Cry Out" 138 pages is all he uses, all he needs.

I don't know how much elegance is lost when translating from Japanese into English, but there were a few points that seemed too rough and out of step with the cadence the Author set for this piece. The story as a whole is wonderfully written, however the reader must reach to nearly the very end before the book's genius is realized. At least this was the case for me. I found much of the contemporary plot, with lengthy highly detailed writing about stone collecting tedious. It is true this flows from the book's opening line "Even the SMALLEST stone in the riverbed has the entire history of the universe inscribed upon it." Where and when the protagonist hears these words is the real center of the tale, and it is as dark as the cave it is heard in.

Ms. Renoir mentioned that the possibility of illusion being present in the mind of Manase whose story is the one we read. When I reached the end I was struck with two strong reactions, one was that I was astounded at how much was relayed in so short a story, and secondly how unsure I was of what had happened. I read the book a second time only reading the earlier of the two time frames with one exception, and the result while different, is still not definitive for me.

There indeed are 138 pages, when you remove what I felt did not have a direct bearing on what actually happened, the number is easily cut in half. That only doubled my amazement at what this man can write, and I still am not certain I can draw the line between fact, dreams, and possible illusions.

The book is remarkable; I hope it serves to have more of his work translated.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A strangely quiet study of the effects of war, October 27, 2000

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Stones Cry Out (Paperback)

This novel is a well-crafted study of the effect of war on a young soldier Manase and the secondary effect on his family. At the point that the focus changes to that of the second son, the reader may, for a short while, wonder if Okuizumi has drifted from the otherwise tight structure; rest assured that he has not.

The first section of the book narrates the events of World War II that plague Manase - time in a cave with sick and dying comrades who dreamed of one last chance to die in battle while killing the dying to decrease the need for food an water. One of the dying spoke to Manase of rocks - rocks containing the history of the world.

The second section narrates Manase's obsession with rocks, his emotional distance from his family, his outward success and inward failure - all under the cloud of nightmares of the cave. When tragedy comes, the surface normality of his family life collapses.

The final section narrates the story second son, the son raised by his aunt. The son's fate becomes the vehicle through which Manase is forced to remember that part of the history of the cave that was sublimated. As part of that remembrance, he is forced to reevaluate the destruction of his family.

That the author tells the story in such quiet and compact a manner adds to the impact of the book. Add this to your must read list.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond Tragedy, September 14, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Stones Cry Out (Hardcover)

This profoundly beautiful, horrifying and seamless novella begins in the darkness of an island cave at the end of World War II and ends fewer than 200 pages later in a final paroxysm of tragedy.

The novel takes its title from the New Testament book of Luke: "Be answered, I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out." It is the memory embedded in the stones that preoccupies Tsuyoshi Manase, the book's protagonist.

As a war veteran, Manase has seen suffering beyond what any imagination could conjure, including prolonged hiding from the enemy in a cave where he is plagued by hunger, thirst, disease and rotting corpses. It is a dying Lance Corporal, however, who becomes the catalyst that will change Manase's life forever as he speaks to Manase about his own love of geology.

After the war, Manase, himself, becomes fascinated with geology and spends increasing amounts of time gathering stones allowing his business, his marriage and his children to recede in importance beside his mounting obsession. The symbolism of the stones, and the way they carry Manase's particular memories, as well as the memories of the universe itself, is woven into the narrative in such a way that any reader would be hard-pressed to forget.

As this harrowing story weaves its way expertly in and out of Manase's memories, reality and hallucination intertwine until finally, the real world, Manase's sanity and even his own innocence regarding a ghastly crime begin to weaken and implode. The two time periods, past and present, are so skillfully and artfully intertwined that one has to wonder if Manase's entire life is really nothing more than an illusion in the cave.

Manase, we come to see, is battling an immense, but nebulous, evil, an evil of which he may be the victim or he may be the perpetrator.

Okuizumi renders this profound tale of terror and beauty in the most subtle and delicate prose style, much like an exquisite painting on a grain of rice. The result is that Manase's nightmarish past becomes all the more real and horrifying.

A surrealistic tragedy of one man's passions, fears and delusions, this book, although short, is extremely complex, much like the classical Japanese novels of Yasunari Kawabata. And the horror of Manase's story is only magnified by the exquisite quietness of its telling.