Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

I have a friend once suffered from pneumonia. She read this book in the hospital when she had broken one of her ribs from a coughing fit. That is how pained and weak she was at that time. After she read the book she said she forgot her own anguish and cried for the suffering characters in this touching and tender book. I picked it up and have never been the same again. It made me angry, sad, and I wanted to do something about the injustice in this world. It made me a better person.

This was the first book by Oe that I have read, and although it's probably not one of his better known books (he wrote it when he was just 23) I found it very powerful and insightful. The story itself reminded me a bit of William Golding's Lord of the Flies (which was actually written a year AFTER Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids was published). The major difference I found between the two books was the difference in where the authors placed the evil forces in their book: for Golding, the evil (the gaping void, the mouth of the "Lord of the Flies) was inside of each individual. For Oe, the evil was in the system, the outside pressure from society on the group of young boys. When outside forces intrude in Golding's book, chaos ends and civility is restored. The opposite happens in this book.Additionally, Golding's tale is an extremely universal one. The boys in the book happen to be English, but there's no reason why they couldn't be American, Japanese, Brazilian, etc. On the other hand, Nip the Buds is written with specific regard to its setting: wartime Japan. Oe himself is surprised by his worldwide appeal: he says he writes to his fellow Japanese, his own generation in particular. Several of the themes, including that of heartless, fickle villagers, is common to Japanese fiction (Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" and Abe Kobo's "Woman in the Dunes" come to mind instantly). This book in general is written with obvious scorn for senseless violence and specifically, Japan's role in World War II. This is not to say that Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids can only be appreciated by elderly Japanese people (I certainly am not in either category). But, as is often the case with Japanese literature, it's very important to try to understand the environment the author was living in and commenting on at the time.Oe's writing is supposed to be a bit abrasive to the Japanese eye, but in translation at least, it was straight-forward and simple to read. It would be easy to call Nip the Buds a graphic book, but journalistic might be a better term. This book is told through the eyes of a youth who has seen it all. He doesn't link ideas such as love and sex or violence and killing, but often treats them as completely separate ideas. Despite the callousness in this book, there is a lot of emotion as well. The reformatory kids' bond is solid (until the end), and the tie between the narrator and his younger brother, and the narrator and the girl is very real and vivid. Seeing these bonds wrenched apart one by one until the narrator is completely alone at the end is part of the reason that Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids is such an amazingly powerful book. Oe has created a truly unforgettable work.

A sparse and chilling tale that recounts the worst week in the lives of 15 adolescent juvenile delinquents left abandoned in a plague infested village. This first novel of Kenzaburo Oe clearly shows his brilliance in capturing the essence of the human condition - warts and all, and why he would go on to win the Nobel prize in literature in 1994. The emotional themes of abandonment and isolation are expertly brought to life and devices such as not providing any details regarding geographic setting and exclusion of character names (with the exception of Minami and Li) will draw uneasy, slow building tension to readers. A lean, expertly translated read that contains numerous scenes and passages that will stay vivid in your memory for days on end.

Oe is a brilliant writer. This was the first book I have read by him, and I was taken away. Leaving no harsh image unspoken, Oe isn't bashful about writing details that may make the reader's stomache churn. To describe the book in a very breif synopsis, a group of reform school boys get abandoned amidst a plauge. The setting is post World War 2 Japan and the boys find a leader from the narrator, and form their own community. Children are forced to grow up far too fast, and their age has no relevance to their minds. Once the narrator becomes an adult, and sheds his last memories of child hood, even his pride of adulthood is stripped away from him. Filled with beautiful sentance structure and much philisophical thoughts, you will find yourself constantly quoting this book. I have reccomended it to all my friends. It is a stunning read and was a Nobel prize winner.

This is not an easy novel to read. From the first page to the last the reader's senses are assualted with descriptions of cruelty, violence and the various perversions of delinquent kids and savage adults. There are some moments of tenderness and consolation, but these are invariably ended by new catastrophes. A group of kids suffer the savage blows of their elders and are then abandoned in an isolated plague ridden village under the threat of being beaten to death if they try to escape. Comparisons have been made with Lord of the Flies. This book is stronger, harsher, with fewer moments of affection or kindness. It is set in wartime Japan and this background is quite an important element in the book, yet the story is universal, the characters and events could have been placed in any setting at any time in history. The novel does not have a strong narrative thread. Each chapter is distinct, built round an incident and then linked into the next chapter. The heart of the book lies in the characters and their environs rather than the plot. There are countless descriptions of sights, sounds, smells, and touch - I got a very strong sense of the place where the boys live. It's an earthy, visceral novel full of blood, snow, guts, mud, sex and death. If I had read the above description by another reviewer I probably wouldn't want to read this book, but the writing is so powerful that I quickly overcame my natural aversion to such relentlessly sordid and depressing material! A very great book, but hard to stomach at times and definitely not for all tastes.