by Kenzaburo Oe
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Product Description
Oe's dark musings on moral failure have come to symbolize an alienated generation in postwar Japan. This novel recounts the exploits of 15 teenage reformatory boys evacuated to a remote mountain village in wartime. When plague breaks out, the villagers flee, leaving the boys blockaded inside the empty village. The boys' brief, doomed attempt to build autonomous lives of self-respect, love, and tribal valor fails in the face of death and the adult nightmare of war.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Horrifying! Devastating!, 2008-11-24
If you read for aesthetic pleasure or to carry yourself away to exotic realms, or just to seek time-filling diversion, avoid this book as you would a rabid dog. It's a tale bursting like an angry pustule with ugliness and pain. Take note that other reviewers praise the novelist's descriptive skills and occasional lyric pulses. Don't be fooled! There's no consolation to be had from the few flashes of pale winter sky and pheasant feathers in the snow; this is a portrayal of the horrors people inflict on "others" in wartime and in times as awful as war.
Why read it then? Truth. Insight. Self-knowledge. Same reasons as you'd give for reading any painfully dark book.
This is implicitly an anti-war book. It's about a group of "juvenile delinquents" transported to a remote peasant village for wartime isolation. The villagers treat them as subhuman, and that's all I intend to tell you of the plot. I have a puzzlement, though. When did "war" novels turn from battlefields to the fate of civilians, and especially the fate of children and other weak members of society? The Tin Drum. The Painted Bird. The German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz. Austerlitz. Were there such novels before World War II? Even the great anti-war novels "The Red Badge of Courage" and "All Quiet on the Western Front" were about soldiers. This book "Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids" treats war as a distant constant, a natural aura surrounding human inhumanity.
Kenzaburo Oe's later novels are uncompromisingly intellectual and non-linear in narrative. Nip the Buds, his earliest translated novel, is uncompromisingly visceral. The only quality in the one that prepares the reader for the other is Oe's fearlessness in writing about grief and nastiness. Oe and Mishima are often compared, usually with approval for one and disdain for the other. They are indeed polar opposites in moral perception. Which is which? Read 'em both, and find out for yourself.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Nameless and abandoned, 2008-10-18
This was Oe's first novel. His style was crisp and laconic, staying away from long descriptions and philosophizing, which is appropriate in view of the fact that the narrator is one of the boys, one of a group of juvenile delinquents who get pushed around towards the end of WW2. The narrator tells us what he can know and nothing more. No know-it-all bird's eye view intrudes.
In the introduction, the translator tells us that Oe is a man of the periphery, a custodian of a marginal community's heritage, meaning the mountain country, where the story is set. I find that an odd observation. If this is how Oe preserves his heritage, how would he go about criticizing it?
The story is violent and brutal. People in it act cruelly, but there is no joyful revelling in violence in the narration. In this aspect, Oe's violence is quite far away from the voyeuristic attitude of writers like C. McCarthy.
The story has been compared to the Lord of the Flies, but it is much better told. Or to the Empire of the Sun, but it is much more truthful as it is straight fiction without pretensions of autobiography.
The story: a group of reform school kids is evacuated from Tokyo to the hinterland during WW2. They are taken to a mountain village, where a disease breaks out, something like cholera. The villagers panic and run, abandoning the boys and in fact locking them up in the village, almost. The boys briefly develop their own lives and even have some happiness. That does not last long, tragedy and death strike. The villagers return and oppression gets worse than before.
Abandonment is a main theme of the story. The boys have been abandoned by their parents, then by their country and by the villagers.
Most people in the story are nameless. The narrator is, so is his brother and his girl friend, so is the deserter who consoles him after the girl dies from the disease. There is a strong current in bi-sexuality, which is probably normal for a group of locked up teenage boys.
Only 2 people have names. One is the narrator's rival for leadership, a male prostitute. The other one is a Korean boy from the village, who first fights, then befriends the narrator. The narrator himself was put into this group because he had stabbed another high school student with a knife.
And the dog has a name, Leo. Leo is an agent of tragedy.
Oe abstains from giving us an interpretation for the story. Good thing!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Monsters, 2006-03-14
The bizaare, dark, and somewhat tragic tale of a group of delinquent boys taken to a secluded mountain village during World War II, then abandoned by the villagers when a mysterious plague strikes...
I found the relationship between the narrator and his younger brother very moving. In some ways, I was reminded of Golding's Lord of the Flies, however, this novel had more positive moments shared between the boys. Very immersing, I read it in one day.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Powerful, 2004-10-26
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.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
 A punch in the stomach..., 2003-04-08
That's what my wife told me when I picked it up to begin reading it. But that's what a good book is supposed to feel like. And it did. It was dark, cruel, and painful,, and contained vivid descriptions of inhumanity, though it was not without its moments of humor.
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