Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (original 1958; edition 1996)

A beautifully written book about a horrible situation. A group of young male delinquents are relocated into he interior of Japan during WWII. The village to which they are sent has a plague scare and the boys are abandoned by the villagers, barricaded in to suffer whatever fate has in store for them. As their isolation lasts only a short time & the assumption is that the villagers will return, the boys in this novel do not attempt to create a functioning society or suffer its eventual breakdown as depicted in Lord of the Flies; these boys endure. They redefine their role, considering themselves as occupiers of the deserted village rather than accept the role of abandoned, unwanted vermin. Instead of demonstrating the inhumanity of and between individuals, the book demonstrates how the society fails the boys. ( )

A translation of the Japanese work by the 1994 Nobel Prize winner. Written in 1958. The tale of a group of reformatory school boys, evacuated to a remote area in the mountains to escape the war, but they never escape their lack of freedom and can never escape the oppression and cruelty of society. ( )

http://wineandabook.com/2012/07/18/review-nip-the-buds-shoot-the-kids-by-kenzabu...

"Nonetheless, for aliens like captured wild beasts to be safe before others watching them, it is best to lead the will-less, eyeless existence of a stone, flower or tree: a purely observed existence. My brother, since, he persisted in being the eye that watched the villagers, was struck on his cheeks by thick yellowish gobs of spittle rolled on women's tongues, and stones thrown by the children. But, smiling, he would wipe his cheeks with his large bird-embroidered pocket facecloth and go on staring in wonderment at the villagers who had insulted him." (p. 23)

Clocking in at 189 pages, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids may at first glance seem like a quick read, but due to Oe's mastery of economy of language, this book is far fuller than one might expect.

Premise: Set during WWII, a group of teenage boys from a reformatory are marched through the woods (presumably on the remote island of Shikoku, Japan, since that's where the author spent most of his life...but no specific geographic location is ever named) and evacuated to a rural village. Upon their arrival, they're made to bury piles of corpses of rotting animals, infected with the plague. The villagers soon flee and abandon the boys in the plague-infested village, where they are left to their own devices to determine a means of survival.

There's a lot going on in such a petite volume: there's the relationship between the narrator and his younger brother, between the narrator and the rest of the group of boys, between the narrator and his love interest; the juxtaposition of order and chaos; the dividing line between childhood and adulthood; the notion of the "other"; themes of abandonment and responsibility to self v. responsibility to the community v. responsibility to family...and Oe was only 23 when this book was published.

Warning: There's also a lot of penis-related discussion. I get that it's a story about adolescent boys, but I swear once a chapter the narrator is either mentioning his erection, talking about someone else's erection, peeing in the snow, etc. It's a lot. I understand it's purpose (perpetuating this undercurrent of rushed sexuality that invades the narrative from time to time) and it's a bit unsettling considering the age of the characters. But I can appreciate why Oe made the choice to include such details in terms of character development/establishment...and I like it when something I read makes me FEEL something, even if the feeling isn't necessarily pleasant.

Penis talk aside, I really valued the experience of reading this book. It was unlike anything I had read before. Dark and unsettling, thought-provoking, at times spare, and at times rich...I could picture the action and characters so vividly as I read. Oe does an amazing job of establishing tone in his work. The entire piece just worked. I will definitely search out more of Oe's translated works in the future.

Rubric rating: 7.5. I can absolutely appreciate why Oe was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. ( )

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids is a brutal, brilliant novel against the craven mindset of the members of a generation who let Japan's military leadership plunge their country into disaster. The story takes place during World War II, but far away from the front of battle in a nameless setting that can be considered allegorical. It is narrated by a reform school boy who, together with a number of his fellows, has been marched into the countryside where the youths will be billeted as laborers in a farm village. All along the route, and when they finally reach the isolated village itself, the boys are treated as vermin. We get the sense that this is not because of anything they have done, but chiefly because they are outsiders with no status or authority.

The boys' first task at the village is to bury an alarming number of domestic animals that have suddenly taken sick and died. When one of the villagers becomes ill, word spreads that the plague has broken out. That night the villagers silently slip away, leaving the boys to their fate. The only way out of the mountainous village is across a bridge which the villagers have blockaded and where they have left an armed guard to keep the boys from removing the barrier. The abandoned boys must now conquer their fear of the plague and forage for food and other necessities in the dead of winter. As outcasts with nowhere to go and nothing to look forward to, they must also confront the despair of being alone in a world of the small-minded, uncaring, and implacable.

The novel is taut and precise. Every object and event comes to have an importance, and nothing is brought in that isn't necessary to the story, not even the narrator's name. The images are often horrifying, especially when described with a child's innocent and uninhibited fascination. Unfortunately the translation does not do full justice to the novel, as the phrasing is occasionally quite clumsy. Nonetheless, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids is a gripping story and highly recommended. ( )

From the back of the book: Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids recounts the exploits of fifteen teenage reformatory boys evacuated to a remote mountain village in wartime, where they are feared and detested by the local peasants.

So, comparisons have been running wild to Lord of the Flies, which seem apt in lots of ways: the focus on children, and henceforth, the focus on society. But this is a book that’s really drenched in the madness of war; although the group of children, as voiced by their leader, do apparently go mad in a very primal sort of way (never as brutal as Flies), it is mostly society, including nearly every adult, that interrupts the children’s passage into society, and not necessarily the children who lose their minds and kill each other. As Oe deliberately says of the adults as the children starve at night: . . . all the malicious people were fast asleep.

In this book, the first I’ve ever read of Oe (and definitely not the last), the invasion of disease, the plague, and a wartime, bloodthirsty, deranged group of villagers, do all of the harm. In fact, the only adult voice of reason is the defector, the soldier who saw the true horrors of war and took his chances in escape. He’d rather be one of them, one of the children, the “useless vermin,� versus being a cold-blooded murderer, a soldier in an unjust war. He’s seen it alright, and to him the onslaught of death by the plague that has no human origins, is a better death than by the insanity of war. After they’ve been sealed in the village by barricade, one of the kids looks up at the person keeping watch with a gun—if the children ever became courageous enough to attempt escape—and he says, “Let’s go back. I’d rather catch the plague than be shot.�

These children, hopeless, considered to be equals to rats by the villagers, surprisingly find a way to adapt to their environment, find and scavenge for food, create a system, although of much idleness (But there was nothing else we could do, so we went on patiently eating.), but with real concern for their fellow comrades. And as an anti-Lord of the Flies, their leader, who fights with an intruding Korean boy, actually learns to appreciate him as one of their own, and they band together and spark a mutual friendship.

When it all comes crashing down, and the plague suddenly erupts in their camp, and the very thing that they most feared at the beginning (abandonment) is reversed as the villagers return, we witness the true origins of brutality: the adults, war-fevered, who do all the world’s killing, all the slaying of the world’s women and children as indiscriminately as cattle, who are the conductors of all the wars that have killed more children than any plague ever could. They return as if nothing even happened. And to their surprise, after their long delay in a corresponding village, presumably “safe,� they are shocked to still see most of the children alive.

The real capabilities of human brutality and violence become evident. War, as a catalyst of abuse and trauma, is similar to an abused child’s long negated trauma, and eventually their own juxtaposed form of mental corruption, a virus, the hate, that attempts to transform anyone it can latch onto. . . . it’s as if the dead can and will be resurrected, bringing less importance to death, and death as only a stage of continuous suffering. We are already ghosts. The children who were little more than pests, were already considered dead.

In a swift 170-some pages, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, is a startling testament to real-life brutality. Oe’s writing is precise and not overly melodramatic, as one may expect, considering the subject matter. In fact, the beats, the pace of the book is like a kindling fire that only grows warmer over time; we aren’t taken to other characters and settings; we stumble onto them naturally, and naturally we care for them and exist with them.

Not purely an anti-war novel, but along the lines of one. It’s been said before, and I’ll say it again: any story that depicts war realistically, is in actuality, an anti-war book. And this is definitely one of the best. ( )