Book Review: Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, by Kenzaburō Ōe
One-line summary: The first novel by Japan’s most celebrated living writer, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids recounts the exploits of fifteen teenage reformatory boys evacuated to a remote mountain village in wartime.
Continuing from the inside jacket blurb: The narrator who acts as nominal leader of the small band, his younger brother and their comrades are all delinquent outcasts, feared and detested by the local peasants. When plague breaks out, their hosts abandon them and flee, then blockade them inside the empty village, together with a young Korean, an army deserter and a girl evacuee. However, the boys’ brief, doomed attempt to build autonomous lives of self-respect, love and tribal valor inevitably fails with the reflux of death and the adult nightmare of war. (Translated by Paul St. John Mackintosh and Maki Sugiyama and published by Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, London, 1995)
Kenzaburō Ōe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 for creating "an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today." Nip the Buds was published (in Japan) in 1958 and was Ōe’s first novel, drawn from his wartime experiences. He was quite young during World War II, having been born in 1935 and he said “All I had to do was let my war experiences, not factual but mental, take their own course and write them down.” I learned all this from the first four or five pages of a 14 page introduction before I decided that I should just dive into the book and figure things out for myself. The novel proper is only a NaNoWriMo-sized 170 pages long, after all.
After finishing it and letting my thoughts stew for a day, I’ve decided that three words characterize this book for me: claustrophobic, impressionistic and brutal.
There is literal claustrophobia several times when the boys are locked in to a small room or building, but even the village that they are abandoned in is narrowly bounded and described as a constricted space. There is also a mental claustrophobia brought about by the resolutely first person point of view and the open hostility of nearly every adult or group of people that the boys encounter. The boys are consistently viewed as “The Other” and achieve some measure of group solidarity as a result.
There is little conventional characterization in the writing, and few of the characters even have names. There are various activities which include some or all of the boys, and there are a few characters with functional references, including “the soldier”, “the blacksmith” and “the boy with the stomach-ache” but not even the narrator’s brother is given a name. All the thoughts and observations are those of a boy in late adolescence (at least that’s the age I infer-no specific details are ever mentioned) and his feelings are passionate but scattershot and mercurial. What little conversation there is, is purely functional and the narrator describes the actions of himself and others but rarely expounds on his feelings. I frequently felt like I was reading the schematic of a novel and this vagueness is what I describe as impressionistic.
My use of brutal isn’t referring to violence against or by the boys but to the starkness and brutality of the environment as well as the descriptive style. The wartime conditions are obviously brutal, it’s winter at the time of the story and the purported arrival of “the plague” stretches all the characters to their breaking points. In contrast to what I expect as a characteristic Japanese delicacy and avoidance of unpleasant things, there are frequent references to penises, anuses, cracked and bleeding body parts and death of people and animals. My feeling of brutality here is in contrast to the only other work of Japanese literature I’ve read in the last five years, The Tale of Genji from about the 11th century CE. Obviously, things have changed.
I haven’t thoroughly researched Ōe, just looked at Wikipedia and the translators introduction, but the word “myth” is used in reference to his work. My personal definition of myth doesn’t fit well with this book, but it does often seem separated from time and space. Based on Ōe’s comment quoted above, we assume the action takes place in Japan, but I don’t recall the country ever being mentioned, although there is a Korean boy who is clearly considered an outsider. Similarly, soldiers and a war which isn’t going well are mentioned, but only a truck and some guns fix the historical time as being the 20th century instead of the 19th or even the 14th. The conditions are primitive, there is no electricity or modern communication such as telephones or even telegraph and the villagers use bamboo spears as weapons.
One obvious reference which I believe to be inappropriate is to Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Although I was never able to finish that book, the only similarity is the group of boys separated from society. In this book, there isn’t sufficient time for the boys to significantly change their relationship to one another or to develop a society beyond that which they start with. There is certainly rivalry and fighting but they never split into factions or seriously threaten one another.
I was sufficiently impressed with this book that I may make an effort to read another of Ōe’s works, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, a collection of four short novels. I wouldn’t necessarily buy it, but that’s just me, and that’s why I love my local library.
Continuing from the inside jacket blurb: The narrator who acts as nominal leader of the small band, his younger brother and their comrades are all delinquent outcasts, feared and detested by the local peasants. When plague breaks out, their hosts abandon them and flee, then blockade them inside the empty village, together with a young Korean, an army deserter and a girl evacuee. However, the boys’ brief, doomed attempt to build autonomous lives of self-respect, love and tribal valor inevitably fails with the reflux of death and the adult nightmare of war. (Translated by Paul St. John Mackintosh and Maki Sugiyama and published by Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, London, 1995)
Kenzaburō Ōe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 for creating "an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today." Nip the Buds was published (in Japan) in 1958 and was Ōe’s first novel, drawn from his wartime experiences. He was quite young during World War II, having been born in 1935 and he said “All I had to do was let my war experiences, not factual but mental, take their own course and write them down.” I learned all this from the first four or five pages of a 14 page introduction before I decided that I should just dive into the book and figure things out for myself. The novel proper is only a NaNoWriMo-sized 170 pages long, after all.
After finishing it and letting my thoughts stew for a day, I’ve decided that three words characterize this book for me: claustrophobic, impressionistic and brutal.
There is literal claustrophobia several times when the boys are locked in to a small room or building, but even the village that they are abandoned in is narrowly bounded and described as a constricted space. There is also a mental claustrophobia brought about by the resolutely first person point of view and the open hostility of nearly every adult or group of people that the boys encounter. The boys are consistently viewed as “The Other” and achieve some measure of group solidarity as a result.
There is little conventional characterization in the writing, and few of the characters even have names. There are various activities which include some or all of the boys, and there are a few characters with functional references, including “the soldier”, “the blacksmith” and “the boy with the stomach-ache” but not even the narrator’s brother is given a name. All the thoughts and observations are those of a boy in late adolescence (at least that’s the age I infer-no specific details are ever mentioned) and his feelings are passionate but scattershot and mercurial. What little conversation there is, is purely functional and the narrator describes the actions of himself and others but rarely expounds on his feelings. I frequently felt like I was reading the schematic of a novel and this vagueness is what I describe as impressionistic.
My use of brutal isn’t referring to violence against or by the boys but to the starkness and brutality of the environment as well as the descriptive style. The wartime conditions are obviously brutal, it’s winter at the time of the story and the purported arrival of “the plague” stretches all the characters to their breaking points. In contrast to what I expect as a characteristic Japanese delicacy and avoidance of unpleasant things, there are frequent references to penises, anuses, cracked and bleeding body parts and death of people and animals. My feeling of brutality here is in contrast to the only other work of Japanese literature I’ve read in the last five years, The Tale of Genji from about the 11th century CE. Obviously, things have changed.
I haven’t thoroughly researched Ōe, just looked at Wikipedia and the translators introduction, but the word “myth” is used in reference to his work. My personal definition of myth doesn’t fit well with this book, but it does often seem separated from time and space. Based on Ōe’s comment quoted above, we assume the action takes place in Japan, but I don’t recall the country ever being mentioned, although there is a Korean boy who is clearly considered an outsider. Similarly, soldiers and a war which isn’t going well are mentioned, but only a truck and some guns fix the historical time as being the 20th century instead of the 19th or even the 14th. The conditions are primitive, there is no electricity or modern communication such as telephones or even telegraph and the villagers use bamboo spears as weapons.
One obvious reference which I believe to be inappropriate is to Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Although I was never able to finish that book, the only similarity is the group of boys separated from society. In this book, there isn’t sufficient time for the boys to significantly change their relationship to one another or to develop a society beyond that which they start with. There is certainly rivalry and fighting but they never split into factions or seriously threaten one another.
I was sufficiently impressed with this book that I may make an effort to read another of Ōe’s works, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, a collection of four short novels. I wouldn’t necessarily buy it, but that’s just me, and that’s why I love my local library.