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Nip the Buds Shoot the Kids Kenzaburo Oe Paul St John Mackintosh Maki Sugiyama Books

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Nip the Buds Shoot the Kids Kenzaburo Oe Paul St John Mackintosh Maki Sugiyama Books

Mature-Content Rating: Sexual Themes, Language, War Violence, Underage Nudity

“I walked howling like a beast, shedding my tears on the snow. The dirty water coming in through my cracked soles soaked my chilblained toes and made them itch terribly, but I fiercely pushed my shoes into the ankle-deep snow and made no attempt to reach down and scratch them. If I had bent down I couldn’t possibly have straightened up and started walking again.”

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids takes place during the Showa period in Japan. It's a time when Japan had moved into totalitarianism, ultranationalism and fascism; coupled with the threats of the Great Depression and WWII.

The book looks at fear during a war, and what a close-knit group would do to outsiders, even children, in order to survive. It's about social order and youthfulness when everything is chaotic and constantly shifting.

To start off, the group of boys had completely lost their trust in adults before they even arrived in the small country village they were evacuated to. As “reformatory” boys they were treated as the lowest class. Younger kids were allowed to mock them and they were blamed for any troubling matters that happened while they were near.

In the village Oe shows a group of boys not only learning to survive but coping with being abandoned, gaining a first love, battling fear of the plague, and death. Two brothers are among the fifteen boys abandoned in the village and Oe depicts a strong brotherly bond between the two- the older brother having a strong sense of responsibility to the younger. Also among the ones left behind is a Korean boy living on the outskirts of the village abandoned due to his heritage, a village girl that refused to leave her dead mother’s side, and a solider being hunted for running from his duties.

Overall Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids is a heartbreaking novel that is most defiantly not for the faint of heart. It shows a darker side of human nature with the mentality of ‘taking care of our own’ and leaving the rest of the world to crumble.


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Nip the Buds Shoot the Kids Kenzaburo Oe Paul St John Mackintosh Maki Sugiyama Books Reviews

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!
Mature-Content Rating Sexual Themes, Language, War Violence, Underage Nudity

“I walked howling like a beast, shedding my tears on the snow. The dirty water coming in through my cracked soles soaked my chilblained toes and made them itch terribly, but I fiercely pushed my shoes into the ankle-deep snow and made no attempt to reach down and scratch them. If I had bent down I couldn’t possibly have straightened up and started walking again.”

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids takes place during the Showa period in Japan. It's a time when Japan had moved into totalitarianism, ultranationalism and fascism; coupled with the threats of the Great Depression and WWII.

The book looks at fear during a war, and what a close-knit group would do to outsiders, even children, in order to survive. It's about social order and youthfulness when everything is chaotic and constantly shifting.

To start off, the group of boys had completely lost their trust in adults before they even arrived in the small country village they were evacuated to. As “reformatory” boys they were treated as the lowest class. Younger kids were allowed to mock them and they were blamed for any troubling matters that happened while they were near.

In the village Oe shows a group of boys not only learning to survive but coping with being abandoned, gaining a first love, battling fear of the plague, and death. Two brothers are among the fifteen boys abandoned in the village and Oe depicts a strong brotherly bond between the two- the older brother having a strong sense of responsibility to the younger. Also among the ones left behind is a Korean boy living on the outskirts of the village abandoned due to his heritage, a village girl that refused to leave her dead mother’s side, and a solider being hunted for running from his duties.

Overall Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids is a heartbreaking novel that is most defiantly not for the faint of heart. It shows a darker side of human nature with the mentality of ‘taking care of our own’ and leaving the rest of the world to crumble.