Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (Paperback)

by Kenzaburo Oe (Author), Paul St. John Mackintosh (Translator), Maki Sugiyama (Translator) "Two of our boys had escaped during the night, so at dawn we still hadn't left..." (more)
Key Phrases: bamboo spears

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Oe, who won the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature, was just 23 in 1958, when he published this wrenching first novel in Japan. From the opening paragraph's description of a river "bearing away at tremendous speed the corpses of dogs, rats, and cats," it is clear that this is a story of innocents?or at least relative innocents?carried violently by forces beyond their control. In the waning days of WWII, a group of Japanese reform-school boys are evacuated to a remote village in a densely wooded valley. The villagers treat the teenagers horribly, making them bury a mountain of animal corpses, locking them into a shed for the night and feeding them raw potatoes. The unnamed narrator?one of the group's leaders?discovers that a plague is ravaging the valley. When a couple of people are infected by the disease, the villagers panic. Believing the boys to be infected, the villagers remove themselves to the other side of the valley and block the only road out of town. At first, the boys can think only of escape, but then, like the boys in Lord of the Flies, they start to make the village their own: they bury the dead humans and perform a sort of sacrament; they care for an abandoned, infirm girl; they hold a hunting festival to ensure continued abundance. The narrator becomes the girl's lover; his younger brother adopts a stray pup; an unexpected snowfall sparks a midwinter celebration. But each pleasant turn, every apparently liberating step away from unremitting brutality, serves to make the characters' inevitable future suffering even more painful. The end arrives with the suddenness and fury of a tornado, as disease and war catch up to the boys. Oe is considered by many to be Japan's greatest postwar novelist. It's easy to see why. Here, his writing is crisp and lovely and gruesomely perfect. First serial to Grand Street.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal
Available for the first time in English, this first novel by the winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature is assured an audience both among those who are familiar with Oe's work and eagerly await the translations that will inevitably follow the awarding of the prize and those who are newly aware of Oe as a major literary figure and wish to sample the range of his work. For the latter group, this assured translation of a novel published in 1958 when Oe was a young student makes a wonderful starting point. A stark, sometimes disturbing tale of a group of young reform school youths being relocated in war-torn Japan, the simple story breathes with mythic intensity and hints at the wealth of untapped expressive power in Oe. An added bonus is a fine introduction that gives a succinct factual and theoretical overview of Oe and his work. Highly recommended.?Mark Woodhouse, Elmira Coll. Lib., N.Y.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1st Grove Press Paperback edition (June 13, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802134637
• ISBN-13: 978-0802134639
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #456,506 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nip the Buds, August 31, 2002

By	Charles E. Stevens - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A disturbing work of genius, April 17, 2000

By	"[e-mail]" (London, England) - See all my reviews

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shoot the Kids..., August 27, 2000

By	"lilyholic" (Atlanta, GA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nip The Buds, Shoot The Kids (Hardcover)

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.