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!
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Top reviews from other countries
sally tarbox
'The War sent its mass insanity flooding into the convolutions of people's feelings, into every last recess of their bodies'
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 7, 2013
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One of the best books ever written, by one of the world's greatest authors
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Kalt und schamlos - dennoch ein sehr erfüllendes Leseerlebnis
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