Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe Search Amazon for other books by or about Kenzaburo Oe. Rating: Reviewed by: John Walsh

Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994 and, since then, much more of his work has been made available in English and, indeed, other languages. This short novel, his first, was written in 1958 when the author was just 23 and it is an extraordinarily powerful and disturbing work. The narrative focuses on a largely unnamed group of boys and young men who are abandoned in the Japanese countryside in what appears to be the closing days of World War II. The boys, from a Reformatory, find themselves isolated in a village in which plague has erupted. The dead lay around them and the surviving villagers have withdrawn to neighbouring communities. The boys, together with a deserter from the army and some other refugees, explore their new territory with an initial sense of freedom and joy, only for this to turn to inevitable misery and suffering--the nature of the universe Oe maps out makes the reader feel that there is an inevitability to this. The reckoning that they must face for the brief freedoms is grim indeed.

Not only is narrative quite unlike the kind of simple and straightforward plotting conventional in Japanese literature, it is also (as explained in a helpful introduction by translators Paul St. John Mackintosh and Maki Sugiyama) written in a dense and evocative style that is also similarly radical. The common view of Japanese literature is based on the concept of the haiku or similar poems, which is that it aims to convey through simple and formulaic techniques timeless truths as described or expressed in natural phenomena. This technique was employed by certain artists to convey an ideology of "sincerity" that became in fact deeply conservative and reactionary. The end of the war, of course, revealed the hollowness of the world view reproduced by that "sincerity" and this, in part, seems to have motivated the author. However, the degree to which Oe is able to convey this motivation through his prose is not really brought out in the English language version--perhaps it would be impossible or at least very difficult so to do without making the text too difficult to follow. The translators do not really address this issue and I know too little of the Japanese language to be able to comment meaningfully.

This is an excellent novel which seems likely to live long in the memory. The characters are well-drawn, although they exist primarily on the surface by and large since the narrator-protagonist has little ability to empathise with other people--his relationship with the unnamed orphan girl is evidence enough of this. The action moves swiftly and reaches potent conclusions--many readers fear Nobel Prize winners and their productions, envisaging hundreds of pages of difficult to understand prose dealing with some ambiguous actions with characters who may or may not exist (to be fair, there are some prize winners who, naming no names, meet this description). There is no fear of this here: this is a compelling and fascinating book and is highly recommended.