Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids in Reading with Style

Sep 25, 2016 Ed Lehman rated it really liked it

Shelves: 1001-list, asia, completed-1001-list-book

Having recently read William Golding's Lord of the Flies, it was easy to see the similarities with this tale: a group of boys forced to form their own society in order to survive. But whereas in the Lord of the Flies, the boys are marooned by an accident, these boys are deliberately abandoned by adults. The story takes place during war-time Japan and a group of reformatory boys are being evacuated to a mountain village.... only the village is being hit by a plaque killing animals and people alik ...more

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Feb 03, 2015 Wendy rated it liked it

Shelves: 1001-books, in-translation, audiobooks, world-war-ii, japan

Many reviewers have described Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids as being a wartime Japan version of Lord of the Flies. It was a bleak, rather difficult read. I suppose the comparison is apt, though I thought unlike Lord of the Flies, the adults here behave more barbarically than the abandoned youngsters do. Still, there's a strange undercurrent involving a range of adolescent sexual behaviors that kept me uncomfortable and off-kilter. There's very little that is cute about these kids, but they are ra ...more

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Sep 18, 2023 Andrew rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favourites, bleak-as-fuck, war-fiction, reviewed, historical-fiction, japan-lit

Some writers (outside and inside Japan, say, Mishima) seem to cast Japan as a magic realist land of permanent melancholy, cast adrift between the customs of its ancient past and the horror of its supercharged modernity, like a fabled kingdom gone to ruin. Indeed, comparison between Oe and Mishima (who Oe detested) would be interesting, as as much as I love Mishima, frankly, this novella gives him a real kick up the arse in terms of *actually* depicting what Japanese culture can be like, and what Some writers (outside and inside Japan, say, Mishima) seem to cast Japan as a magic realist land of permanent melancholy, cast adrift between the customs of its ancient past and the horror of its supercharged modernity, like a fabled kingdom gone to ruin. Indeed, comparison between Oe and Mishima (who Oe detested) would be interesting, as as much as I love Mishima, frankly, this novella gives him a real kick up the arse in terms of *actually* depicting what Japanese culture can be like, and what *actually* existing during this time in the war was like. In short, it wasn't fun.

Birds are brutally murdered for food, dogs clubbed to death, people bleed from the arse before death due to plauge, children die shivering to death inside of a locked barn, sexual relations amongst the kids are marked by awkward, awful self loathing, men are murdered while their guts are still hanging out, kids piss themselves while theyre locked up and are forced to stand in pools of their own stale urine, and any spot of life or hope; between our fellow human or towards animals, are all ruthlessly, totally stamped upon. Piss, shit, anal fucking, regular fucking, blood, intestines, vomit, mud, muck, filth, cadavers - all are gloriously mixed together in this narrative with an almost Chaucerian commitment to sincere, honest vulgarity.

Japan comes across less as a snow capped Orientalist fantasy land, with cherry blossom trees fluttering gently in the wind as pale faced Geishas weave baskets for stern Samurais before a vast, ornate ancient temple and more a kind of frozen hellscape of amazing cruelty, total negligence to its children & unyielding in its millitarist inhumanity, the rot of its brutal imperalism and rigid Emperor worship seeping into all facets of Japanese life, right down to a local peasant village.

But don't be fooled by this description, misery porn it is not. It also buyoes its unremittingly grim subject matter with a genuine lightness, a filthy, underground grungy type of humour that produces snorts of laughter at the sheer blunt, unpretentious nature of its descriptions (I swear to God, Oe has some of the best, and most hilariously innapropiate descriptions of erections I've ever read). Its also laces its narrative with agonisingly beautiful writing, the sense of sincere community that is trying to be formed by the kids made all the more acutely tragic in its warmth and humanity. Oe conveys a kind of realism, humanity and complexity to his child characters that some writers fail to convey in 1 entire adult character. Their fragile, desperate attempts to form a tiny speck of utopia amongst the hell of the world, their fears, their hopes, their childish irrationalities, silly games, discovery of pre-pubsecent begginings of a sexual drive (written as crudely as possible, and laced with all manner of ill feelings, it nevertheless represents a genuine and sweet attempt at these abandoned children to form some kind of love) are conveyed with such a sense of profound, sad brilliance.

The natural landscape is given a kind of sentience of its own, as nature becomes a kind of quiet, peaceful objective judge to the actions of the humans in the village, both food and companionship to the lost children, their behavioural patterns and survival strategies becoming the mirror image of the children's, as the people and landscape merge into one ecosystem of struggle and solidarity. First they hunt and kill birds, watching them struggle in brutal traps as they are slowly killed. By the end the villagers hunt and kill people, with the same sounds of screaming bellowing across the landscape.

Its proof of a culture of such intellectual maturity and refined sense of self doubt as Japan that it could produce such a masterpiece, one of such ferocious bleakness and genuine beauty. Its stunning. ...more

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