Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

The Boys and the Village

The reformatory boys are evacuated from the city during the final years of World War II, transported to a remote mountain village in what the authorities imagine is a gesture of wartime practicality. The village does not want them. They are troublemakers, delinquents, the discarded young — not the kind of children Japan’s wartime ideology had any use for. The villagers give them work. They sleep badly, eat poorly, look at the village with the eyes of people who know they are not welcome.

Then the plague comes. Animals die first. Then people begin to die. The villagers pack what they can carry and leave, locking the gates behind them and leaving the boys inside. The logic is clear: if the plague is already there, there is no point in taking it with you. The boys who were already outside the social order are now literally enclosed within it, quarantined not for medical reasons but because they were always disposable and now there is a reason to act on it.

What follows — the brief interregnum before the adults return — is the novel’s exhilarating and desperate center. The boys bury their dead. They find food. They discover a Korean boy who had been kept hidden in a barn by the village, someone even more excluded than they are, and they make him one of their own. They find an enemy soldier who has wandered in from the mountains. They have a fire. They have, for a short and violent and genuine period, something that functions like a community of equals. And then the adults come back, and the freedom ends, and the novel shows without flinching what it costs.

Ōe’s Debut and His Major Themes

Ōe was twenty-three when he wrote this novel. That it is a debut is apparent in certain ways — some of the secondary characters are thin, the plotting is occasionally mechanical — but what is not apparent is any uncertainty about what the novel is for or what it is saying. The major themes of Ōe’s entire career are already present in miniature: the abandoned child who is also the most clear-sighted witness; the institution (family, state, reform school) as a mechanism of violence; the wartime Japanese state as a system built on the exclusion of everyone who does not fit the ideology; and the paradox of liberation-through-exclusion — the strange freedom that becomes possible only when society’s claim on you has been fully revoked.

Ōe was reading Sartre and Camus in the mid-1950s when he wrote the novel, and the influence is audible. The existentialist emphasis on radical freedom and bad faith, on the individual confronting a world that offers no external meaning, gives the boys’ situation its philosophical grounding. But Ōe places it in a context that Sartre and Camus did not imagine: rural Japan in wartime, with its specific hierarchies and specific exclusions and specific way of treating children who do not belong to anyone.

The Lord of the Flies comparison is inevitable and not misleading. Both novels ask what boys do when adult authority withdraws. Both give a dark answer. But Golding’s novel is essentially about the evil latent in all children, an original-sin argument applied to the young. Ōe’s boys are not savage because human nature is savage; they are violent because they have learned violence from the institutions that shaped them. The difference is political, and it matters.

Reading Ōe from the Beginning

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids was published in Japanese in 1958. The English translation by Paul St. John Mackintosh and Maki Sugiyama was published in 1995, the year after Ōe received the Nobel Prize in Literature, as part of the expansion of his English-language catalogue that followed the award. It arrived in English after A Personal Matter (1964, translated 1968) and The Silent Cry (1967, translated 1974), which meant that English readers often encountered his debut late, having already read his more complex mature work.

Read in publication order, the novel is the right place to start: short, propulsive, thematically concentrated, and demanding without being formally experimental in the way the later novels are. A Personal Matter is the recommended second step — a novel about a man whose son is born with a brain hernia and who must decide whether to let the child die, Ōe’s first major engagement with disability and parenthood, themes that would define his work for decades. The Silent Cry is more ambitious and more difficult, and best read after both.

Ōe received the Nobel Prize in 1994. He was the second Japanese writer so honored, after Kawabata in 1968. His acceptance speech, “Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself,” engaged directly with what he saw as Japan’s unresolved relationship to its wartime past and its postwar modernity — the same ambiguity that Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids had been examining from the bottom, through the eyes of boys nobody wanted, since 1958.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — A debut that already knows exactly what it is: a short, violent, exhilarating novel about abandoned boys, wartime Japan, and the strange freedom that arrives only when society has finished discarding you.