Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids - Japanese Literature Novel by Kenzaburo Oe | Award-Winning Fiction Book for Adults | Perfect for Book Clubs & Literary Enthusiasts

If you read for aesthetic pleasure or to carry yourself away to exotic realms, or just to seek time-filling diversion, avoid this book as you would a rabid dog. It's a tale bursting like an angry pustule with ugliness and pain. Take note that other reviewers praise the novelist's descriptive skills and occasional lyric pulses. Don't be fooled! There's no consolation to be had from the few flashes of pale winter sky and pheasant feathers in the snow; this is a portrayal of the horrors people inflict on "others" in wartime and in times as awful as war.Why read it then? Truth. Insight. Self-knowledge. Same reasons as you'd give for reading any painfully dark book.This is implicitly an anti-war book. It's about a group of "juvenile delinquents" transported to a remote peasant village for wartime isolation. The villagers treat them as subhuman, and that's all I intend to tell you of the plot. I have a puzzlement, though. When did "war" novels turn from battlefields to the fate of civilians, and especially the fate of children and other weak members of society? The Tin Drum. The Painted Bird. The German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz. Austerlitz. Were there such novels before World War II? Even the great anti-war novels "The Red Badge of Courage" and "All Quiet on the Western Front" were about soldiers. This book "Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids" treats war as a distant constant, a natural aura surrounding human inhumanity.Kenzaburo Oe's later novels are uncompromisingly intellectual and non-linear in narrative. Nip the Buds, his earliest translated novel, is uncompromisingly visceral. The only quality in the one that prepares the reader for the other is Oe's fearlessness in writing about grief and nastiness. Oe and Mishima are often compared, usually with approval for one and disdain for the other. They are indeed polar opposites in moral perception. Which is which? Read 'em both, and find out for yourself.