Review of ​Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburō Ōe

​Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburō Ōe follows the lives of fifteen reformatory boys as they are transported to a village to bury animals and then abandoned. They arrive at the moment where a soldier has defected and the remaining soldiers are sent out to look for him. The soldiers aren’t able to find the defector, but a larger more pressing matter occurs when a woman and loads of animals show up dead with bloated stomachs. The villagers see this as a plague that they must escape, so one night when the boys are left in an unlocked shack, the villagers leave. The next day, the boys find the village empty and learn that the exit out of the village is blocked off by a guard, so they are stuck there. While in the village, the boys gather food from the houses and try to survive in the cold winter. They go ice skating in the center square, they kill birds and have a feast, and the main character meets and then has sex with a girl that was also abandoned. The defected soldier is shown to them by one of the village boys, Li, who had stayed behind. The main character’s brother then finds and adopts a dog, but when it bites the girl, she comes down with the plague and eventually dies with the defector caring for her. The boys believe the dog had the plague, which causes one of the boys, Minami, to kill it. Then the main character’s brother runs away and never be seen again. The next day, the villagers return to berate and throw the boys into a shack, while the men search and find the defector. The villagers stab the defector and then send him with the military police, while the rest of the boys are beaten into submission and told to never mention the plague or their abandonment. The main character retaliates, which causes the villagers to send him away where they try to kill him. The novel ends with the main character on the ground in the forest ready to take on the villagers searching for him.
 
Ōe never seems to disappoint, and even with such a heavy and depressing book, there are beautiful moments and relationships that blossom. I was also intrigued with the way Ōe approaches the characters’ sexualities. One of the main characters, Minami, is shown as explicitly gay, discussing having sex with soldiers, doing his “morning make-up” which involves his butt, and his blunt lewd comments. There are other moments of sexual ambiguity among the boys watching their erections in a group together and displaying their penises to villagers. And it also occurs when the main character and the defector “…tasted a small miserable pleasure in each other. Silently we bared our poor goose-pimpled buttocks, losing ourselves in the motion of cunning fingers.” The main character’s sexuality is even more ambiguous when it’s shown he also thinks about and has sex with the girl. This openness to sexuality, particularly in the fifties when this was published in Japan, does seem quite out of the ordinary, but not an outlier (as one only has to look at Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask). It’s a dark book that gets worse as it goes, in displaying the villager’s brutality and the way life affects each character. However, it’s one that will stick with me.
 
Final Rating: 5/5