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
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The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima is a novel about a thirteen-year-old boy, Noboru, who is in a gang while his mother is a widow. One day, his mother is invited onto a vessel to help out an actress where they meet Ryuji, a sailor. Ryuji is in port for a few days, and begins to take a liking to Noboru’s mother, Fusako. Over the course of those few days, they sleep together while Noboru watches through a peephole from his room. Due to the gang’s hatred for fathers and the adult world, Noboru is conflicted because he adores Ryuji’s profession and idolizes him, while also disliking the fact that he doesn’t fit the standards of the gang. On one of the days Ryuji is still there, Noboru and the gang capture a stray cat, kill it, skin it, and crush its organs in their hands. Upon returning from their killing, Ryuji sees them, but doesn’t suspect anything. Once Ryuji’s leave is over, he returns to his ship, the Rakuyo, and sails away. Ryuji returns in the winter, where he intends to stay on land due to his love for Fusako by proposing to her. However, Ryuji is still heartbroken about leaving his sailing life and likes to tell stories of his tales whenever he can. Everything comes to a head when one night Fusako and Ryuji are making love in the dark when they spy the light of the peep hole and find Noboru sleeping there. Once he’s found out, Noboru believes Ryuji will give him a beating (one Fusako even directed), but is likely even more shamed when it results in a comforting talk from Ryuji. Betrayed by his idol, Noboru goes to his gang with all the wrongs that Ryuji committed, and the gang concocts a plan to drug and kill Ryuji. The day of the wedding, Noboru lures Ryuji out to meet the gang by the docks, where they get on a train, hike through a tunnel, and arrive on a desolate hill overlooking the sea. Ryuji is somewhat suspicious, but enjoys the fact that they were interested in his sailor tales, so he begins discussing all of his adventures. While he is speaking, Ryuji begins to second guess his decision to stay on land. Then, Noboru offers him tea laced with sleeping pills, which he drinks, and the gang’s plans are set in motion.
In this novel, Mishima has concocted a deftly violent, intriguing, and impassioned piece of literature. There are moments that are rendered in absolutely terrifying detail (i.e. the cat scene), and his understanding of violence, love, and betrayal are striking. What interested me was the near irony of belief of some of the boys in the gang and the way they treated fathers. Fathers, in their eyes, were scum and because they were scum, nothing they could do would save them from their own being. While some of the boy’s hatred stemmed justifiably (i.e. parents beating them or absent), it was noted at least one of the boys had a loving father that prayed with them. From an outside perspective, this type of thinking is completely illogical, though when Ryuji began to step into the role of being a father, he was lumped in with the rest of them. I found it to be an interesting take on how the identity of someone can be what people hate even though they did nothing wrong. In this case, Fusako had an agency look into Ryuji’s past and found nothing but an upstanding sailor and man. Mishima thus constructs an ideal man: no debts, faithful, hard-working, doesn’t reprimand, strong, and outgoing. And yet, the ideal is still the death of him in the eyes of the gang. In some ways, the gang’s thought process is contradictory in that the boys couldn’t be alive if not for their fathers and yet the boys utterly despise them. Also, Mishima even goes out to say that the boys come from well-to-do backgrounds commenting on their large lunches, and yet Mishima demonstrates an evil inside of the boys. The structure of the novel leads itself to being masterly crafted, with not only the seasons factoring into the tone of the novel (i.e. summer = passion, winter = violence), but in the way the novel expertly cuts off once the reader knows the inevitable. After having read only a handful of Mishima’s novels, I can certainly tell I will enjoy the rest. Final Rating: 5/5 A Quiet Life by Kenzaburō Ōe is a novel about a woman and her older brother who is handicapped. Their father and mother travel to California where the father is trying to get out of writer’s block, and believes being a writer-in-residence will help him. All the while, the woman, Ma-chan, the older brother, Eeyore, and younger brother, O-chan, continue to live in Japan. Ma-chan has taken up the responsibility of caring for Eeyore, taking him to music practice at Mr. Shigeto’s, taking him to his job at a handicap workshop, and eventually to swim practices with Mr. Arai. Throughout the novel, Ma-chan worries that Eeyore will either have his fits out in public, will be hurt by other people, or will act out his sexual urges. None of this comes to pass, but her worries become real when it’s alluded to that Mr. Arai was involved in two deaths on a cruise. They continue to get swimming lessons with Mr. Arai, until one day when Mr. Shigeto approaches him about an incident and then gets beat up. Finally, as Ma-chan talks about her dreams of marrying a Mr. Arai, Eeyore discusses this with Mr. Arai. Mr. Arai then decides to take them to his place, where he attempts to have sex with Ma-chan, but is beat up by Eeyore. The novel ends with their mother returning home and the father still toiling away in America.
Ōe creates such an interesting narrative through his use of Ma-chan’s voice, the discussions of movies, music, and of Ma-chan’s worry. It’s a novel that highly contemplates what it means to care for a disabled family member, and shows in some instances, the reverse (i.e. the care giver needs to be the one who is cared for) is true. This occurs while Eeyore protects Ma-chan from an oncoming crowd at a train station even while he is having a fit and in the last moment where Eeyore beats up Mr. Arai to save Ma-chan from being raped. It’s a compelling novel that shows the breadth of the care siblings have for each other. Final Rating: 5/5 The Resurrection Appearances: Fragments of a Daybook by Jay Aquinas Thompson is a nonfiction chapbook detailing the days, weeks, and months after the death of their mother. It recounts the moment they encountered her body, her life, as well as ruminations on Christianity. I particularly liked the lines, “When people asked me how grief felt, I’d say it didn’t feel like anything, it wasn’t a feeling; it was a metabolism.” and, “God is a fire victim on bedrest: from each burn point an angel is born;” It’s a deeply moving chapbook on how Thomson views their mother’s death, how their child, Finn, deals with these emotions, and what it all means within the context of religion. Thomson finishes off by writing, “There’s no and then I realized…moment in grief…”
Final Rating: 5/5 The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa is about a housekeeper tasked with taking care of a professor whose memory lasts eighty minutes. The memory loss had been caused by a car accident and now he lives in a tiny dilapidated house where he toils away at math prizes. A beautiful relationship emerges once the son of the housekeeper, nicknamed Root, comes into the equation. The professor cares for Root and is highly protective of him, trying to stop the bleeding from a cut on Roots hand to protecting him from a baseball. Both Root and the professor are enamored with baseball, but in two different ways through math and though the athleticism of the game. Throughout the novel, the housekeeper takes the professor and Root to a baseball game, she learns the tragic nature of the professor’s past, and in the end throws a birthday party for Root as well as for the professor winning a huge math prize. However, as the novel progresses, the professor’s memory shortens. In the end, the professor’s sister-in-law admits him to a living facility where he eventually dies.
Ogawa is a master at creating strikingly quiet and profound moments whether in the discussion of math or in the small details of the professor. I was charmed by the relationship between the professor and Root, implying that love and friendship go beyond time and memory. It’s a heartwarming and tender novel that I am glad I revisited. Final Rating: 5/5 If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery is a collection of short stories focusing on the lives of Jamaican Americans living in Florida. The stories feature a tight cast of characters, Trelawny, Delano, their parents, and their cousin Cukie. The collection shows these characters at their lowest points, living out of their cars while working for an apartment complex, a father who traffics drugs, and other moments where they simply need to find a way to get by. I found the whole collection to be striking, but in particular, I enjoyed, ‘In Flux’, because of its comments on how Blackness is perceived in America, ‘Pestilence’, ‘Spashdown’, ‘Independent Living’, and ‘If I Survive You’. In the last story, it provides an intense look at how people view and take advantage of the Jamaican American population. I found the tension and dynamic of the brothers to be powerful. Highly recommend this book.
Final Rating: 5/5 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote is a non-fiction novel about the Kansas murders of the Clutter family in 1959. It follows the lives of the Clutter family leading up to their deaths, as well as describing the murders, Perry and Hickock, as they decide to rob and kill the family. Both Perry and Hickock had been in and out of trouble with the law, and in one such case heard about Mr. Clutter who owned a farm and had a safe with at least ten thousand dollars in it. With that, Hickock concocts a plan to drive to their house once they’re out of prison, rob and kill the family, and disappear. Perry has an idea of them going to Mexico to discover gold after the murders, which they decide is their next course of action. Both Perry and Hickock are described as having tolerated each other, in part because they believed they’d get a big payout. However, once they get to the house, and tie the family up, they can’t find the safe. They collect forty dollars from Mr. Clutter’s wallet, and while Mr. Clutter is tied up, Perry has a momentary psychotic episode and slits Mr. Clutter’s throat. Then, knowing there can’t be any witnesses, he shoots the rest of the family. Then, they escape from the house, begin to cash fraudulent checks, steal from stores and pawn those items off, and finally make their way to Mexico. However, due to Hickock’s spending, they find they have lost all their money, so they decide to return to the US. All the while, the detective on the case, Dewey, searches for clues in the footprints left and the photos of the crime scene. Dewey finally gets a lead when an inmate who previously bunked with Hickock had told him about the Clutter family and how he described the safe to him. Eventually, they catch Perry and Hickock in Las Vegas, where they are brought back to Kansas to stand trial. Their trial is short, with the death sentence being the final verdict. They are on death row for about five and a half years where they appeal the verdict. However, the novel ends with their hangings while Dewey observes them.
Capote masterfully crafts a vibrant and haunting world in this novel, and I felt severely conflicted with the main murderer it focuses on, Perry. It’s alluded he had some sort of schizophrenia, and had had a rough childhood. I liked how at parts of the novel, Capote takes excerpts of people’s conversations, and how both Perry views himself and the rest of the world views him. It’s imagery and conflict feel completely real, and I can see why this novel has existed in the literary cannon. Final Rating: 5/5 Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So is a collection of short stories focused on the lives of Cambodian Americans, their interlinking relationships, and the generational trauma of the Khmer Rouge genocide. ‘Three Woman of Chuck’s Donuts’ is about a family who owns a donut shop while a mysterious man comes to order a single fritter every night without eating it. ‘Superking Son Scores Again’ is about a badminton coach who owns a store and can’t stop reliving his glory days. ‘Maly, Maly, Maly’ is about two cousins who hang out and work at a bootleg DVD store, where they get high, watch porn together, and then go to a ceremony for the rebirth of their aunt. ‘The Shop’ is about a father who owns a mechanic shop, but the business begins to fail after one of the cars is stolen. Other stories I enjoyed were ‘The Monks’ and ‘Human Development’.
The stories feature interlinking characters, though fairly loose in the specific plots between them. Thus, they create a tapestry of what it means to be Khmer, gay, and sometimes aimless. It’s a tender and powerful collection. Final Rating: 5/5 Flux by Jinwoo Chong is a novel about a man, Bo, who loses his job at a magazine company and gets recruited for a job at a company that promises a life-long battery. His introduction to the company is one that is oddly timed with a man, Lev, offering him a job right after he falls down an elevator shaft. At the company, he begins his commute and at 9am, losses his memory of what he did for that day. The story of a younger Bo is threaded throughout, who loses his mother after she is run over by a bus three days before Christmas while bringing him his lunch. Bo is continuously filled with guilt from that moment, and fights with his brother, Kaz, runs away from his home, and then falls and rips open his wrist. Another character, Blue, which turns out to be Bo, decades after his time at the battery company, is preparing to do an interview telling the world the scam the company was running. One day at work, after getting a mysterious alarm on his phone, Bo follows its instructions, which was to use 1% milk in his cereal. This then reveals he is able to visit memories of his life and affect them, essentially becoming a time traveler. Once Bo finds out, he tries to warn his coworker, Ry, but she is then taken by the company and killed with two of her friends. The deaths kick-start in investigation into the company, where the scam and misgiving are revealed. At the interview location, Bo tries to recreate his time travel and is successful. He sets in motion setting his younger self’s alarm, goes to his father right before he has a heart attack and apologies for how terrible of a son he was, brings his younger self back home when he ran away, and finally goes to save his mother from being killed by a bus. Bo is obsessed with a character in a detective show, Raider, which features an Asian cast, but is all the while tinged in racism. Bo converses with the fictional character throughout the novel, explaining his situation, and frames it in the context of the show.
Flux is a dazzling display of Chong’s use of timelines, threaded narratives, and the surreal. The conversing with the Raider character is such a powerful framing device and reminds me of how Matthew Salesses uses something similar in The Sense of Wonder. I also like how the figure-head of the battery company, Io Emsworth, is a pretty good analog to Elizabeth Holmes. But what I am most astounded by is how intricate the timelines coalesce with Bo becoming the Jacket Guy, the phone alarms, and the memories (as with the rest of the novel). There had to have been a lot of planning on the back end on how everything would be put in, and it’s still a wonder to me how well its sense of time bends while reading. I highly recommend this book as Chong’s ability has shown he is a master at his craft. Final Rating: 5/5 Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart is a novel about a boy, Hugh “Shuggie” Bain, living in Glasgow whose mother is an alcoholic, while he is questioning his sexuality. Shuggie initially lives with his mother, father, grandmother, half-brother, and sister. His father, Shug, is a taxi driver who, it turns out, was sleeping with a lot of other women. Shug makes the family move from their place in Sighthill to Pithead, a run-down miner’s town. Then, Shug abandons the family to live with another woman who worked at the taxi company. Throughout all of this, Shuggie’s mother, Agnes, drinks their money away and, many times, tries to kill herself. At Pithead, Shuggie learns he is different from the other boys with the way he walks, talks, and is called terrible names (in addition to being forced to give another boy a handjob and is touched by a taxi driver). By this time, Shuggie’s older sister has moved to Africa and Leek, Shuggie’s older brither, is distancing himself from Agnes. Agnes at one point, however, decides to get sober and gest a job working the night shift at a gas station. She does well for a little while, meets a man named Eugene, and goes to AA meetings. However, after her one-year anniversary of being sober, Eugene invites her to dinner and convinces her to have a drink. From there, Agnes’s drinking worsens and causes terrible pain for Leek and Shuggie. Eventually, Agnes and Shuggie move out of Pithead to start a new life on the East End, but it doesn’t work out. One night, after much drama, Shuggie is in the middle of helping his unconscious mother, when she chokes on her vomit and dies. The final scene is with Shuggie and his new friend, Leanne, helping her alcoholic mother with changing her clothes because she is homeless. In the end, the realization on Shuggie’s sexuality seems to be the light at the end of the tunnel for him.
This novel is expertly told through its Scottish dialect, its acute descriptions of alcoholism, and the way it depicts Shuggie’s sexuality. It’s a novel about abuse, poverty, queerness, drugs, but it’s also about love. There are mentions throughout, and some scenes where Agnes’s abuse shows through, such as her blackout night in the back of a taxi, or her under a pile of coats in a bedroom. And the final scene really was intense, showing that had Agnes continued on her path, she would’ve been just like Leanne’s mother and he would’ve been just like Leanne. It’s a heartbreaking and tender novel and I enjoyed it throughout. Final Rating: 5/5 |
AuthorMaxwell Suzuki is a writer, poet, and photographer based in Los Angeles. Archives
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