Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

Ōe opens with an ugly premise and then complicates it immediately: a group of reform-school boys, evacuated from the city for their own safety during wartime, are marched to an isolated mountain village and, when plague breaks out among the village's livestock and then its people, simply abandoned there, the villagers fleeing and blockading every route out rather than risk contagion. What follows isn't the chaos an adult reader might expect from delinquents left unsupervised but something closer to its opposite: the boys, joined by a Korean boy the village had already segregated, a deserting soldier, and eventually a young girl, build a functioning, cooperative small society with its own labor, its own rough justice, and, for the narrator, his first real experience of tenderness.

That interlude is more central to the book than the eventual return of the adults, and Ōe frames the boys' brief self-governance as evidence that the cruelty everyone assumes is native to them was manufactured by the institutions and the war that discarded them in the first place, not by anything essential to who they are. The girl the narrator comes to love, and who dies of the same plague that emptied the village of its adults, gives the interlude its clearest measure of what these boys were actually capable of when nobody powerful enough to punish them was watching: not the savagery their reform-school label predicts, but grief, loyalty, and something close to a working community.

Ōe wrote Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids at twenty-three, his first novel, and its raw, propulsive prose, sentences that shove forward past ordinary grammatical caution, reads as the work of a writer discovering how much force language could carry before he'd fully learned the rules he was breaking. The novel arrived only a few years after the war's end, when Japan's official memory was already smoothing itself toward stories of collective endurance and shared suffering, and Ōe's insistence on showing wartime Japan abandoning its most disposable children to die of plague rather than risk contamination was received as a genuine provocation, a first shot in a career that would keep returning, from A Personal Matter onward, to institutions failing exactly the people they claimed to protect.