Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids
Kenzaburo Oe's 1958 debut novel, written when he was twenty-three and later translated by Paul St. John Mackintosh and Maki Sugiyama, is set in the final months of the Second World War. A group of fifteen reformatory boys is evacuated from Tokyo into the mountains, marched through the rain by a shrinking number of guards, and finally locked into an isolated village where the locals fear them as criminals and disease carriers. When a plague breaks out, the villagers flee, sealing the boys inside. For one strange interlude the narrator and his friends run the abandoned village themselves, falling in love, hunting, burying the dead, and tasting an unsupervised freedom none of them has ever known, before the adults return. Oe, who would later win the Nobel Prize, wrote the book as a furious indictment of the wartime adult world, and it remains one of the great Japanese novels of the postwar generation.
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Late in WWII, a group of fifteen reform-school boys is evacuated to a remote Japanese mountain village. When plague breaks out, the villagers seal the boys in and flee, leaving the children to govern themselves.
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids was written by Kenzaburo Oe and originally published in Japanese in 1958. It was Oe's debut novel. Oe won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994.
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids is fictional but inspired by Kenzaburo Oe's wartime childhood in rural Japan. The setting and conditions reflect documented experience even though the events are invented.
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids is 189 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids takes most readers 3 to 4 hours to finish.
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids is a standalone novel by Kenzaburo Oe, not part of a series.
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
