Walking the Wall

Yesterday I started and finished Kenzaburo Oe’s Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids
for my literature class. I found it to be as powerful as it was
disturbing and beautifully written with a raw, blunt energy that pulled
me through the whole story. I found it interesting that Oe said that
this book, while not a real account of actual events–is an account of
his experience of war. You get a sense of emotional factuality rather
than historical facts that is, in many ways, more powerful than a play
by play of real events. I found two major themes on my first read–the
idea of what it means to be human, and what it means to be human in
extreme conditions, and the idea of the juxtaposition of the sensual
and the obscene. As such, this book is not for the faint of heart,
there are a number of scenes that are disturbing on a number of
levels–and while none of it feels gratuitous–many could find it
offensive.

There are a lot of images of water, the idea of the sea: “Not even
our most reckless boys had the courage to dash into that vast forest,
which raged and grew calm like a sea” (42). “Like a long deluge, the
war sent its mass insanity flooding into the
convolutions of people’s feelings, into every last recess of their
bodies, into the forests, the streets and into the sky” (26).

The book has been touted as a Japanese version of Lord of the Flies,
but I think that is a very inaccurate comparison–although I’ll admit
it has been a very long time since I read Lord of the Flies. The major
difference is that in Nip the Buds, we don’t see a disintegration of
society when the boys are left to their own devices–in fact, the
dehumanization is most centered on the adult villagers. The boys (and
one girl) abandoned in the plague village have a space of innocence and
childhood in the midst of war and chaos and starvation. Boys that are
considered vermin and continuously starved and beaten and worked
hard–have time to “play house,” sled, have a festival, learn to trap,
and generally bond together. Not that this is a garden of eden, by any
means, and innocence is used loosely here.

Because of the stark harshness of the world, the moments of
connection–brothers finding each others hands in the midst of an
extreme condition, the sharing of food, even the sexual encounters–all
stand out as even more poignant.