Just now I have finished one of them - Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe.

It's a rather depressing book, and perhaps also a slightly muddled one. The gist of the plot is that a troop of reform school boys in wartime Japan are evacuated to a remote mountain village. Once there, however, the villagers are taken with panic over the perceived outbreak of a plague, and abandon the boys, barricading them inside the village.

How everything plays-out inside the actual village, during the perceived outbreak, is simultaneously the most interesting part of the book an the vaguest. The crux of the book seems to be using plague, and the paranoia and obsessive cleansing it incites, to examine that aspect of Japanese society which allowed them to end-up where it was in the mid forties. Hence the title - comparing nipping the bad buds early to getting rid of the bad kids before they can, according to the grown-ups, inevitably grow into bad adults.

Of course, the part where the kids are trapped in the town just goes to show that they probably wouldn't grow to be any worse, and might actually turn-out better, than their captors. 

All in all I liked it pretty good. I was just sort of expecting a Lord of the Flies rip-off, to be honest.

It's also sort of interesting that these themes are still being examined quite a bit in Japanese fiction today. It doesn't take a lot of effort to find many, many points of comparison between this and Battle Royale, for example, although the plots have no really similarity.

And the ending is bleak.

I would heartily recommend this book.

Perhaps I should found a book club?

Tags: books
Current Mood: apathetic
Current Music: hindi dance anthems from a housemate's laptop