Rating: 
Summary: Shoot the Kids...
Review: Oe is a brilliant writer. This was the first book I have read by him, and I was taken away. Leaving no harsh image unspoken, Oe isn't bashful about writing details that may make the reader's stomache churn. To describe the book in a very breif synopsis, a group of reform school boys get abandoned amidst a plauge. The setting is post World War 2 Japan and the boys find a leader from the narrator, and form their own community. Children are forced to grow up far too fast, and their age has no relevance to their minds. Once the narrator becomes an adult, and sheds his last memories of child hood, even his pride of adulthood is stripped away from him. Filled with beautiful sentance structure and much philisophical thoughts, you will find yourself constantly quoting this book. I have reccomended it to all my friends. It is a stunning read and was a Nobel prize winner.
Rating:
Summary: Shoot the Kids...
Review: Oe is a brilliant writer. This was the first book I have read by him, and I was taken away. Leaving no harsh image unspoken, Oe isn't bashful about writing details that may make the reader's stomache churn. To describe the book in a very breif synopsis, a group of reform school boys get abandoned amidst a plauge. The setting is post World War 2 Japan and the boys find a leader from the narrator, and form their own community. Children are forced to grow up far too fast, and their age has no relevance to their minds. Once the narrator becomes an adult, and sheds his last memories of child hood, even his pride of adulthood is stripped away from him. Filled with beautiful sentance structure and much philisophical thoughts, you will find yourself constantly quoting this book. I have reccomended it to all my friends. It is a stunning read and was a Nobel prize winner.
Rating:
Summary: A haunting tale that will linger in your mind for days...
Review: A sparse and chilling tale that recounts the worst week in the lives of 15 adolescent juvenile delinquents left abandoned in a plague infested village. This first novel of Kenzaburo Oe clearly shows his brilliance in capturing the essence of the human condition - warts and all, and why he would go on to win the Nobel prize in literature in 1994. The emotional themes of abandonment and isolation are expertly brought to life and devices such as not providing any details regarding geographic setting and exclusion of character names (with the exception of Minami and Li) will draw uneasy, slow building tension to readers. A lean, expertly translated read that contains numerous scenes and passages that will stay vivid in your memory for days on end.
Rating:
Summary: Although very harsh a very good book
Review: From the beginning of Nip the buds... the characters and their emotions are what most captured my attention. Oe uses extrememly harsh images and the way the children are treated throughout the book disturbed me to the point of anger. These parts did not detract from the book, however, they only added to the pure, simple emotions that Oe creates so vividly. The language is very easy to read, but some scenes are not... If you are not too sensitive to fairly vulgar images i highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful
Review: I have a friend once suffered from pneumonia. She read this book in the hospital when she had broken one of her ribs from a coughing fit. That is how pained and weak she was at that time. After she read the book she said she forgot her own anguish and cried for the suffering characters in this touching and tender book. I picked it up and have never been the same again. It made me angry, sad, and I wanted to do something about the injustice in this world. It made me a better person.
Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful and painful
Review: I was entranced by this little book. I am new to Oe, but found the direct style stimulating. The images are strong and painful. The sense of tragedy is palpable (and seems to have pervaded the author's own life); but where there is tragedy, there must be lost beauty - and Oe communicates the beauty as well. I'll read more of Oe's works.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful and painful
Review: I was entranced by this little book. I am new to Oe, but found the direct style stimulating. The images are strong and painful. The sense of tragedy is palpable (and seems to have pervaded the author's own life); but where there is tragedy, there must be lost beauty - and Oe communicates the beauty as well. I'll read more of Oe's works.
Rating:
Summary: Dark, beautiful, tragic.
Review: My introduction to Kenzaburo Oe, "Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids" struck me with the force of a bamboo spear. With his beautiful prose (and the complementary translation by Mackintosh and Sugiyama), Oe paints his characters with the brush of traditional Japan but in the style of a contemporary miscreant. Throughout, the book conveys relentlessly brutal portraits of an altered, horrific reality. From the moment the reformatory boys are introduced to the end of their abandonment and the narrator's final, fearful sentences, Oe drags the reader through the hell of his ambiguous setting. Pulled along with the narrator, his brother, and their reform school compatriots, the reader follows into the nightmare of a plague-infested village and their utter isolation. While the boys struggle to eke out their existence and build lives in their newfound freedom, one is constantly on edge awaiting the collapse of their delicate system. When, finally, the villagers return and the madness of the world indeed crushes their fragile independence, the reader emulates the boys in their sense of relief and subsequent betrayal. One of Oe's first novels, the deft manipulation of the reader's emotions and interactions between the characters promised great things for the young writer. As I begin another of his books, I cannot help but agree that he deserved his Nobel.
Rating:
Summary: Disturbing, Amazing, Powerful, Raw
Review: Some people love this book and some people hate this book. I, for one, think that this is an amazing piece of literature. People who hate this book or Oe's writing in general point all too often to Oe's frank use of graphic sexual, violent, and otherwise extremely disturbing imagery (for example, a penis in the wind is at one point a very potent symbol in this book). However, Oe's real power lies in his refusal to budge in the face of convention and his use of genitals, blood, human nature, and the deepest, most carnal parts of the human heart to create a powerful work of literature. This book, as Oe's first major novel, shows his philosophy and thoughts concerning human nature, Japanese society, and the world in their raw form, even before the birth of his autistic child that so influenced his later writing (for the better). This book is about reformatory boys in wartime Japan who are ferried into a small mountain town where a plague is breaking out. The villagers flee the town when the plague gains strength, blockading it and leaving the boys behind with a few other unintended captives. ALthough prisoners these boys and their new friends may be, they soon begin to think of the village as their autonomous property and to create a just soicety, free of time and the worries of the outside world- an illusion that develops and is summarily shattered in a painful and beautiful manner. This book is amazing for the incredible desperation, frankness, fear, feeling, and symbolic meaning that Oe puts into every character and every object in every sentence. His prose has been called "like an ice pick," a statement that most probably refers to its tendancy to deliver a cruel, poignant, sharp, and necessary message through frank, thoughtful, and often disturbing means. This book IS disgusting and horrifying at points- but so is war and life in general, Oe masterfully points out. This book is not for the faint-hearted, but it is for those who enjoy thinking, great literature, and learning something fundamental about human nature. Not everyone can or will like this book, but everyone should at least try. Highly recommended, along with most of Oe's other works.
Rating:
Summary: A punch in the stomach...
Review: That's what my wife told me when I picked it up to begin reading it. But that's what a good book is supposed to feel like. And it did. It was dark, cruel, and painful,, and contained vivid descriptions of inhumanity, though it was not without its moments of humor.
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