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: A wonderful story of being a reformatory boy in wartime.
Review: Nip the bud shoot the kids is one of the best books I've read in a while. The different setting and narrating will keep you wanting to know more. You will start to imagine yourself in the young mens shoes. The book is as realistic as they come even though it's fiction. For example, Minami and an accomplish tried to escape from one of the remote villages they were in, they got caught by some of the villager and Minami talks about how they were chased and beating by some of the villagers. I have never really liked books about wartime, so for those who feel the same way I did, you need to give Nip the Bud Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe a try.
Rating: 
Summary: A.B.C.D. Encirclement
Review: Oe lachrymosely indulges every anti-Japanese propagandist in the american media conglomerate (Ingram) with ample opportunity to smack their lips over the "moral failings" of Japan. The fact that this ineffectual moralist won the Noble prize while it was denied to Mishima speaks volumes on what supine expectations the american propaganda industry expects from Japan. Both left and right. Writer like Oe and Murakami... are parasites getting fat by preening all the morbid phobias of a degenerate american elite, allowing them to wallow in self-adulation. What would Mr. Oe have done during the war? Sheepishly meet the demands of an expansionist american navy? Allowed China to invade the country so as not to offend their sensitivities?...Japan chose WAR rightfully, even with the foreknowledge that it was a lost cause. And Japan would not even exist today if Mr. Oe were around then. Instead of Oe or Murakami or Bannana Yoshimoto's insipid writing for privileged sectors in the american market (The Nanny Diaries) feeding that markets endless appetite for peeling scabs and self-abasement try and find a video of the Shunya Ito film Pride, which angered ALL the right people in the world and was one of the most popular films in recent Japanese cinema. Or any of the great Yukio Mishima's books, who was indeed what he described himself to be "the conscience of post war Japan".
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: 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.
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.
Rating: 
Summary: Exquisite moments but uneven translation!
Review: There are moments in this novella in which Oe's descriptive ability and allegorical vision combine to produce a work of power. Oe is fairly new to me, but the broader historical horizon in --and of -- which he writes is not. Perhaps as a result, I found the story deeply moving, on many levels. As a writer, however, I have to say that I found the translation very uneven. I'm "turned off" and my reading is interrupted by obvious grammatical mistakes and this text contains several. It is possible that the translators might plead special circumstances but I doubt that would really hold. From the point of view of overall quality, this translation would --I think-- have a hard time competing with Jay Rubin's work with Haruki Murakami's "Wind up Bird.."
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