'NIP THE BUDS': THE FLOWERING OF DARK GENIUS

Author: By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff

Date: Tuesday, June 6, 1995
Page: 30
Section: LIVING

"Nip the Buds Shoot the Kids" is a dark and angry book that owes something to the methods and preoccupations of the French literature Oe was studying as a student, and in particular to the style and philosophy of Albert Camus.

The central situation, curiously, runs parallel to that in another first novel written four years before, which Oe was probably not in a position to know, William Golding's "Lord of the Flies." But above all else, "Nip the Buds Shoot the Kids" is a fiercely original book. Oe's own childhood in a remote, almost medieval village; his knowledge of wartime on a secondary Japanese island; his fury at the way adults betray youth; his rage at the way national leaders betray a people simply blow apart his models -- and blow away comparisons.

The setting is a remote and forested island, we don't know where; the time is during World War II, but it could be almost any time during the last 1,000 years. "It was a time of killing. 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."

The style, as translated, is direct, deceptively simple, unflinching about every ugly fact of life. It was language that profoundly shocked the audience for "literature" in postwar Japan; it is language that retains power to shock an American reader today. It is, however, language that fits the narrator -- a delinquent boy, one of a group from a reformatory in a metropolitan center. The reformatory has been strafed in an air raid, so the boys are being evacuated, traveling toward a primitive village in the country that is supposed to become their refuge.

Once they arrive, they are met with unfeigned hostility, although the villagers must accept the presence of the boys or risk defying authority.

There is an outbreak of plague; the boys must dig a mass grave for dead animals. Before long, people begin dying, too, and the villagers take flight, leaving the boys to create their own republic in the solidarity of the abandoned. They make free use of the deserted village. Their new life is no idyll either, but it represents an improvement over "civilization." Oe describes the setting of traps, the roasting of a pheasant, the fun of sliding in the snow. For most of the book the boys have been "forced to twist bodies and minds to mould ourselves to the many things that confronted us daily"; now, at least, they are molding themselves to nature.

But there is death too -- one of the boys dies, and so does a young village girl who has remained behind; the narrator's younger brother vanishes in a flood. The doctor from the next village refuses all help. Finally the villagers return and slaughter a deserter the boys have befriended; they tell the boys that the authorities are coming, and they are to say that there was no plague and that the villagers never left their homes. The narrator resists both complicity and the accompanying threats and flees into the forest.

According to the preface by the translators, Oe returned to this story in 1980 and wrote a kind of sequel ("The Trial of 'Nip the Buds Shoot the Kids' ''). The narrator, now an adult, returns to the village to put it on trial, which proceeds in the form of a ritual reenactment. When justice fails, he goes to America and ends up fighting in Vietnam: The story has repeated itself.

It is part of Oe's method to keep circling around his work. "Nip the Buds Shoot the Kids" is full of images, patterns, motifs, structural devices, ideas, themes that will reappear throughout his career. But it also presents a complete and compelling world -- a world powerfully remembered, powerfully imagined.

DYER ;05/10 NIGRO ;06/06,06:23 BOOK06