Oe's first novel and the despair of post-war Japen

Kenzaburo Oe's early (first?) novel, from ca. 1955, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (yes, that's the title) is one of those dystopian narratives that feels in some ways post-apocalyptic: a group of about a dozen teenage boys, apparently all or most arrested for some type of juvenile delinquency (at least one is just in the group because his brother was nabbed) are social pariah, marched through rural Japan under armed guard and subject to severe deprivation and brutal discipline. After a long march and truck ride they are penned into an abandoned barn and assigned to a work detail disposing of animal (and human?) carcasses - and it's clear that the dead animals and people were victims of a highly contagious plague. But the setting isn't exactly post-apocalyptic/dystopian - it appears that we're in Japan during the 2nd world war. I'm not sure if there's any basis in fact for this kind of barbaric mistreatment of the young - but we do know about the barbaric mistreatment of Korean women forced into prostitution; in this novel, the victims of plague are part of a South Korean settlement. So, one-third of the way through this relatively short novel, I'm not sure what it is meant to represent - but it's a disturbing narrative to say the least, made even more so by Oe's excellent descriptions of scenes of horror and by his establishment of a nuanced and sympathetic narrative voice. The narrator is one of the boy, close to protective of his younger brother, and willing at times to step forward and be the leader of his group, even though doing so makes him more vulnerable to the whims of their captor. Sometimes the narrator speaks in first-person singular; more often, he speaks in first-person plural, giving us the sense of all the boys as part of a shared consciousness, what one experiences they all experience. There are hints int the first 70 pages of a rebellion by the boys; we'll see how Oe moves and develops his plot - and what he's getting that, aside from a disquieting sense of dread and despair, perhaps typical of the writers of his generation shortly after the devastation of Japan during and after the war.