Trying to figure out the allegorical significance, if any, of Oe's Nip the Buds...

About two-thirds through Kenzaburo Oe's first novel, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (1958, St.-John tr.) and am still impressed with this novel though it's exceptionally dark. Somewhat like an end-of-world dystopian novel - comparisons w/ Lord of the Flies are obvious and even noted in one of the jacket blurbs: A group of about a dozen boys labelled juvenile delinquents (we get no good info on what crimes they may have committed) consigned to some kind of work gang and given the task of burying rotting corpses, human and animal; their over-seers learn of suspect that the dead had died from the plague and they abandon the village, in effect imprisoning the boys in what seems to be certain death from the plague. A few other young people, in particular a young girl, also turn up in this village - apparently consigned to starve and die there along w/ other Koreans, whom the Japanese during the war years considered to be an inferior race or population. So we watch the boys manage to survive, make some attempts at escape, get into a few fights, and the narrator falls in love with the young girl - they have sex, but it is described as a violent and unfeeling action, more like a spasm of hatred than anything loving or even pleasant. The question throughout is: What does this mean? Is it just an imagined adventure story, that could be re-enacted in any time or culture? Or is there something specific to Japanese culture. During the war? Were there gangs of homeless boys pressed into service and struggling to survive? Postwar? Were there gangs of boys roaming through the nearly destroyed civilization? Do the boys represent the entire nation during or after the war, struggling to survive and to rebuilt a society? Clearly, the boy are victims - though Oe's portrayal of them isn't entirely sympathetic. He seems to be getting at an indictment of Japanese - or perhaps any - culture that can dispose of their troubled youth, but I sense that we are not to interpret this novel literally; there's some kind of symbolic or allegorical level that, even this far in, I can't quite connect. Perhaps the concluding chapters will clarify some of the significance, or else perhaps it's must enigmatic, like the works of some of Oe's predecessors like Abe or Mishima.