Trying to get at the significance of Oe's Nip the Buds... - is it allegorical?

Kenzaburo Oe's 1958  novel Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids has an intriguingly open ending leaving us to ponder the fate of the band of so-called juvenile delinquents in what appears to be wartime Japan, though we clearly do know that the narrator, one of the boys, escapes from the village where they'd been held captive and lives to tell the tale - reminds me there of Ishmael at the end of Moby Dick. I'm still ot sure and never will no for certain what Oe is trying to represent in this novel: Is it an imagined adventure tale about the fate of a group of boys abandoned to live on their own in a village cut off from the rest of the world, a different take on Lord of the Flies, or is there some deeper allegorical significance to the boys and their fate: Do they represent all of human-kind in their struggle against the elements for survival? In other words, is this an existential novel, an examination of "man's (and woman's) fate"? I wish I could answer these open questions or even offer an opinion, but I'm just not certain. What is clear is that on the adventure level alone this novel as tense and captivating, but also dark and disquieting; it has some elements in common with Abe's more famous Woman in the Dunes. Abe's novel is famous in part because of the excellent movie adaptation; Oe's would be too painful and dark for a movie, I think - full of brutality, bestial behavior, lots of spasmodic sex, vomiting and illness and nausea -  I can't imagine sitting through a screen version of this tale, and it would feel graphic and even exploitative - though as a novel it feels more sorrowful and sympathetic  to the young boys and more of a social critique, as even the title tells us: These young boys are expendable, as are so many social misfits and outcasts. Whether there is any factual basis during wartime Japan, analogous to the Nazi camps and exterminations, I have no idea.