'Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids' by Kenzaburo Oe (Review)

Kenzaburo Oe is a writer I haven't read much by for one reason or another, so January in Japan is the perfect time to remedy that.  I recently acquired three of his works second-hand from Abe Books, and I'm starting today with his first real novel - a book concerning youthful misdemeanours and something far more sinister...

*****
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (translated by Paul St John Mackintosh and Maki Sugiyama) is a story of reformatory kids during wartime Japan.  A group of sullen boys are in the process of being evacuated to a rural village when the narrator is joined by his younger brother.  The young boy isn't a juvenile delinquent though; his dad is just taking advantage of the evacuation...

When the kids arrive at their destination, they soon find that the villagers despise them (and that there is no chance of escape from the isolated location).  However, when an illness breaks out in the village, the kids are abandoned by the villagers, left stranded in the middle of nowhere with no hope of rescue.  It's time to fend for themselves...

It's a superb story, very easy to read, but with a deeper meaning.  We see the young delinquents as the dregs of society, at the mercy of the heartless villagers.  After being forced to bury the animals that have died from the sickness, they are left to their fate:

"The primitive Japanese, so terrified of the resurrection of their dead, had folded the legs of the corpses and piled their graves with massively heavy slabs of stone.  We too stamped the earth with legs strengthened by fear of our friend, once a comrade of ours, rising up from out of the earth and rampaging in the village where children had been left behind alone and cut off."
p.102 (Picador, 1996)

Is it all too late though? The germs are spreading...

Nip the Buds,... is a very Lord of The Flies-like novel in the way the young protagonists are left to sort out their own affairs.  After the initial confusion, they are forced to concentrate on organisation, including a choice of leader, allocating accommodation and working out how to get food.  As they start to hunt and gather, the reader is cheering them on in their quest for survival in the harsh mountainous terrain. 

One of the best parts of the book is its depiction of the children, and it's important to remember that despite their 'crimes', that's just what they are, kids.  Initially locked up overnight without water, then abandoned without food, the kids talk big but don't really understand the big picture.  There are several examples of the children exposing themselves, or sitting around, masturbating, time out from idly killing time in the sun.  For children who have never experienced freedom, the question of how to live without a rigid structure is a weighty one.

Another interesting theme is the relationship between the narrator and his younger brother (Oe doesn't provide us with many names here...).  The central figure is the tough one, the delinquent, and the leader of the group.  He becomes increasingly torn between his roles as elder brother and leader, and his growing affection for a girl left behind by the villagers.  Despite his best efforts, he can't keep everyone happy, no matter how much he wants to, and eventually he is going to have to make some painful choices...

There's a lot more to Nip the Buds,... than this though.  It can also be read as an allegory of the atrocities of war and the failure of Japanese society:

"Through our experience of escape and failure as we shifted from village to village, we had learned that we were surrounded by gigantic walls.  In the farming villages, we were like splinters stuck in skin.  In an instant we would be pressed in on from all sides by coagulating flesh, extruded and suffocated.  These farmers, wearing the hard armour of their clannishness, refused to allow others to pass through, let alone settle in.  It was we, a small group, who were just drifting on a sea which never took in people from outside but threw them back." (p.25)

In fact, this is true for all Japanese of the time - you can shut up and fall in line or else.  This attitude, Oe argues, got Japan into this mess in the first place - the horrors of the war were a consequence of ordinary Japanese following the lead of the insane military.  Woe betide anyone who thinks of standing up against this system...

At the end of the novel, we see order reasserted, with cruel, savage consequences.  It would be nice if we ended on a bright note with hope for the future - instead we are back in the dark, primeval forests, cold and scared.  While Oe believes that the results for society of people blindly following their leaders is tragic, the consequences for individuals who stand up for their beliefs are horrific...

A Nobel Pursuit

Nobel time has come and gone for another year, and (alas) Haruki Murakami still hasn't brought home the prize.  While the committee (hopefully) has many years yet to rectify this, it means that there are still only two Japanese Nobel laureates in the literature section - Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburo Oe.  So, while we wait for 1Q84 to arrive on our doorsteps (and ponder what might have been), I thought it might be nice to have a look at a couple of works from the writers Murakami is hoping to emulate...

*****
Kawabata's Beauty and Sadness is a novella centred on Toshio Oki, a middle-aged novelist, and Otoko Ueno, an artist whom Oki (while already married) seduced at an early age, and whose life he altered dramatically.  Decades after their affair was brought to an end, the writer decides to visit his former love in Kyoto to hear the New Year bells ringing, and on this trip he meets Keiko Sakami, a young woman who has become Otoko's protégée - and perhaps a whole lot more...

Otoko greets Oki warmly, if warily, and it is actually Keiko who shows more of an interest in the writer (whose most famous work is a novel based on his relationship with Otoko).  It soon becomes clear that the stunning and vibrant Keiko knows all about Otoko and Oki's affair, and while, on the surface at least, she appears to want to respect her teacher's wishes to treat her old flame with respect, the reader soon suspects that she has another motive for her interest in Oki - revenge.

My first thought on reading this (aided by memories of several other J-Lit classics) was that if you are to believe fiction, Japanese women are most definitely not to be crossed.  It's not giving much away to say that the most interesting character in the novella is Keiko, a femme fatale in the vein of Mitsuko (the memorable character in Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's Quicksand).  It's not just her scheming against Oki and his family which is so disturbing, it's also her behaviour when she is with Otoko.  Urgent, pouting, aggressive, meek, flirty... she is anything but predictable.

As is so often the case with Japanese literature though, nature itself is just as important as the people who move through it.  Kawabata is a master of painting pictures with words in his works, and Beauty and Sadness is no exception.  The reader is treated to sumptuous descriptions of Arashiyama and the other mountains surrounding Kyoto; we walk with Oki through the hills of Kamakura; and we gaze out over the beautiful Lake Biwa, still unaware of what is to happen there.  There certainly is a lot of beauty in Kawabata's writing - if you read this book, you'll see that behind the beauty, there is often a fair amount of sadness too...

*****
If Kawabata is the traditional, aesthetic Yin of modern Japanese literature though, Kenzaburo Oe is most definitely the foreign-influenced, hard-nosed Yang.  In contrast to the understated elegance of Beauty and Sadness, A Personal Matter, one of Oe's earliest works, is a rather modern and realistic affair.

The short novel introduces us to Bird, a twenty-seven-year-old cram-school teacher, who is hanging around in Tokyo, waiting for news on the birth of his first child.  When the call finally comes, he senses that not all is well, and on arriving at the hospital, his fears are confirmed.  His son has been born with a large lump on his head, which the doctors describe as a brain hernia.  Faced with a situation where his son will either die in a matter of days or grow up severely mentally disabled,  Bird leaves the hospital and quickly begins to unravel...

Bird's trial of character as he deliberates whether to make an effort to save his son's life, a decision which will result in him giving up his life's dream of travelling to Africa, may seem grotesque (and more than a little over the top), but it is actually a slightly exaggerated metaphor for the sense of a loss of freedom which accompanies the joy of welcoming a child into the world.  The problems his son is facing allow Bird to consider running away from his responsibilities, throwing away his career and falling into the arms of a former girlfriend in an attempt to regain his freedom.  It isn't until the last few pages, after many tortuous episodes, that we are told the decision Bird has come to.

A Personal Matter is a thought-provoking book, but in a gritty, unflinching way.  It is reminiscent of John Updike's Rabbit, Run (written four years earlier) in both its content and its style, very different indeed to Beauty and Sadness.  Where Kawabata's works are steeped in tea houses and temples, Oe shows us the underbelly of Japanese life - tenements, amusement arcades, gay bars, dodgy clinics - and doesn't shy away from explicit sex, alcoholism and violence.  Slammed by many critics at the time for his sullying of pure Japanese writing, Oe is obviously an influence on several contemporary Japanese writers.  Haruki Murakami is, of course, one that comes to mind, but it's safe to say that writers such as Ryu Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto and Natsuo Kirino were also nudged into their writing paths by Oe's Westernised style.

*****
I've now read four of Kawabata's works, while A Personal Matter is my second of Oe's novels.  Oe may verge on the disturbing at some points, but I enjoy the way he dissects the issues facing normal modern Japanese families, ones without homes overlooking the valleys of Kamakura.  Perhaps though that's why the two works reviewed here complement each other so well: the delicate and the crude, the subdued and the brash, the inside and the outside...

...the Yin and the Yang.

Down in the Deep, Dark Forest...

Despite my frequent forays into Japanese literature over the past couple of years, there are still a couple of glaring gaps in my J-Lit C.V., namely my lack of reading of novels from the country's two Nobel Laureates, Kenzaburo Oe and Yasunari Kawabata.  The latter is on the agenda for the next couple of months, but today's post sees me tackle the first of these giants, with a review of Oe's novel The Silent Cry (translated by John Bester) - which is (un)strangely familiar...

*****

The novel is centred on two men, the reserved Mitsusaburo Nedokoro and his charismatic younger brother Takashi.  The two brothers have had their share of problems in life: Taka fled to America to escape the guilt felt after his mentally-disabled sister's suicide and his role in violent student riots; Mitsu is emotionally drained, crushed by the double blow of the arrival of a mentally-disabled son and the unexpected, somewhat bizarre, suicide of a close friend.  Therefore, when Taka returns from the States, suggesting a return to their small hometown in Shikoku, Mitsu is happy to go along with his plan.  However, the past has a funny way of returning to haunt the present...

The Silent Cry is a superb book, packing a tremendous amount into its 274 pages.  Oe draws the reader through his thoughts on suicide, family ties and mental illness, using a series of parallels reaching back in time.  The original Japanese title Man'en no Gannen no Futoboru (Football in Year One of the Gan'en Era), actually refers back to 1860, a time when Japan was making its first, tiny efforts to communicate with the outside world again, and the year in which the Nedokoro's ancestors took part in events which are then repeated a century later.  For those concerned about the use of a sporting word in the title, fear not - sport plays an insignificant role in the book, to the extent where I only found out afterwards, via Wikipedia, that the 'football' involved was actually the American, relatively kicking-less, gridiron version...  The English title comes from a comment Mitsu makes, comparing the last actions of his late friend to a silent cry; not for help, however, but more for communication, letting people know of his feelings

The setting of the novel adds to the mood Oe creates, with the Nedokoro's hometown being a valley completely surrounded by a dark, menacing forest.  The approaching winter, and the promise (or threat) of heavy snow which it brings, along with the damaged bridge cutting off the only road in or out of the village, heighten this sense of isolation, mirroring the feelings of the main characters, each of whom is trying to come to terms with their own issues, in their own way.  Events naturally build to a climax, but the reader is never sure exactly what that climax will bring.

From the very first page, two things were very clear to me.  Firstly, that I was going to like this book (just as with Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, which I read recently, I was sucked straight into the writer's world); secondly, that the Oe influence on Haruki Murakami which I had read a little about was clearly evident.  From Mitsu's very first action of getting up, going out to the garden, and descending into a hole, Murakami fans are in very familiar territory.

In fact there are many features of The Silent Cry which impact on Murakami's work , especially his early novels.  In addition to Mitsu's predilection for doing his thinking underground, the nickname of 'the Rat', given to Mitsu by one of Taka's friends, and Mitsu's stoic, almost passive attitude to the events unfolding around him, some of which are actually rather humiliating, are reminiscent of Murakami's early nameless protagonists.  Even the Japanese title provided inspiration for the younger writer, whose second short novel was entitled 1973-nen no Pinuboru (Pinball, 1973).  Even the idea of the isolated valley could be seen, if we were stretching the point (and, where Murakami is concerned, I usually am), as the model for the Town in Hard-Boiled Wonderland...

Murakami influences aside, this is a book which demands to be read and reread, which I'll no doubt be doing at some point, especially as I don't think I paid this book the attention it deserves.  It took me a week to get through it, mainly because of the demands of starting a new job (and looking after an unexpected visitor from overseas!), and that was too long for me.  If I'd read this in three or four days, as I had expected to, I suspect that the narrative would have flowed a lot better, and the mood Oe created would have held up more; the start-stop approach meant that I often took time to get back into the book when picking it up again.

So, just as 2009 was the Year of Yukio Mishima, and 2010 was the Year of Natsume Soseki and Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, 2011 may well be the year of Kenzaburo Oe.  But will it also be the year of Yasunari Kawabata?  Well, I'll have to get back to you on that one...