Oe, Kenzaburo

New York. 1995. Marion Boyars. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0714529974. Translated from the Japanese by Paul St. John Mackintosh & Maki Sugiyama. 189 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Susi Mawani. keywords: Literature Translated Japan Asia . FROM THE PUBLISHER - The first novel by Japan's most celebrated living writer, Nip The Buds, Shoot the Kids recounts the exploits of fifteen teenage reformatory boys evacuated to a remote mountain village in wartime. The narrator who acts as nominal leader of the small band, his younger brother and their comrades are all delinquent outcasts, feared and detested by the local peasants. When plague breaks out, their hosts abandon them and flee, then blockade them inside the empty village, together with a young Korean, an army deserter and a girl evacuee. However, the boys' brief, doomed attempt to build autonomous lives of self-respect, love and tribal valour inevitably fails with the reflux of death and the adult nightmare of war. Nip The Buds, Shoot the Kids encapsulates all the qualities that distinguish Oe's writing: his radical anger; his evocation of myth and archetype and his extraordinary poetic style. Distilling a vast range of influences, from Twain and Golding to Mailer and Cams, it burns with the agony of the existential hero in a time and place where any deviancy meets with savage retribution. Indisputably the greatest post-war Japanese novelist, Kenzaburo Oe has won every major notional literary prize, many international awards, including the 1989 Prix Europalia, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994. He is also revered as the conscience of Japan's modern left. His translated works include Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, A Personal Matter and The Silent Cry. inventory #21254 ISBN: 0714529974.