SOURCE: Loughman, Celeste. Review of Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, by Kenzaburō Ōe. World Literature Today 70, no. 1 (winter 1996): 242-43.

In the following review, Loughman offers a mixed assessment of Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids but commends the novel's “sharpness of focus, narrative simplicity, and spontaneity.”

War, pestilence, flood, famine, death—this is the context of Ōe Kenzaburō's first novel, Memushiri kouchi (1958), now translated as Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids. Unfortunately, the colloquial English title gives a misleading lightness and triviality to what is a grim book intended to convey the Japanese mentality during the Pacific War: “It was a time of killing. Like a long deluge, the war sent its mass insanity flooding into the convolutions of people's feelings, into every last recess of their bodies, into the forests, the streets and into the sky.”

Because of intensifying air raids, a group of reformatory...