SOURCE: Ryan, Marleigh Grayer. “‘And a Little Child Shall Lead Them’: The Agency of the Innocent in an Early Story by Ōe Kenzaburō.” World Literature Today 76, no. 2 (spring 2002): 49-57.

In the following essay, Ryan identifies the deception and corruption of children by adults as the central theme of Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids.

Ōe Kenzaburō was ten and a half years old when he heard tell of the emperor's fateful message ending World War II. He has written—and continues to write—of the impact that message had upon his life and the lives of his compatriots. The time immediately before and after that day has resonated in his fiction with an intensity unequaled in that of his contemporaries. The closing year of that terrible war, those months when countless thousands of Japanese died in an already lost cause—that time of killing, as he names it...