Pull out the buds, kill the children

Kenzaburo Oe is one of the giants of novelists in Japan, and one of the most prominent representatives of the post-war generation in Japanese literature, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994. This novel, which is Oe's first, narrates the exploits of fifteen teenagers from the reform school boys who were evacuated during the war to a remote mountain village where ostracism, mistreatment, and hatred from its inhabitants who fled after the plague spread. Oe explores in the novel the dark side of humanity, where despair meets hope, maturity after immaturity, corruption with innocence in a philosophical clash, and it is written in words that take us on a deliberate journey inside a captivating fictional world that is difficult for the reader to exit after turning the last page.