Arrancad las semillas, fusilad a los niños se sitúa en el Japón de la II Guerra Mundial. Al ser evacuado un reformatorio, un grupo de muchachos, conformado por el narrador, su hermano menor y algunos de sus amigos, va a parar a un pueblo remoto de montaña, cuyo alcalde mantiene la filosofía de que el mal debe ser cortado de raíz, «desde la semilla». Sus actividades y actitudes pronto hacen que sean temidos y detestados por los campesinos. Cuando se declara una epidemia, los habitantes del pueblo los abandonan y huyen, encerrándolos dentro del pueblo vacío; los chicos, como reacción a la muerte y a la adulta pesadilla de la guerra, probarán a construirse una vida autónoma de dignidad, amor y valor tribal.

I decided to expand my Japanese reading list beyond Murakami and had heard good things about the Nobel Prize winning Kenzaburo Oë. The story is about of a group of delinquent boys abandoned in a mountain village when a plague breaks out. The story was pretty depressing and gruesome, but good. I'd give it 3.5 stars. ( )

This is one of those must read classics, especially since the author was awarded the Nobel for Literature. While never naming the place or time, or most of the characters, it centers on a group of reform school boys marched into the mountains around the time of World War II. Classism and racism feature prominently. The narrator's struggle to survive starvation and hatred long enough to escape, even though escape doesn't offer salvation, builds a hopelessness that is difficult to read. Many focus on the near apocalyptic setting and the spare details to push the book into an almost magical realism category, especially as examined against the author's other work, but it is squarely a flat realist narrative. On balance, it's not the difficult substance of the book, but the lack of much else but increasing violence that foils the book. It's one thing to describe hopelessness, and an altogether different thing to withhold hope. Also, an odd side note - there's a fair amount of homosexuality in the text that reads like it was meant to shock rather than as a true part of a character's life. Oe dropped it in at odd times, in odd ways, always trying to express vulgarity, which is an odd note to strike with the topic. The true success of the book for me was the author's deft hand with the natural world around his characters - the descriptions of the forest evidenced a poet's mind. That alone brought the rating of the book up for me.

3 bones!!! ( )

I picked up this book cuz the way they described the setting sounded neat as heck, like you cant tell if its postapocalytpic or a war zone or a science fiction thing but its like horrifically timeless, and when i read the book it was pretty much exactly that. The setting was genius in how it provides minimal context but the characters and the story weren't there... The most interesting was the brother and he did like nothing. Also they talk about dicks way too much in this it was really sus ( )

Very poignant. Very raw. A booked that rocked Japan when published just 13 years after the Japanese surrender in 1945.

This is Japan’s Lord of the Flies with important exceptions: adults are always on the periphery and the children work together for survival.

During WW2, a group of boys is left to fend for themselves in a village deserted due to a viral outbreak. Despite most surviving against the odds, when the adults return, they force them into secrecy about how they have been treated. Only the narrator escapes to an unknown fate – clearly a metaphor for the author.

The storytelling is vivid and heartbreaking. Their plight is visceral and easy to get drawn into. Their betrayal and treatment at the hands of the adult villagers is harsh. The metaphors abound.

Oe was 23 when he wrote this. It’s a youth’s response to the intertia of mass denial as his nation lay crushed by the unbearable weight of the shame of surrender. This is captured well by John Dower in his excellent Embracing Defeat.

In a few hundred pages, Oe wrested his nation’s conscience into consciousness. He forced them to face questions about what being Japanese was all about. Had he been Russian, he would have faced the Gulag.

A powerful and important book in the literature of Japan, it needs to be understood in its context. With the passing of time and the necessary cultural chasm between English and Japanese, this is becoming harder and harder to do. My advice would be to read it as soon as possible. ( )