Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids
Kenzaburo Oe
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 0802134637
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
getting up. ‘You, stay inside, keep a watch over the dead body. Wild dogs’ll come and eat him.’ ‘Stay and wait,’ I also shouted. ‘I’ll punish anyone who comes out.’ My comrades showed their displeasure, but didn’t try to come out. Minami, my brother and I ran down the path through the garden. When we came to the corner that overlooked the wide road through the gap in the low stone wall, running on pebbles that were cold under our bare soles, the heavily suppressed yet rising clamour and
their oath. Minami, his voice shrill with exasperation and expectation, spoke as if almost threatening Li, who was still hesitating: ‘You treat us like dogs: stop it, or we’ll make you sorry.’ Making up his mind, Li nodded and, surrounding him, we ran down the road. He looked tense, as though he was already beginning to regret revealing his secret, hardly replying to our questions at all. But, persistendy badgering him, we crossed the short bridge and went up the steep path to the Korean
redemption. The book was being serialized when Oe discovered the religious thought of the Romanian scholar-poet Mircea Eliade, with its emphasis on the annihi lation/purification of history through ritual repetition, prompting him to withdraw the draft and reshape it into a work which became a watershed in his career as well as probably the greatest postwar Japanese novel. The Silent Cry presents yet another pair of brothers, returning to their native village: a village whose mythical founder
forest. Inside the coppiced woodland Li gave loud instructions and then we scattered, each going his own way, carried away by the birdsong. My brother and I were holding small traps patiently knotted together from hemp fibres to lay on the snowdusted grass before scattering grain and waiting for the birds to entangle their thin hard legs — a bunch of smallish cunning traps — and a woven bamboo basket. We first set a hempen trap in a little hollow where frozen grass blades peeped out from the
it all day covered in shit.’ ‘You were really brave,’ I said, moved by a spirit of comradeship, then remembered the girl’s words and was gripped by a sorrow so intense that it almost made me keel over in the snow and cry out loud. Biting my lips, I collected the snow for Li to put in the old-fashioned ice bag which he took out of the paper bag, and scooped up slushy water from the puddles of melted snow with both frozen hands. ‘You’re brave too,’ he said, tying the mouth of the ice bag. The