I have found a new adorable old-man author for my collection. This is Kenzaburo Oe, a Japanese author whose fiction revolves mostly around the Post-WWII years (and especially post-Hiroshima) in Japanese history.
My favorite of his novels is Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids. It follows a group of young boys (juvenile delinquents, if their paranoid elders can be trusted) as they are shunted from one village to another, seeking shelter from the elements and the air-raiding armies. They are finally abandoned by their adult supervisors in a mountain village and left to fend for themselves for a few days, only to be punishedfor finding ways to survive when their supervisors return. I won't give away all of the surrounding circumstances or the conclusion, but I can say that I defiantly recommend the novel. It's a short read- I read it in about a day, and it's not even two hundred pages long. It's a bit of a mix between Battle Royale and Lord of the Flies without the campy flavor of the first or the...well, actually it's almost as disturbing as the latter, and it's a good study of the tension, paranoia, and social insecurity caused by war and the mistrust of youth.
I've also got a copy of his Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, which contains four short novels including a semi-autobiographical story about a man coming to grips with having a mentally challenged son (that is the PC term these days, isn't it?) and another story following the dying days of a man with liver cancer (which he's probably imagined).
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