An anonymous Japanese village in an unnamed time of war is the setting for Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe's first novel Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, which he wrote after WWII. A group of juvenile delinquents is evacuated to the countryside, only to be abandoned by the villagers there. What follows is a sort of inverse Lord of the Flies, in which the boys try to live with honor despite their depravations, only to be betrayed first by a plague sweeping through the village, and

—Myla Goldberg