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The self in recoil: radical innocence in Oe's Seventeen and Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids.(Critical Essay)

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From: World Literature Today
Date: 20020101
Author:Loughman, Celeste

A LONGTIME ADMIRER of William Butler Yeats, Oe Kenzaburo has often discovered in the Irish writer the meaning of his own works. The title The Flaming Green Tree, the third part of Oe's recent trilogy, is taken from Yeats's poem "Vacillation," and Oe acknowledges, "In fact my trilogy is soaked in the overflowing influence of Yeats's poems as a whole" ("Japan," 28). Analogs to Yeats's poetry are also central in two of Oe's early works, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (orig. Memushiri kouchi, 1958) and Seventeen (orig. Sebunchin, 1961).

Borrowing from a comment congratulating Yeats ...

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