Born of Anger : Where the Japanese Nobel Prize winner began his storytelling : NIP THE BUDS SHOOT THE KIDS, <i> By Kenzaburo Oe</i> . <i> Translated from the Japanese by Paul St</i> . <i> John Mackintosh and Maki Sugiyama (Marion Boyars: $22.95; 189 pp.)</i>

Only a pinch of suspicion is needed to theorize that Kenzaburo Oe was a substitute winner of the Nobel Prize in 1994, just as Yasunari Kawabata was in 1968.

The achievements of postwar Japanese literature surely merited one or more Nobels, but the leading contender was Yukio Mishima, and Mishima wasn’t about to win one, for some of the same reasons the Swedish Academy has never given the nod to Norman Mailer.

Mishima’s works, like Mailer’s, were influential, often brilliant, but uneven in quality. They were overshadowed, in any case, by the flamboyance of his public persona--the weightlifting, the sexual ambiguity, the right-wing melodramatics that ended with his suicide by beheading at the hands of an acolyte in 1970. What could any mere prize add to a life like that?

So the Nobel honorees, instead, were Kawabata, an impeccable stylist but essentially a prewar sensibility; and Oe, an enfant terrible of the 1960s whose unremitting seriousness and uncompromising intellectualism had long since gone out of fashion in Japan.

It’s a theory, anyway. But lest we take it too far, Oe’s debut novel has just been translated into English for the first time. “Nip the Buds Shoot the Kids” (“Memushiri Kouchi”) appeared in Japan in 1958, along with his Akutagawa Prize-winning story “The Catch,” when the author was 23. Reading it, we can get some sense of the original excitement about Oe and draw our own conclusions.

That excitement came from two sources: Oe’s style and his attitude. This British-flavored translation by Paul St. John Mackintosh and Maki Sugiyama conveys the poetry and physicality of Oe’s prose, though there’s no way it can reproduce for us the shock his clotted, brutal images held for Japanese readers accustomed at that time to a stylistic ideal of limpid purity and vagueness of outline. Oe’s attitude, however, comes through loud and clear.

He was angry.

Oe grew up in a rural area of Shikoku, smallest of Japan’s four main islands, which made him an outsider in that highly centralized society. He was 10 when World War II ended. Suddenly, the emperor for whom all schoolchildren had pledged to sacrifice their lives was denying his divinity over the radio; suddenly, the officials who had ruled so harshly during the war were shedding the ideology they had used to justify their fanaticism. Oe’s disillusionment was greater, perhaps, than any adult could feel.

Accordingly, the nameless hero of “Nip the Buds” expresses the author’s alienation, rage and scorn. He’s the ultimate outsider--the teen-age leader of a group of reformatory inmates being evacuated on foot from a nameless city hit by U.S. air raids.

“It was a time of killing . . . when maddened adults ran riot in the streets,” he says. “There was a strange mania for locking up those with skin that was smooth all over, or with just a little glowing chestnut down; those who had committed petty offenses, including those simply judged to have criminal tendencies.”

Except for the hero’s younger brother, an innocent sent along with them supposedly for his own safety, these boys are the hard core whose parents, even at this desperate time, have refused to take them back. They are delinquents, sure enough. But they are no worse than the peasants who stare balefully as they march, harass them at rest stops, hunt them down and beat them if they try to escape.

Their goal is a nameless mountain village where they expect to be fed in return for farm work. Their first job there, however, is to bury a huge pile of animals that have died of a mysterious plague.

Soon the disease spreads to people. The villagers pack up and flee, abandoning the boys in midwinter. Armed men and floodwaters block all the exit roads. The boys have no choice but to break into the houses and steal what food remains.

At first they are stupefied, inert. “Time doesn’t move at all,” the hero thinks. “Like a domestic animal . . . a horse or a sheep, time won’t move a step without grownups’ orders.”

Gradually, though, the boys start to think of the village as their own, as a world outside time and history. Along with a few others who have been left behind--a downtrodden group of Koreans, an army deserter and a girl whose mother has died of the plague--they form a primitive society.

The hero and the girl become lovers. A Korean youth befriends the boys and teaches them to hunt birds with snares. They feast on pheasant, sing to bless future hunts, celebrate a newfound heroic myth of themselves.

This idyll lasts a couple of days. Then the plague flares up again, generating a wave of fear. The girl dies; the hero’s brother vanishes. The villagers return, stab the deserter with bamboo spears, viciously punish the boys for their burglaries and threaten to kill them if they tell authorities that they have been abandoned.

“Nip the Buds” ends with the hero, betrayed even by his closest comrades, running away through the forest in darkness and freezing cold, without hope, into an existential void.

The translators note that Oe, who has often rewritten the same story from different angles, wrote a sequel to this novel in 1980, “employing a slew of postmodern techniques. . . . The writer learns from his younger brother of another, older brother, the hero of ‘Nip the Buds,’ who returns to the village after the war in the company of American troops and in the guise of his [dead] younger brother . . . to put the community on trial.

“Proceedings in the closed hearing are conveyed to the villagers through a reenactment which becomes a ritual festival involving the whole community. In the end, the accuser’s case fails and he leaves for America, fighting in Vietnam, where he is crippled.

“This vastly increased complexity is typical of Oe’s later practice.”

“Nip the Buds,” in contrast, is a taut and straightforward adventure story. Oe had intellectual aims, to be sure--we can hear echoes of “Huckleberry Finn” and Camus’ “The Plague,” among other works--but what we remember most about this novel is its powerful impact on the senses. Oe not only describes the sights and sounds and smells of the Japanese countryside; he makes sights and sounds and smells convey human emotion.

Here’s how the hero sees a doctor from the next village, who refuses to help: “I saw his bared gums soaked and glistening with saliva, and cunning spread quickly from there all over his face.”

Here’s how he sees the girl, who is uncertain of his feelings after their first sexual encounter: “Beneath her thin skin, with its pale egg-colored gloss, fine blotches of blood floated up, then sank back again, following the rhythm of the struggle between her smile and the cold.”

And here’s how the boys, penned in a shed by the returning villagers and crushed by their own helplessness, see themselves: “We took our eyes from the boards, sat down on the earth floor and stared at our feet in silence. Our legs, dried and white with the skin peeling off like fish scales, our small scrawny feet like those of birds, smelly and covered in dirt. . . .”

“Nip the Buds” gives us a new perspective on one of Oe’s best-known novels, “A Personal Matter” (1964). Oe based it on the terrible dilemma he faced when his son Hikari was born with a “brain hernia.” Should the infant undergo surgery that might save his life but would result in severe brain damage, or should he be allowed to die?

Bird, the hero of “A Personal Matter,” is an ex-delinquent trying none too successfully to conform to middle-class Japanese mores. He longs to go to Africa; he has an affair with a “sexual adventuress” he knew in his wilder days. Bird’s rage, which has dwindled to wistfulness, revives when he sees that he must permanently knuckle under to convention if the baby lives.

Bird does the right thing--he saves his son--but his last-minute change of heart seems forced. The emotional current of the novel flows the other way. I read “A Personal Matter” after it was translated into English in 1969 and told a Japanese friend, a professor of literature in Tokyo, that I found the ending unconvincing.

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, that ending!” he said--indicating that readers in Japan, too, considered it flawed.

Now I wonder. Hikari’s survival and success as a composer have no doubt long since reconciled Oe to his choice. (Oe even said recently that he needn’t write any more fiction because his retarded son, through music, has found a way to speak for himself.) But when we see the radical anger of the younger man who wrote “Nip the Buds,” we can understand how wrenching that choice must have been.

Is it possible that Oe deliberately made the ending of “A Personal Matter” unsatisfying so that we would have to taste the bitterness in his mouth and conclude, as he did, that doing good can be the furthest thing from feeling good; that it can be worse, even, than hopeless revolt--a stifling submission, a death of the spirit?

Maybe.

I don’t want to accept this conclusion, even now. Oe clearly didn’t want to. Yet if he was capable of paying such a price, in both his life and his work, to affirm a truth he hated because, nonetheless, it was the truth, he deserves any prize he has won.