Koushun Takami

In an alternate history Japan (now "the Republic of Greater East Asia"), the government randomly selects 50 third-year junior high classes per year for something called "the Program." Each class is confined to an island and forced to fight until one survivor is left. Each student in the Program is made to wear a tracking collar that not only keeps track of their vital signs and location but is also set to explode if they leave the island. They're each given a little water and food, a map, a show more compass, and a randomly selected weapon of some sort. The map and compass are handy, because every couple hours one new section of the island becomes a forbidden zone. The tracking collars are set to explode if they're in forbidden zones. They're also set to explode if no one new has died in the past 24 hours, so students can't simply agree to not kill each other. Program survivors are given a pension and are instructed not to tell anyone about their experiences.

Shuya thinks his class is just going on a regular trip. He and the others fall asleep on the bus and wake up to find themselves in an unfamiliar classroom. They all have some general knowledge about the Program, of course, but none of them expected they'd actually end up in it. A man named Sakamochi tells them the rules and kills a few people to underscore that, yes, this is happening and there's nothing any of them can do about it. Then he sends them out one by one: the game has begun.

I've owned this for a while but avoided reading it for a couple reasons. First, it's a brick of a book, and if the writing/translation didn't flow well enough, that could mean months of slogging. Second, I was worried it would be too gory for me.

I can't comment on the accuracy of the translation, but it was certainly very readable - I sped through the book much more quickly than I had expected I would. As for its level of goriness, well, the first few deaths had me worried. Sakamoto seemed to relish shocking the Program participants, and the first few deaths were both casual and horrible. When he mentioned having raped the woman who'd been the caretaker of a couple of the students because she hadn't meekly accepted the news that they were now in the Program, I wondered whether this was going to reach Ryu Murakami levels of nastiness.

Thankfully, either I got used to it all or Takami scaled things back a bit, because most of the later deaths didn't pack the kind of punch those first few did. A warning to those with eye-related phobias, though: there were several eye-related gory moments throughout the book that were detailed enough that I had to skim them. Still, nothing involving intestines, thankfully, and although there were mentions of rape (Sakamoto, plus a male student threatening a female student), there was no on-page rape.

Nearly every chapter ended with a count of the total number of students still alive. The class started with 42 - 21 boys and 21 girls - and rapidly shrunk as the game progressed. Some of the students committed suicide rather than play along. Others found people they could trust and banded together, at least temporarily. Their different approaches, as well as the variations in their weapons (which ranged from proper weapons like guns and knives to "jokes" like a fork or a set of darts complete with a dart board), made it tough to tell how things might go. Just on the basis of who had the greatest amount of page-time, I was able to mostly figure out who'd be there for the final showdown, but some things did catch me by surprise.

Many of the students were just names and basic personalities, although a few of the students were a little more fleshed out. That said, I didn't really get attached to any of them. There were a few who I wanted to see survive because they seemed to be both decent people and prepared for the Program (seriously, why didn't more parents in this world sign their kids up for basic first aid, survival, and weapons training, just in case?), and there were a couple characters I could tell that the author wanted me to root for. Still, while I did think a few of the deaths were tragic and sad, nothing left me feeling wrecked after the book was over. Maybe because I was braced for all or most of the cast to die at some point? I don't know.

Of all the characters, I think I probably rooted for Hiroki the most, although Shogo and Shinji weren't too far behind. And even where Hiroki was concerned, I liked the guy but didn't think he'd actually make it - I mean, one of the reasons I liked him was his stubborn refusal to actually kill anyone. He wasn't stupid about it, defending himself when necessary and otherwise staying hidden, but it wasn't an approach that had a good chance of getting him all the way through to the end. Shogo and Shinji, meanwhile, were both smart, cool-headed, gutsy, and good planners (and both of them came across as being a good deal older than 15 or 16 years old, to the point that I wondered whether it would be revealed that adults who are passing as kids had infiltrated the Program).

It was pretty clear, though, that the author wanted readers to root for Shuya and Noriko the most. Noriko was nice enough, if bland, but Shuya got on my nerves. He was one of those very dense "every girl loves him but he has no idea" types - nearly a quarter of the girls in his class had secret crushes on him. He'd rage against Shogo or others for being callous, and he seemed to have girls in a special category in his brain - it was always more shocking to him when girls were hurt than when guys were, and he was weirdly surprised when Noriko used a gun to help him and Shogo defend their group.

I was expecting this to be a bleak and depressing book, but somehow it wasn't. There was a murder mystery-like appeal to finding out how all the deaths were going to play out, and the ending managed to be satisfying and somewhat hopeful. I enjoyed it overall and am glad I finally read it.

As far as the Hunger Games controversy goes: I know that there were folks shouting that Suzanne Collins copied off of Battle Royale, and now that I've read both the first Hunger Games book and this, I disagree. Sure, it's a similar setup, but the books each handle it completely differently.

Extras:

A map of the island with a list of the various forbidden zones and the times at which they became forbidden, a list of the students in the class, an interview with filmmaker Kinji Fukasaku, and an afterword by Koushun Takami.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less

A stunning book that is clearly the source material for almost all the current dystopian fiction that is so popular. Hunger games is the sesame street version of Battle Royale and it is far more mature, nuanced and intelligently violent than most of what is available today. Each chapter follows a different student and we flick between them as they live, die, fight, kill or run. A little tough as an English speaker as many of the names are quite familiar and it is at times hard to distinguish show more between characters. This is my problem though and had the Japanese Author called the kids Steve and Mary it would have made a mockery of the whole thing. Stretch your capacity for reading by listening to this voice and pick this up. show less

I've always been rather fond of the idea of children killing each other; not in real life, I should probably point out, but in fiction. It's not only a concept designed to horrify the reader, but it's also a great opportunity for the writer to reflect on mankind's innate abilities and emotions, to say something about us a species and as a society. The idea of judging a society by how they treat the weakest among them is an old one, and setting it up so that the children get to battle it out show more themselves can be a great recipe for some pretty harsh satire. Of course, the benchmark is Golding's Lord of the Flies, though the book that really suckerpunched me in my own youth was Stephen King's overlooked The Long March.

Battle Royale shares traits with both of those: the theme from Golding, and the tightly plotted genre sensibilities (and clunky prose) from King (and a slight dash of Orwell for good measure). In a world where things went differently from WWII and onwards, Japan (AKA The Republic of Greater East Asia) is a tightly controlled dictatorship in which American influences are very much frowned upon. Children are kept ignorant with strict discipline and harmless entertainment... and kept on their toes by the Battle Royale: a yearly competition in which entire high school classes are kidnapped and taken to a remote place, given weapons and told to kill each other or be killed. Only one child is allowed to survive. This, of course, is broadcast as entertainment, the ultimate reality show, and is also a popular sport for gamblers. (This is both the strength and the trappings of genre literature; it allows the writer to take elements of a society - the conformity of Japanese culture, the tendency to look down on others, the very strict patriarchy - and amp them up, make them tangible.)

The novel follows one class of 15-year-olds who suddenly find themselves caught up in this; trapped on a deserted island and having to slaughter each other if they want to survive. The horrible thing about Battle Royale is precisely that it's a Japanese book. It's about children who have been taught from an early age to conform, to dress alike, to not question authority... and who are suddenly handed a gun and told to kill each other. To be individuals. Cut-throat competition at its most non-subtextual. In a sense, if Golding's book was about the animal underneath the thin layer of civilizaion, then Takami's is about how thick that layer can be, and how hard it can be to ignore it.

Battle Royale was initially savaged by the critics in Japan for being violent, and yes, it is. Very very violent. That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing; again, there are very strong elements of satire and social criticism and Takami isn't aiming for subtlety. Japanese society is (in)famous for its high pressure, and when the children get the scoop on what they're supposed to do before they die, they all react in different ways; some kill themselves rather than compete, others lose their mind completely and are quickly killed off by their more cold-blooded classmates, most fight desperately for their lives and fail; in the end, only the best and the worst are left standing. Yet Takami does his best to give all 42 of them their own story, present them all as individuals with bad and (except in some cases) good sides, and while this is admirable it's also one of the major problems of the novel. Even if Takami is very inventive when it comes to killing them off, they soon all start to look a little too much alike, especially since he uses the same tools to characterize them all; which bands they like, what their family is like, whom they have a crush on, etc - at times, this reads less like a novel about 15-year-olds and more like a yearbook by 15-year-olds. That, along with the fact that nobody ever seems to have told Takami about "show, don't tell", tends to make it a well-plotted but not always very well-written book. Of course, another problem with genre literature is that it rarely gets the sort of translator that could do it justice, and some of the aforementioned clunkiness feels more like a bad translation. Still, a skilled editor could easily have tightened up the plot by cutting some of the overly verbose and repetitive character descriptions (which are even repeated several times for our main characters) out of this book.

I watched the movie version long before I read the novel, and it might just be familiarity, but I must say I preferred the movie; it cuts down on the number of protagonists, focuses on fleshing out the ones that carry the plot, and leaves characterizations more up to the camera than to endless backstories. What the book really has going for it in comparison is the dystopian angle, which it milks pretty well, and which in a sense makes it a more relevant work than the rather self-contained movie. For all the gore (and it's good gore, if you're into that sort of thing), the scenes that tend to stick are the ones where the more fleshed-out characters interact in desperate (and mostly futile) attempts to find their way out of an oppressive society - it's no coincidence that the main character keeps quoting Springsteen: "Tramps like us, baby, we were born to run." And while I can't help wishing Takami had had a better editor and translator, it's still a vicious if blunt piece of satire and quite the pageturner. Though mostly, of course, it's about 15-year-olds in sailor suits blowing each others' heads off. show less

I actually sort of hated myself while I was reading this book, because I can't remember having read, much less enjoyed, so exploitative a book -- imagine Lord of the Flies combined with The Most Dangerous Game combined with The Terminator. But I have to admit, I couldn't put it down. Ok, I'm going to go set myself on fire now.