Battle Royale
by Koushun Takami
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Book Reviews of Battle Royale
Book Review: A Game of Death
Summary: 4 Stars
Originally submitted for a literary competition, Koushun Takami's *Battle Royale* was hotly contested and eventually rejected in the final round, condemned for its caustic blend of violence, satire and pulp-extravagance. If anything, this reaction helped assure its bestseller status in Japan - uproar always sells copy - and the novel's shelf-life was then immeasurably augmented by the ensuing film-adaptation and comic serialization (...I saw issues of it crowding manga-bins in Thailand). Stateside, however, *Battle Royale*, in any form, existed as a media-indefinite, praised throughout the cyberverse by those 'in the know' but unavailable through any mainstream outlet. Thankfully this has changed, with the primary text now translated and sleekly packaged for round-eyes, and the movie slated for a `special edition' Region-One release date.
The story itself is a *Lord of the Flies*-style update, cynically embellished with the hallmarks of tech-dystopia. In essence: forty-two schoolchildren are shipped to a remote location, provided weapons, and ordered to kill or be killed, thrive or die, until the last is standing. In Takami's alternative universe, Japan has devolved into a totalitarian dictatorship; the 'game' of *Battle Royale* keeps the mainland inhabitants in line and also provides an exciting gambling venture for those in power. As for the children involved? The author employs the pivotal theme of William Golding's mid-20th century masterpiece, in that under extreme circumstances, human beings face a psychological choice: to become the beast (or at least to ~mimic~ it), or to rise above. *Battle Royale* thus chronicles the individual decisions of these schoolchildren. Some choose the beast. Others struggle to retain their basic human dignity. Some choose death, others love - and damn the consequences. And the rest do their best to simply survive, as the clock ticks down and the territory of the killing ground diminishes every six hours. For in this game of death, there is only one possible survivor.
The premise of *Battle Royale* is irresistible, with great potential...almost too much potential. In the hands of a lesser author, the story could easily spin out of control, descending into bloodbath extremes and overt melodrama; and in the very least, losing its focus among the multitude of players and total range of situations. Takami's overall control of his concept - establishing the rules early on, and concentrating primarily on a select group of characters, with brief digressions for the minor players - is commendable on a sheer technical level; and the skill in which he develops, and disposes, of these schoolchildren makes it easy to see why *Battle Royale* sparked controversy and gained a strong following upon its release. The concept of children murdering children, and some gleefully and/or efficiently at that, is uncomfortable to those who envision peace and prosperity as the principal goal of the human race: it's not surprising that *Battle Royale*, for some, inspires a knee-jerk reaction of negativity before a page is turned. Yet there is more here than typical grindhouse exploitation. The concept of love under extremities is the primary thematic nucleus of the novel, developed carefully and powerfully; and Takami wisely sets the protagonist view on Shuya, who feels the exact same way as most (sane) people would. "They won't do it... impossible..." he constantly reflects at the beginning, honestly believing it so until graphically proven otherwise; and for the remainder of the contest he strives to survive without playing the game, as much out of spite for the evil propagating it as his own moral code.
There are several aspects that elevate *Battle Royale* above the genre of pulp. The first and foremost, IMO, is the masterful development of the characters. It has been six months since I read this novel, and I still have vivid images of the main players: battle-scarred Shogo with his shotgun; the chillingly psychotic Kazuo Kiriyama; prey-turned-predator Mitsuko (perhaps the saddest character of the lot); the stoic and utterly focused martial-arts master Hiroaki Sugimura. And Tahara Sakamochi, of course. I've rarely seen a more villainous portrait 'come to life' from the printed page. The environments and action, although only adequately described, do take hold the mind's eye, and I can correlate these characters with some very poignant - and brutal - moments, attaining the hallucinatory power of the inner-cinema.
Another aspect is developed more powerfully in the film, being a satire on the repressed, media-drenched, violence-devouring Japanese culture. Although *Battle Royale's* 'game' is inconceivable, at least for the present, let us reflect on the state of modern television: how many murders occur on a primetime night? How many children are watching CSI and/or any number of its clones/competitors at this moment? Rape, exploitation, death - these are primal triggers for easy cash - and it's only going to get more explicit. This book barely hints at competition-as-entertainment satire, but inspires enough internal thought about the matter that, when coupled with the psychological trauma/adaptation that this sort of situation might create, makes *Battle Royale* a worthy read in its own right.
Along with the violence, of course - there is enough triune-stroke here to satiate even the most rabid gore-hound.
The translation suffers from grammar-errors and awkward transitions, and I think they were going a little too much for the 'punchy' effect, but Takami's raw material more than makes up for the occasional blunder...and the ending, in a word: incredible. *Battle Royale* is powerful, compelling material, some of the best pulp on the market.
Four and 1/2 Stars.
Book Review: <3 Battle Royale
Summary: 5 Stars
J**** R*****
Period 5
1/19/06
Battle Royale
I personally loved Battle Royale; it made me laugh, cry, read again and again. The storyline is genius and it's interesting throughout the book. Battle Royale is based in southern Japan during a time of Dictatorship. This book is focused on the future of Japan with overpopulation, corruption, and teenagers ditching school for months. Japan's Dictator has now created the Battle Royale Program. The Battle Royale Act is a way to help control overpopulation and punish children who've ditched school and ridiculed adults.
This Program randomly selects a high school class to be taken on a "study trip" which involves sleeping gas on the bus, collars put on all students, and waking them up on an abandoned island. Students then are told that the collars will monitor their movements and pulses; explode if attempt to escape or go into a forbidden zone; and will be supplied a random weapon to kill each other until one survivor is left. Announcements are made every six hours to tell who've died and additional forbidden zone's coordinates. The bag that students are given at the school, when they wake up, contains a map with coordinates, bread, water, a flashlight, and the random weapon. Forbidden zones are a way to speed up the game by eliminating space and add more protection to the school (military base) because the collar will instantly explode a head off if they're caught in these zones.
Absolute dictatorship has given the government unlimited power to kill anyone who opposes anything or show the slightest amount of resistance. Parents either allow their children to be apart of the Program or be killed. Seriously, think of what you'd do if your only child is taken to an island to kill students and a 1:42 chance of coming back alive.
You got to admit, random weapons get pretty funny-a pan lid to a machine gun, luck of the draw and the strategy put behind each character is amazing. The book made some characters over powerful and too smart but after watching the movie, it made more sense. The book tells of how Shogo Kawada being randomly selected twice into Battle Royale, but it never mentions anything of how he hacked to get into the program for revenge by being added as a transfer student. Then Kazuo Kiriyama joins for the fun of it, he ends up owning all the students but the book makes what he does not seem possible. The movie really helps and is almost as good as the book.
Being a normal teenager, hormones, girls, emotions, life is good. Then one of your friends decides to come back to school and stabs your teacher. Then coming home and finding your dad hung himself... Life seems like it can't get any worse? Well, for Shuya it did. Now he gets to witness all his friends killing each other. One ends up dying by the teacher in the beginning by a knight thrown into his head. Then his best friend's corpse is found right outside the exit of the island's school with arrows lodged into him. And this is barely the beginning of the game...
Yeah, this book gets pretty violent but it does show a different view on life and makes you think. "It's so hard to love" is one of the quotes from this book by Motoharu Sano. After reading this book or even watching the movie, you'll believe this quote is absolute true. Battle Royale gives a sense that friends and couples would stick by each other, but twists and betrayal are unique throughout this book which makes it so interesting!
I was a bit skeptical when reading of Shinji's plan to make a bomb. He came so far and failed to my favorite character. I'm still confused on how my favorite character managed to escape from the explosion and I was almost certain he would win easily. Apparently, Shogo and Shuya got lucky and their plan was more successful then poor Shinji. Shogo's main purpose for rejoining Battle Royale was to screw up the game by having more than one survivor. The previous game, Shogo had lost his only true love and managed to hack his ticket back into the game and how to deactivate the collars. Shogo's original goal was to save as many people as he can but controversies only ended with Noriko and Shuya allying with him.
Battle Royale will be one of my favorite books forever and I recommend it to all my friends. Once you start reading this book, you'll never want to put it down-literally, and I mean this from a picky reader's taste. Harry Potter is nothing compared to this book. Battle Royale is definitely one of the most thrilling books ever and realistic in a sense you can relate to. The book isn't encouraging violence or anything; it's just a book to read for fun and show a different view on life. Someday, this Program could be used. Who'd you trust in a life or death situation like this?
Book Review: One of the best character-driven novels I've ever read!
Summary: 5 Stars
I was first introduced to "Battle Royale" by a good friend of mine who said I just HAD to watch the movie. It took me a while 'cause the movie is not distributed in the U.S. and, therefore, is hard to buy or rent. Finally, I found it to rent and the movie was amazing ... phenomenal! I had bought the book (the novel NOT the manga) a few months ago (before watching the movie) but hadn't gotten around to reading it yet. After watching the movie, I just HAD to read it and finally picked it up and began reading all 620 pages within a week or so.
All I can say about the book is: it's 10 times better than the movie!!!! This book is clever and insane at the same time, making it a terrific, can't-put-the-book-down-type of read! As was said in one of the earlier reviews, you wouldn't think it'd be easy to keep up with the 42 students but, after a while, it is. Unlike the movie (which was very good for the time they had to keep it down to), the book is seen through pretty much every character's point of view and the action scenes as well as the explanation of injuries and deaths is so well-written and described that you can't help but wonder what author Koushun Takami is going to write for his next book.
I do have to admit that I'm a huge Bruce Springsteen fan and since the novel mentions him and quotes one of his famous songs during a crucial end scene of the book, my liking of this book grew hugely! The fact that Takami was able to comment on not only young adult issues but also of country politics and economics, computer hacking, fascism and emotional issues (plus the importance of rock music and its influence) is astounding! All of these issues are addressed within this book without sounding preachy and complicatedly overdiscussed to the point of boredom. He writes with such knowledge and detail of computer hacking and homemade bomb-making that it makes the reader wonder whether he has personal experience with these things or not.
Like I said, the reader REALLY gets to know more of the characters and their emotions in this book, which makes it all the more tragic when each come to their demise. Because there are 42 different characters, there are several stories, emotions and thoughts varying of love, hate, sadness, fear, and hope that you see through each person. Because of not only our, but the world's, desensitized views on violence, I think people who read or hear about this book (and see the movie) really don't take in the extreme seriousness of the plot: Imagine having to kill your friends (... your best friends, for that matter) to survive. Could you do it? Could you actually live with memories like that? The idea alone is scary as hell and these 9th grade students have to do just that!
The book is a mix of "Clockwork Orange," "Lord of the Flies," "1984," and Stephen King's "Running Man" all in one. I've always been impressed with books, movies or TV shows that are ensemble and focus on a group of people rather than just two or one person(s). And the characters in this are all so wonderfully described that you wonder what would become of them or what they would be like if you knew them in real life. If you wondered why some parts of the movie were the way they were, then read the book and it answers pretty much everything. There is also a great love story (without becoming too mushy) and PLENTY of action and plot twists. I do have to warn squeamish readers that this book is very descriptive and violent. There aren't really any sexual situations but the violence is plentiful. Like the movie "Final Destination," near the middle of the first part of the book, you morbidly begin wondering how the next student will meet their death. And each death can be seen as a metaphoric failure-in-life because of that character's personality flaw under stress, which would lead to their failure in life because of the usual stresses that life can sometimes bring (i.e. SPOILER -- the young couple commit suicide rather than fight to survive and live; their kind of love has blinded them 'cause they can't imagine living without each other). Fear and selfishness are the true enemies which lead to death in this story.
The only flaw is because this is translated from Japanese to English, there are sometimes grammatical errors and words missing but they are easy to fill and don't leave the reader missing or wondering what should be there. And it doesn't take away from this intense story at all!
Aside from grammer, this book is simply one of the best stories I've ever read! In the form of a survival/violent action story, the plot is really about learning to make your way in the world and not being afraid to go out there and live. Life can be scary but its worth living.
Book Review: I'm just not seeing it...
Summary: 2 Stars
Battle Royale's premise is as irresistible as its back cover claims. A junior high class is kidnapped and taken to an island where, as part of a brutal authoritarian Program, they will be provided weapons and set loose to kill each other. The last one standing is the 'champion' of The Game. It came riding high with a controversial reputation and a recommendation from Stephen King. Talk about your pulp gold!
But all that promise is spoiled by clunky writing. I don't know if Mr. Takami is just not much of a writer or if the translation was just too literal (that's my guess), but the writing was bad. Sentences were clumsily constructed or ignored rules of grammar. As brilliant as the concept was, it was tough to get into while reading sentences like: 'After all they were friends ever since they wet their beds at that Catholic institution with the pretentious name, "the Charity House" - where orphans or other children who, due to "circumstances," were no longer able to be with their parents' (p 24) or 'They both didn't accept your assignment...' (p49).
Another bad thing about the writing was the repetition of certain stock phrases. The phrase 'That's right' shows up on every other page. Now, I know you are thinking "What's wrong with 'that's right'"? But it shows up in very inappropriate places in the narration and sometimes breaks the tone or distracts from sheer repetition. There's also 'knit brows'. Every character in the story knits their brows at least six times. There was so much knitting in this book that between them they could have knitted a sweater by story's end.
Though a lot of my problems with the book may be due to a babelfish-like translation, there were some issues that were squarely on the author. One of the students is technically savvy, which is fine until he becomes MacGyver-esque. Another student is supposed to be a year older than the rest (making him fifteen) but he is so world weary and wise that he came off like a forty year old. It didn't help that he was repeatedly described as stubbly, with mannish hands and features. I was just waiting for a plot twist that would reveal that he was an adult posing as a junior high student.
Also, I never felt like there was ever an adequate explanation of how 'The Program' was foisted on the citizenry. We are told that The Program runs every two or three years and that it involves a Game in each of Japan's forty-seven prefectures. An estimated two thousand students are involved of which only forty seven will survive. How was it sold to the public enough to prevent revolution? Even a totalitarian regime would have to provide their public with some kind of reason to ship thousands of children off every couple of years to a game that lead to certain death.
I did like the cynical rationale for what The Program was trying to accomplish, and that it was never concretely provided, just guessed at by the students participating in it. I also liked the way their fascist society was presented to us in bits and pieces via the students recollections. Often the society was shown as being fairly close to the Japan we all know, then their would be a mention of government monitoring the internet or disappearances of citizens or whatever.
Lastly, at six-hundred pages, the book just felt too long. There were too many chapters devoted to the lives of characters who we hadn't heard of before and who were dead by the end of the chapter. Used sparingly, that would have worked, establishing a wider scope rather than just focusing on 'our heroes'. But we learn every detail of every one of the forty two kids involved in the Game, even though there are only five or six who we really follow. It breaks the forward momentum of the story and many of the kids detailed in these one off chapters felt sort of same-y. Even the author agrees with me here (in an interview he gave discussing the manga adaptation). The book could easily have lost two hundred pages and benefited greatly from it.
Battle Royale has a lot of promise. Unfortunately either bad writing or bad translation kills it. I would suggest watching the movie or reading the manga rather than attempting the book. I haven't done either, but they have to be better than slogging through six hundred pages of bad writing.
Book Review: BANG!
Summary: 4 Stars
Takami Koshoun, Battle Royale (Viz, 1999)
While I can't find any publication figures on Battle Royale, Viz' blurb on the back assures me it was a runaway bestseller (their words) in Japan, and that the manga which is based upon it has sold similarly well. For that matter, Kinji Fukasaku's film adaptation has very little box office information about it at IMDB, though I am prepared to accept that it, too, was a smash; pretty much everyone I know who likes (or is even curious about) modern Japanese film has either seen it or wants to see it. (Unfortunately, as of now I still fall into the latter category.) It is a film that comes readily to the fore when a Japahorror newbie asks, "so what should I see first?" In other words, in all sorts of media, Battle Royale has turned into something of a phenomenon (assuming one believes Viz' assertions, which I've no reason not to).
Like the not-nearly-as-deserving Da Vinci Code, reading Battle Royale will show you pretty easily what would cause it to become a major bestseller. With a few exceptions (the introduction and first chapter are interminable), Koshoun keeps the pages turning in this six-hundred-plus-page epic. The pace is exceptionally done once you've gotten to page forty or fifty, the subject matter has that "beauty of a particularly gruesome auto accident" feel to it, and the main characters are well-enough drawn that you can at least empathize with them on a surface level.
The plot is exceptionally simple: a junior high school class, forty-two students, are taken to a remote, evacuated island and ordered to participate in what is called The Program. It's a game of sorts in which the objective is exceptionally simple: be the last surviving student. To that end, students are equipped with basic survival equipment and a random weapon or two with which to defend themselves against, and kill, their classmates. There are a few extra rules thrown in to make sure the game doesn't stagnate, but that's the gist of it. And really, what could be more fun than six hundred pages of fifteen-year-olds killing each other?
As a straight genre thriller, the book works on just about every level. It's prime genre writing, right down to characters wandering around with "kill me" stamped on their foreheads and the final battle being, for all intents and purposes, obvious by the time you've reached the end of the first few chapters. In the larger picture, though, it's not quite as successful as the cover blurb and the adaptations would have you believe. It's obvious that Koshoun meant Battle Royale not just as a thriller, but as both a satire on modern civilization and a rant against fascism (how much fascism Koshoun attributes to current-day Japanese civilization is a valid question, but one to be answered with far more authority by a Japanese critic, or at least someone living in the country capable of reading the novel in the original), Battle Royale leaves way too much out to really be effective. Every once in a while, some of the characters stop what they're doing and mouth various platitudes about how awful the government is and how they'd like to strike against it, or how awful a civilization must be that would allow such a game to go on. None of it really works, at least in translation. Ironically, the places it works best are in one student's assessment of the government as unbeatable, simply because despite how awful it is, it works (cf. Mussolini making the trains run on time), which rather undercuts the satire angle.
Another place it fails somewhat, and this is obviously no fault of Koshoun's, is in the English translation. Where other translators might have glossed over some of the Japanese idioms, or at least made them more familiar to human ears, the translation seems almost literal in places, to where the text, especially in internal monologues, sounds like badly-dubbed dialogue from a sixties Godzilla movie. This, of course, leaves the reader somewhat jarred (but with, it should be said, a feeling of amusement).
Despite all its various faults, I will emphasize my earlier statement that Battle Royale is a good-- no, a great-- genre thriller. The back cover compares it to Lord of the Flies, but it seems to me that a better comparison would be to "The Most Dangerous Game," with the twist that everyone is both hunter and hunted. This is one hell of a fun ride, so pony up your E ticket and hop on. *** ½