Battle Royale
by Koushun Takami
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Book Reviews of Battle Royale
Book Review: Deeply flawed, but still entertaining. 3 1/2 stars
Summary: 3 Stars
The first thing I have to say is that for the most part, overall I liked the book.
I bought it because it was the next book on the list for our book club and the premise interested me, nd I heard a few really good reviews from some of my friends. I don't think the description on the back really explains it well though. To me, it just wasn't "Lord of the Flies." Sure, both groups were stuck on an island, and there are a few similarities, but similarity ends there. "Lord of the Flies" can't even be compared, because it's more about civilization and what a civilization of young boys would be like, rather than simply being about insane killing, where "Battle Royal" is more based in kids forced to kill each other. If you're looking for a modern "Lord of the Flies," then look somewhere else.
Also, the book's riddled with grammatical errors, due to perhaps bad translating, though I can't be sure. Some of the sentances were just plain screwed up, for example when Takami writes, "Tadakatsu grinned. 'Well, first of all, Tadakatsu didn't shoot at me or anything.'" Yuichiro is supposed to be talking to Mitsuko, and Tadkatsu is supposed to be asleep, so that paragraph made no sense. It should have said "Yuichiro grinned." There were several moments like that that I found myself wishing I had a pencil with me so I could cross out the sentance and fix it. There were also moments in dialogue that all there was was "..." or "?", which reminded me of manga. Then there were a few instances Takami puts in (!) after things he apparently considers very alarming, which I found mildly entertaining (though I doubt that was the authors intent), but some might find annoying. There were somewhat random transitions into 1st person to tell the characters thoughts, but this was often with no warning or indication that such was going to happen. While there's nothing wrong with planting the character's thoughts, it at times wasn't executed well and can cause confusion because the change is sudden. Also, not all the dialogue is lables who is speaking, and some of the dialogue is messed up. I don't know who to blame for these sorts of things --the trasnlator or the author-- but either way, anyone who wants good grammer better not bother. I think I even found one sentance that didn't have a period.
As for other things, it was easy to see when everyone was going to die and it seemed a bit too bad that most of the female characters (and for that matter, several of the male characters, but more so with the girls) were simply filler. *spoiler* For example, there's one mass of 6 girls all dying together, because they just formed a group and wanted to protect each other, one of them accidently kills one by poison, and the paranoia kills the rest of them. Then Yuka (or was it Yuko? oh well...) proceedes to fall to her death. Then there was Mizuho, who was in it for 3 pages, crazy for no reason, and dies pointlessly. *end spoiler*.
Kazuo for some reason also cannot apparently die, no matter how much he's shot at, crushed, or exploded. And while it's entierly possible that there might be one amazing computer genius, we get two, and a few characters described as being the best or good at everything. How can there be three students simaltaniously described as being "the best at X in the class?" That, along with the fact that ALL the girls like the same exact guy, and the random intrusions of "who likes who," and general predictability were very annoying. I could probably go on, but I'm sure other's have mentioned a few things too.
Here's the thing though, I really did like reading it, and I found I could never find a good spot to stop, because there was always something going on. Yes, "Battle Royale" is very flawed, but discounting the flaws (if you can), it was enjoyable. Maybe I'm too forgiving, but while I'd never call it a perfectly perfect piece of literature, it can still be entertaining.
Book Review: Violent, disturbing, intelligent and unmissable.
Summary: 5 Stars
On its original publication in Japan in 1999, Battle Royale was a surprise hit. Its author, journalist Koushun Takami, had written it for a literary competition but it had been rejected due to its controversial content and violent storyline. Of course, these very things combined with its searing commentary on Japanese society and reviews drawing comparisons with William Golding's Lord of the Flies made it immensely attractive to a younger audience.
The setting of Battle Royale is a little confusing, but it is eventually revealed that the book takes place in an alternate-reality timeline where Japan remained a police state after WWII and still controls much of Asia. Japan's schoolchildren and students are becoming more and more unruly as American culture and notions of freedom seep into the country, most notably via illegal musical imports (Bruce Springsteen's lyrics from 'Born to Run' are an influence on the main protagonist). To keep them under control, the Japanese government has instituted the Battle Royale programme. Every year, fifty classes of schoolchildren are dumped on various islands, equipped with weapons and told to slaughter one another. The last survivor is allowed to go free. The idea is that this horrifying threat will enforce peace and tranquillity on Japan's schools, but of course this doesn't quite work, with instead the programme being seen as a game to be followed and the winners become celebrities.
The novel follows one such class of schoolchildren as they are shipped to an abandoned island, given weapons and have failsafe bombs attached to necklaces placed around their heads. Any attempt to swim off the island or remove the necklace will result in it exploding. If at least one student isn't killed every 24 hours, all the bombs will be detonated simultaneously. The situation appears hopeless, apart from something the organisers didn't plan for. One of the students has played the game before...
Battle Royale is a scintillating novel. The premise is pretty shocking, but works brilliantly. By taking a bunch of schoolkids and ramping all of their petty animosities and arguments to the max and then giving them high-powered weaponry, Takami creates a situation which is both horrifying and, insanely, is also convincing. The characters are all pretty standard archetypes, with the class bully, the stuck-up rich girl, the innocents, the nerds, the peacemakers and so on, with Takami exploring the hierarchy of classroom power and how it is affected, or more accurately how it isn't particularly affected, but the disturbing situation these teenagers are placed in. The novel's length (over 600 pages) allows him to paint all 42 of the kids in reasonable detail, adding backstories and motivations to each character, usually engendering the reader's sympathy for each one just before they get violently offed.
Battle Royale works as a searing condemnation of humanity and how easy it is to slip into barbarism (much like Lord of the Flies, though with less spears and more petrol bombs and samurai swords), the inability for any repressive regime to maintain control over the imagination of the young and also that overconfidence always leads to a downfall (the ending of the novel, although possibly predictable, is deeply satisfying).
Battle Royale (*****) is the first novel I've ever reviewed which I feel compelled to add an advisory warning to: this book features a bunch of 14 and 15-year-olds killing one another (and some adults as well) in various inventive and disturbing ways. The book is pretty full-on in its depiction of violence and cruelty. That said, the violence is not gratuitous. There is a story, character or thematic reason for everything that happens, and the cumulative effect of the narrative is exceptionally powerful. The book is published in the UK by Gollancz and in the USA by VIZ Media.
Book Review: Complex Novel Handled Excellently.
Summary: 5 Stars
The story of Battle Royale is an allegory for the transition of teenage school life into the cut-throat world of Japanese business. In an alternative future where America is a third-world country and Japan has become a massively strict dictatorship, the government has set up a program in which one class of fifteen-year-old students is chosen to participate in The Program, which sets them in a deserted area and forces them to kill each other off until there is only one left. Shiroiwa Junior High School Class B has just been selected to be the next class to participate. They are put on a small island that has been evacuated from all inhabitants. Each of them (all 42, with 21 males and 21 females) has a metal collar around his or her neck wherein it can be detonated if they start to do something against the rules and/or government, if they try to escape, or if they get caught in a Forbidden Zone -- areas of the island that are announced along with the newly dead every 6 hours that are forbidden to be in after that point in time. Along for the `game' is Shuya Nanahara, a young boy who lost both his parents and just wants to get out alive with all of his friends; Noriko Nakagawa, a young girl who gets injured early on and struggles to stay alive and innocent with her secret crush; Shogo Kawada, a mysterious new transfer student with a scarred-up face and an interest in both Shuya and Noriko; Hiroki Sugimura, a sweet boy who just wants to find two different girls; and Shinji Mimura, a friend of Shuya's that is incredibly popular and incredibly smart. And then there are the more sinister of the bunch, including troubled female Mitsuko Souma and insane psychopath Kazuo Kiriyama. The rules state there can only be one survivor, but Shogo insists he can help get himself, Shuya, and Noriko off the island alive. The only issue is that they have to wait until they're the only ones left... if they can survive that long.
The book was absolutely amazing. It's now one of my favorite books. A lot of people, as I've read, have some issues with the English translation, but outside of a few typos or missing words here and there, I found no real huge issues. It's not incredibly descriptive in the scenery or action/violence, but I think the point was more in that it was actually happening instead of every minute detail of the occurrences. Though it did get confusing in the action at times, especially toward the end when there's a big car chase. I had a very difficult time trying to picture what the heck was going on.
The only other thing of note from the narrative would be the narration itself. It's interesting in the way that the book switches from third person to first person interchangeably, allowing for the reader to see inside a specific character's mind at that moment. So at one point you have a third person narrator, then out of nowhere it'll start in with `I' with first person. Though it never got confusing, at least for me, because each section really focused on one main person at a time. And that's another great thing about the book: it had an incredible character focus. Each and every one of the 42 students had a background and a story to go with them. Most of them were interconnected either as friends or enemies or even secret crushes (and there were numerous).
Shogo and Hiroki were two of my favorite characters in the book. Both were awfully mysterious to where you could never tell if what they were up to was good or bad up until the last moment. And both of the major villains were handled well with great background information, giving you just enough to understand how their minds work without going overboard.
Overall, the book was outstanding and I really recommend it as long as teens killing each other doesn't make you easily queasy.
Book Review: One Bloody Page-Turner.
Summary: 5 Stars
In his violent, controversial first novel, Koushun Takami takes us to the Republic of Greater East Asia, a contemporary, fictional, essentially fascist empire that includes Japan and China, but not Korea. Among the stranger forms of abuse under this oppressive regime is the Program, a compulsory game that pits a group of teenagers against one another until there is only one survivor. Ostensibly begun as a sort of tactical experiment, every year the Program destroys 50 junior high school classes of 15-year-olds for no clear purpose. This is the story of one of those classes. 42 students, 21 male, 21 female, are given weapons and confined to an island. There, they must kill each other until there is one winner, or all perish should they refuse."Battle Royale" is often compared to William Golding's 1954 novel "Lord of the Flies". The two books are superficially very similar: They both concern a group of youths on a island fighting for their lives. They are both allegories, but of different things. "Lord of the Flies" illustrates the baser instincts that are normally hidden beneath a thin veneer of civilization. It is to some degree a mockery of British society as the author saw it at the time. "Battle Royale" is explicitly anti-fascist, but since it is doesn't have an audience living under fascism, that's not meaningful in itself. The book's fascism seems to be an allegory for the more rigid aspects of Japanese culture and its educational system. It's possible to interpret the book as anti-capitalist, but I've no idea if that was intended. I do think it implicitly criticizes expectations that modern families often have for their children, and I suspect that bourgeois American youth will empathize more with this facet of the book than with those themes which apply more specifically to Japan.
I understand why young people like "Battle Royale". But it wasn't exclusively young people who made the book a bestseller in Japan. It's an entertaining novel with an interesting premise for older folks too. Truthfully, its themes are not as well-executed as "Lord of the Flies", but "Battle Royale"'s characters, interpersonal relationships, and motivations are more intricately drawn. And this is what makes it a page-turner. The bloodbath isn't so shocking as the idea that gruesome violence is inevitable. We get to know these characters. We witness well-intentioned people do horrible things. After a while the reader comes to see the hopelessness of the situation and realizes that people really would murder their classmates, even if they had not set out to do so.
When I started reading "Battle Royale", I doubted my ability to keep track of 42 plus characters, all with unfamiliar Japanese names. But I didn't have any trouble at all remembering who was who. Author Koushun Takami deserves a lot of credit for focusing our attention on unique attributes of each character and organizing the book to overcome confusion. The number of students left remaining is announced at the end of each chapter. This helps the reader keep track of what's going on and emphasizes the narrative's -and the Program's- matter-of-fact tone.
The only glaring fault that I can find with Takami's writing is the dialogue. The students' dialogue seems awkward and remedial. As I know nothing about the Japanese language, I can't tell if this is bad writing or a problem with the translation. Apart from that, the text is fluid and easy to read. Don't be put off by the book's length. It's a real page-turner. I never at any point tired of reading. I was always anxious to find out who would live or die in the next chapter. Creepy but true. Maintaining the readers' curiosity for over 600 pages is an admirable accomplishment. "Battle Royale" is an impressive first novel. It's enjoyable for young and aging alike. 4 1/2 stars.
Book Review: "You better obey me, girl. A woman obeys his man."
Summary: 2 Stars
It would be something of an understatement to say that the hype for his book was overwhelming. I had seen the film version long, long before getting my hands on the beefy novel -- it's already a bonafide cult classic destined to sit beside RIKI-OH: The Story of Ricky. You can imagine my anticipation when I hauled ass to work and sunk my teeth in. Shuya Nanahara is an unfortunate sod who lives in Japan. The good news is practically every girl in class has a crush on him. The bad news is that en route to a "study trip" their bus takes a detour and winds up on a remote island somewhere. All this is well and good, but that was just basic setup and already we're 60-something pages in! Guess what -- when the reader's interest is at its lowest, it's not wise to begin your tale with droning exposition that doesn't apply anywhere else in the story. As we go on, the narrative will suddenly screech to a halt and we're treated to endless scenes of one-dimensional students with identical names reciting stale soap-opera platitudes.
Eventually we learn that a totalitarian government has ferried the kids off to the island so they can kill each other. Cue up the characters griping about how cool it would be if the government was Democratic. They're so evil, they've banned Rock N' Roll, even! Why'd they do that? So Shuya and a buddy can recite Bruce Springsteen lyrics like solemn profundities, of course. For the next 500 pages the cliches come flying like bullets from a MAC-10 -- for every inept "action" scene there's at least three of meandering babble. Middle-schoolers tend to get existential when they're pitted against one another, and you can smell the angst whenever a character dies and someone's there to bawl about not saving him/her. This is not helped by stilted, awkward translation that should have been proofread more than once (sometimes producing unintentionally hilarious sentences, such as the title of review). For 600-odd pages we go, slamming headlong into the sloppy conclusion like a ton of slushy concrete.
Does this sound like the next big Pretentious Coffeehouse Book? It's big, and I've noticed a lot of pretentious types raving about how meaningful and important all this foolishness is. Some have gone so far as to compare this to Lord of the Flies, which couldn't be more inaccurate. LotF was mainly concerned with the buildup prior to the sudden explosion of violence, as well as factions and crude "governments" springing up out of the rubble. This starts off with a boy getting machine-gunned in the chest by a commando. There are two kids who like to kill others and the rest hide and are slowly killed off one by one while they gripe about how dumb life is. You tell me how these can be compared.
Don't believe the neverending hype for this book. Its only redeeming qualities are some fiendishly creative death scenes and the occasional moment of accidental comedy. Really, Battle Royale's dry, uneven translation should be the least of your worries. Nobody under the age of 16 should be reading this book. Anyone over the age of 16 should be slapped upside the head for trying to milk "meaning" from it. I think it's appropriate to end this with a verbatim quote from the book:
"This guy was at least ten cenimeters taller than [him], who at 172 meters was short for a basketball player."
This book is 172 meters too big for its boots. It's too meandering for an actioner and it's too ADD-stricken for an allegorical study of "being young and alive in a 21st-century world". Just see the movie, it takes much less time away from your diminishing life.