Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
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Book Reviews of Battle Royale
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: 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.