Battle Royale: Remastered
Here it is, the instant classic that has informed so much of Japanese pop culture in the twenty-first century. If you like anime and manga, you sooner or later run into allusions to Battle Royale. Indeed, if you’ve followed this blog, the anime version of Magical Girl Raising Project, which I discussed at length, is basically Battle Royale with magical girls.
This novel by Koushun Takami appeared in 1999 and was an instant sensation probably in part because it resulted in some pearl-clutching. As an exercise in ultraviolence, it received some condemnations, and its notoriety was secured in the following year when the movie adaptation received criticism from members of the Japanese parliament. I noticed a DVD of the film at the store one day and saw that the blurb on the back proudly boasts that it is banned in several countries.
The effect of Battle Royale on pop culture reaches outside Japan: it is arguably the source of the slew of teen dystopias that have populated YA fiction of late, as it is a likely inspiration for The Hunger Games
Battle Royale is, among other things, the ultimate one-hit wonder. Author Koushun Takami has written nothing else of note. He did a stint on a newspaper, and he penned a few short stories, and he wrote Battle Royale—and then nothing, except for some Battle Royale derivations, such as the manga adaptation. In the afterword he wrote for the 2009 VIZ Media translation, he commented that he was bored with the novel and would never write anything about Battle Royale ever again, but he apparently couldn’t keep that promise, as he went on to produce the script for Angels’ Border
I didn’t know what to think of Battle Royale when I first approached it, aside from recognizing it as something I ought to read sooner or later. My opinion of some of its derivations (see the aforementioned Magical Girl Raising Project) is largely negative. I read it in fits and starts because it honestly didn’t grab me, though I found a few of its chapters good for an ironical chuckle and found its action sequences to be generally well-constructed in spite of some flubs. As I read it, my opinion swung wildly from love to hate to indifference.
To my own surprise, however, my final take on Battle Royale is positive: I don’t like everything about it, but the last chapters provide a succession of plot twists that result in the story having a really good ending. Like, really, really good. A great ending can do much to redeem a book; so, though I will refrain from giving details, I will say that, in the last analysis, Battle Royale is badass. Magical Girl Raising Project still sucks, though.
Likely as not, you know the story already, but here goes: Battle Royale is set in a fictional totalitarian dictatorship called the Republic of Greater East Asia. The exact borders of the Republic are unclear, but it at least includes Japan. On a yearly basis, the Republic nabs one class of middle-school students, takes them to a remote location, gives them a random assortment of weapons, and forces them to kill one another. The last student standing is declared the winner and gets to go free.
The book opens with an engaging but intimidating infodump: We meet the students (Ninth Grade, Class B, Shiroiwa Junior High) on a bus, believing themselves to be on a field trip. The POV character in the first chapter and through much of the novel is Shuya Nanahara, a slightly rebellious guitarist who happens to be thinking about the life histories of several of his classmates when the story opens. Counting him, there are forty-two students in his class, which, if we know the premise of this book, might appall us, but Koushun Takami does a masterful job of keeping track of his characters so we don’t have to.
Shuya and the rest of the students are knocked out with gas, and they wake up in a classroom in a schoolhouse on a remote island, where a government agent calling himself Kinpatsu Sakamochi informs them that they have been selected for the “Program.” Each will be given a random weapon and sent out of the classroom one at a time. They have been fitted with explosive collars that will go off if they try to escape the island. What’s more, the government will regularly add “forbidden zones” to the island’s map, which will cause the collar of anyone who enters them to go off. If someone doesn’t die every twenty-four hours, the collars will go off. To break them mentally, Sakamochi makes them write, “We are all going to kill each other,” on a piece of paper several times. He callously orders one of the students murdered in cold blood by the soldiers accompanying him. Then the game begins.
Much of the book is taken up with vignettes of students dealing with their own emotional turmoil as they are forced to defend themselves or slay one another. Some of these are reasonably good in themselves, and others are weak. A pervading problem of the book—the same problem I highlighted in my discussion of Magical Girl Raising Project—is that the attempts to develop pathos often fall flat because we have a pretty good idea that the characters whose backstories we’re getting at great length are just going to die anyway. For this reason, a sense of anticlimax pervades much of the novel, even though the pace is fast and the narration is mostly enjoyable.
Takami makes some wise choices that make this a better novel than it could have been. In spite of the dauntingly large cast, he keeps the focus on a small group of heroes we can root for and villains we can hate. On the heroes’ side, we have the aforementioned Shuya, who’s a likable guy even if Takami goes too far in trying to depict him as a heartthrob. Then there’s Noriko, the girl he’s determined to protect because his best friend was in love with her. And finally, we have the hardbitten Kawada, a survivalist who seems to know exactly what it takes to play the game.
On the villains’ side, we have Mitsuko Souma, a coldhearted seductress who turned ruthless after being raped repeatedly in childhood (oy), and Kazuo Kiriyama, a psychopath suffering from a very specific brain injury that renders him incapable of feeling emotion (yes, really). The depiction of Kiriyama clearly owes something to The Terminator, which was a popular movie in Japan. He quickly becomes a villain we can love to hate as he implausibly escapes certain death several times and callously cuts down most everybody else.
There are others who struggle and fight and make bold attempts, of course, but these listed above remain the most important ones, and it is that narrow focus that prevents the large cast from becoming bewildering. Even when Takami brings up characters we haven’t seen for several chapters, he does a good job of gently reminding us of who they are. Even though I read the book slowly and fitfully, I found myself having no trouble keeping track of the cast. As an additional bit of help, or perhaps as a nasty joke, the novel also keeps a running tally of how many students are still alive, printed at the end of each chapter.
The particular edition I read, which runs under the title of Battle Royale: Remastered, was translated by Nathan Collins. This is the third (!) translation into English, all of which have come from VIZ Media. It claims to be less literal than the previous editions, for the purpose of being more readable in English. I have no intention of comparing translations (because I haven’t read them all), but I will say that I found this edition to be pretty good, though it could have survived a few more passes from an editor to fix typos, repair grammatical flubs, and tighten the prose. There’s an excessive use of passive voice and a tendency to wordiness, both of which place unintended emphasis on the schlockiness . To be fair, however, I will add that the sometimes tin-eared prose makes Battle Royale read like exactly the melodramatic, pulpy paperback it is. Given that it’s a first novel (and probably last novel, considering the author’s output), it’s very strong. From time to time, it waxes maudlin when it tries too hard to elicit pathos from its blood, guts, and weepy backstories, but it’s pretty good overall considering the premise.
I want to avoid talking about the plot in detail, but I do want to discuss interpretation, Most notably, the book has been compared to Lord of the Flies
Lord of the Flies, as I have discussed before, more-or-less shares the same theme as Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness
Discussions of Lord of the Flies tend, in my experience, to leave out an important fact, which is that it is a science fiction novel. The story takes place in the near future, and its backdrop is World War III. The reason the schoolboys are trapped together on a desert island is because Britain, in a last-ditch effort to preserve some fragment of its populace, sent them away on a plane before being consumed by nuclear fire. Without adult supervision, and under the combined pressures of untamed wilderness and superstitious fear, the boys revert from civilization to savagery, and this is apparently a microcosm of what is happening off the page, where civilization is tearing itself to pieces: the children pillage, rape, and murder because the adults that left them behind are doing the same thing on a larger scale.
“Heart of Darkness” seems to say that civilization is fragile and perhaps illusory. Lord of the Flies seems to say that civilization has a built-in self-destruct button. Both works seem to say that even civilized man still has a savage heart, a “heart of darkness.”
Battle Royale, however, appears to say almost the opposite. The brutal game in which the kids find themselves trapped derives not from civilization’s absence nor its breakdown, but its excess. “This is what successful fascism looks like,” one of the characters says near the beginning. The “Program” that forces the children to kill one another is the product of a rigid bureaucracy. It is a totalitarian state and the faceless organizations that enable it that force the children into the battle royale.
According to the afterword in the back, Takami had a few different sources of inspiration for his totalitarian state. He is familiar with George Orwell, so we can name 1984
On top of all that, he states in the afterword that the fascist state in the novel is supposed to be a satire of Japan in the 1980s, though exactly what he means by that is not easily discernible to a foreigner. Certain hints in the book suggest that, like many people who live in a free society, he has a sort of schoolgirl crush on totalitarianism, specifically North Korea, perhaps similar to the infatuation American radicals had with the USSR in the 1960s. This seems confirmed by the praise he gives to a song called “Wanna Be in North Korea” by Kiyoshiro Imawano. At the same time, however, he mentions that an address from the Republic’s dear leader early in the novel is based on propaganda broadcasts from North Korea, and he appears to admit a resemblance between North Korea and his fictional Republic. After his ambiguous commentary, he simply invites the reader to study East Asian geopolitics, which is fair enough. In any case, we can say with reasonable certainty that he chafes at rigid rules, and he mentions that he thinks people in Japan (especially in the 1980s) are unwilling to speak up against pointless traditions for fear of being criticized.
On account of its sheer popularity, I think this novel sometimes has depth attributed to it that isn’t really there. But although it is not exactly deep, it is certainly entertaining. I find myself satisfied with Battle Royale, especially its superb finale, and I recommend it.
