Book review: Battle Royale
Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
In an alternate reality, Japan is no longer Japan but the Republic of Greater East Asia. As part of its oppressive totalitarian regime, every year groups of ninth grade students are forced to participate in The Program-a brutal, dog-eat-dog competition there can only be one winner. After witnessing the murder of his best friend Yoshitoki, Shuya immediately teams up with his best friend’s longtime crush, Noriko. Together the two have to overcome not only homicidal classmates, but also the seemingly insurmountable fact that only one of them can survive.
My thoughts
This book makes the events in The Hunger Games like a playdate in Chuck E. Cheese’s in comparison. I’m almost glad I haven’t seen the immensely popular movie version yet, because I’m squeamish by nature and to see a visual of some of these scenes would be too much. Takami is terribly good at concocting the most violent scenes possible: eyes are gouged out; heads are split apart by axes or blown apart by bombs; limbs are hacked off with a sickle. Twisted, twisted stuff. There were also some neat emotional twists in the narrative too, such as when two young lovers decide to jump off a cliff rather than kill one another.
Yet notice I can’t actually recall specific characters, besides the main trio: Shogo (the tough-looking, mysterious transfer student), Shuya (the sensitive athlete/musician), and Noriko (the sweet one who limps her way through most of the book, but I’ll get back to her later). That was my main problem with the book: there were way too many contestants to keep track of-42 to be exact. For the most part, Takami does focus on the three, but when the competition starts in earnest, he incorporates the perspective of characters who then die less than fifty pages later. I can see such a technique working in a movie or in a reality TV format, but…not so much in a novel. Plus, all those multiple perspectives made the story two hundred pages longer than it needed to be. By the end, I felt the characters were acting the way they were not because it was true to their character, but because they fit the twists and turns of the story.
One aspect of the book that really got to me was the “angel or whore” portrayal of the girls. I was trying to keep in mind that this is fiction in translation; that the original audience was Japanese, with different conceptions of masculinity and femininity. But to me, most of the characters were so two-dimensional. The boys were ruthless and violent; they were more likely than the girls not to have any qualms about picking up a gun. The girls, on the other hand, were terrified and panicked out of their wits. The only real contenders among the girls, like Takako (the track star) and Mitsuko (the mean, beautiful girl), are either dispatched quickly or mentally unhinged. There are rare exceptions like Shuya, but come on. Maybe I’m just cynical, but girls and boys are more cunning than that.