Battle Royale: The Novel

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The most impressive attribute of this novel would be the writing. It was vivid. Some would say too vivid, but for me, the more violent, the better. This novel promised a battle royale among teenagers, but what happened was not completely unbelievable. If thrown in together with a bunch of your classmates and forced to kill each other, some people tend to lose their minds. The whole idea of it is not completely unlikely to happen, but odds are it wouldn't. The children here were brutal to the point that they had no hearts. I'm not Japanese, but I still think that Japanese people don't exude the violent characteristics that the author portrayed. The defense though would be that this is a work of fiction. It can be as absurd as it can be. There are some work of fiction that tend to go overboard regarding the absurdity, but for me this novel had the perfect amount. It was believable, and honestly I'm a bit terrified because of it.

Tokyo International Film Festival Presentation, with footage from the gala screening at the Tokyo International Film Festival The dialogue is natural and hardly ever preachy. Some of the kids involved in politics wax poetic about the country and its failings. Most of them, though, are content to gossip about their crushes or other students. They talk about their families, hobbies, and pasts. They make plans for a future they may never see.Each Battle Royale student is issued with a map divided into a coded grid. Danger Zones are randomly chosen grid-sectors which are declared off-limits to students. Takami was born in Amagasaki, Hyōgo Prefecture near Osaka and grew up in the Kagawa Prefecture of Shikoku. After graduating from Osaka University with a degree in literature, he dropped out of Nihon University's liberal arts correspondence course program. From 1991 to 1996, he worked for the news company Shikoku Shimbun, reporting on various fields including politics, police reports, and economics. On July 26, 2012, the Los Angeles Times reported that The CW Television Network had been in discussions with Hollywood representatives about the possibility of turning Battle Royale into an American television show. According to a spokesperson, the talks were only preliminary, but if a deal could be reached, the network would acquire rights to Koushun Takami's novel, then expand on it for an hourlong dramatic series. Joyce Jun, a Hollywood attorney representing U.S. rights to the title, states that "there is no deal in place." A CW spokesman only confirmed there had been some discussion, declining to comment further. [25] In the end, only four students remain: Shuya Nanahara, Noriko Nakagawa, Shogo Kawada, and antagonist Kazuo Kiriyama. There is a car chase and shootout between the three main characters and Kazuo. Kiriyama is killed, and soon Kawada succumbs to his wounds and dies, as well. Heeding Kawada's advice to "show no mercy," Shuya and Noriko board a nearby ship, kill the soldiers on board, and escape to the mainland, where they become fugitives and try to the reach the US as refugees.

If a student enters a Danger Zone, or fails to leave in time, their collar will explode, killing the student. Once an area becomes a Danger Zone, it remains for the rest of the game. Consequently, the number of Danger Zones increases as the game progresses, forcing students to move around in an ever shrinking battlefield. Battle Royale takes place in an alternate timeline; according to the book's prologue, Japan is a police state, known as the Republic of Greater East Asia (大東亜共和国 Dai Tōa Kyōwakoku). From time to time, fifty randomly selected classes of secondary school students are forced to take arms against one another until only one student in each class remains. The program was created, supposedly, as a form of military research, though the outcome of each battle is publicized on local television. A character discovers that the program is not an experiment at all, but a means of terrorizing the population. In theory, after seeing such atrocities, the people will become paranoid and divided, preventing an organized rebellion. Also, Suzanne Collins totally plagiarized! There were parts of the story that were absolutely exactly from this book. For instance, there were announcements in the morning and evening of who was killed, they were constantly narrowing down the playing field to herd the kids closer together, and there was a part where they instructed one boy to set two fires with young wood so that it would smoke as a signal and then they would use a bird call to find each other. Copy much? Now I know that this is a translation, and not a very good one, by all accounts. And I know that Japanese culture is different from my own (one of the big themes in the book, actually), and that their way of speaking and thinking and behaving is different from the way I would do it. I have no problem with that. I would like to state for the record that I never expected this book to read as though it was written by an American. But I'm not going to just give all of the bad writing in this book a pass because it's poorly translated from Japanese. When I was reading Battle Royale, Hong Kong young people had also been (and still are) engaging in a battle of their future and the city's own future too:

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In 2012, the Sipat Lawin Ensemble and two other college theater groups in the Philippines, made an unofficial loose adaptation of the novel into a live-action performance called Battalia Royale, which had its debut at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Performances were also held at an abandoned high school in Quezon City. [24] Television [ edit ] I got to be the hunter and the hunted. The person who spends all their time looking for their crush so that they can tell them they love them. The best friends hiding in the dark together and whispering about boys they like as a distraction. The betrayed and the betrayer. I know, I know, rotating through 38 POVs sounds exhausting and confusing but it was executed so well and each character was so different. I loved that I got to experience the Program through all different eyes and the experience would not have been the same if it wasn’t written this way. I got to see through the eyes of the avid hunters, the hiders, the plotters and I-don’t-want-to-kill-anyone-but-I’m-just-trying-to-survive-ers. A Tribute to Kinji Fukasaku, featuring scenes of Kinji Fukasaku on the location of Battle Royale II Alderman, David N. (October 7, 2010). "Battle Royale – (Book Review)". Red Room. Archived from the original on September 29, 2013 . Retrieved March 28, 2012. And still after all those scary things there were some really touching moments too, when you get to see love and kindness are as important traits of a human being as fear and cruelty.

The premise was not new to me, but the execution was spectacular. Not only did the author managed to impress me with the plot, but he also managed to make me feel sympathy toward some of the characters. I'll be honest and say that it would be impossible to feel sympathy toward all 42 of them, but I still managed to feel a sense of connection toward a few of them. So. Battle Royale. Was. Epic. Dare I say it? It was better than The Hunger Games, and The Hunger Games is one of my favorites. Both have similar settings: a dystopian government that forces children into an arena and makes them kill each other off one by one. But Battle Royale ended up as the more striking, more intense, of the two. The novel grabbed me, strapped me to a poodle, and threw me off a cliff. How does a poodle save a person from a fall off a cliff, you may ask. It doesn't. That's why I kind of feel like an insignificant smudge on the ground right now. The novel Battle Royale was completed after Takami left the news company. It was reje Koushun Takami (高見 広春 Takami Kōshun) is the author of the novel Battle Royale, originally published in Japanese, and later translated into English by Yuji Oniki and published by Viz Media and, later, in an expanded edition by Haika Soru, a division of Viz Media. In short, a bunch of forty 15 year old Japanese schoolkids are transported to an island and forced to kill each other until only one is left. Maybe they were built on the same ideas, but both novels do something very different and I appreciate them equally. My biggest criticism of Battle Royale is Shuya - the good guy. He is the weak link in a great novel. Why? Because he's so goddamn perfect. Good-looking. Popular. Talented in sports and music. Kind. Self-sacrificing. I just don't like heroes, give me someone who reeks of humanity any day over the one who seems unnaturally above it all.Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new essays by Matt Alt and Anne Billson and archival articles