Battle Royale: Battle Royale [Paperback]

Product Details

Paperback: 624 pages
Publisher: VIZ Media LLC; Original edition (February 26, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 156931778X
ISBN-13: 978-1569317785
Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5 x 1.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds

Battle Royale [Paperback]

Client Critiques

In his violent, controversial first novel, Koushun Takami takes us to the Republic of Greater East Asia, a contemporary, fictional, essentially fascist empire that contains Japan and China, but not Korea. Among the stranger forms of abuse beneath this oppressive regime is the Plan, a compulsory game that pits a group of teenagers against one yet another until there is only one particular survivor. Ostensibly begun as a sort of tactical experiment, every single year the Plan destroys 50 junior high school classes of 15-year-olds for no clear objective. This is the story of a single of those classes. 42 students, 21 male, 21 female, are offered weapons and confined to an island. There, they should kill each and every other till there is one winner, or all perish should really they refuse.
"Battle Royale" is commonly compared to William Golding's 1954 novel "Lord of the Flies". The two books are superficially rather similar: They each concern a group of youths on a island fighting for their lives. They are each allegories, but of several issues. "Lord of the Flies" illustrates the baser instincts that are commonly 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 due to the fact it is doesn't have an audience living below fascism, that's not meaningful in itself. The book's fascism seems to be an allegory for the a lot more rigid elements of Japanese culture and its educational method. It is potential 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 day families quite often have for their youngsters, and I suspect that bourgeois American youth will empathize more with this facet of the book than with those themes which apply a great deal more specifically to Japan.
I understand why young folks like "Battle Royale". But it wasn't exclusively young many people who produced the book a bestseller in Japan. It really is an entertaining novel with an fascinating premise for older folks as well. Truthfully, its themes are not as nicely-executed as "Lord of the Flies", but "Battle Royale"'s characters, interpersonal relationships, and motivations are alot 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 men and women do horrible factors. After a whilst the reader comes to see the hopelessness of the scenario and realizes that individuals genuinely 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 preserve track of 42 plus characters, all with unfamiliar Japanese names. But I did not have any difficulty at all remembering who was who. Author Koushun Takami deserves a lot of credit for focusing our attention on exceptional attributes of each and every character and organizing the book to overcome confusion. The number of students left remaining is announced at the finish of each and every chapter. This assists the reader keep track of what is going on and emphasizes the narrative's -and the Program's- matter-of-fact tone.
The only glaring fault that I can discover with Takami's writing is the dialogue. The students' dialogue appears awkward and remedial. As I know absolutely nothing about the Japanese language, I can not tell if this is negative writing or a trouble with the translation. Apart from that, the text is fluid and hassle-free to read. Don't be place off by the book's length. It's a genuine page-turner. I under no circumstances at any point tired of reading. I was at all times anxious to discover out who would live or die in the subsequent chapter. Creepy but true. Sustaining the readers' curiosity for more than 600 pages is an admirable accomplishment. "Battle Royale" is an impressive very first novel. It really is enjoyable for young and aging alike. 4 1/2 stars.

"Battle Royale" is a gripping, intense socio-political novel in the tradition of "Brave New Planet" and "1984." When initial hearing the subject matter, a government-sponsored game where a Jr. High School class ought to kill every single other until only a single remains, it seems sensationalistic and additional action-thriller than believed-provoker. Nonetheless, there is far way more hear than ultra-violence and simplistic teenage slaughter.
1st, the writing is brilliant, combing the subtlety of classical Japanese literature with the aggression and confrontation of European/American political literature. Every of the 40 students are men and women, with distinctive motivations and personalities. There are no throw-away scenes or off-screen deaths, and each and every student's demise is made to feel intimate and very important. Each life matters.
Second, the troubles dealt with are legion, from the conformity of Japanese schools to the insane bureaucracy and immobility of the Japanese political system. Along with this are alot more personal difficulties of loyalty, pain and loss. "Battle Royale" is a thick book, with a lot packed inside. I would imagine that those far more fluent in modern Japanese politics and social problems would grasp some of the subtler messages, but there is still a thing right here for everybody.
A minor complaint is that the students act absolutely nothing like Jr. High School students, particularly not Japanese ones. Maybe this is how they would like to be, but there are a few as well lots of "super-heroes" amongst them, a a couple of as well few crybabies. In spite of this, as this is an alternate-reality setting, maybe in the "Battle Royale" world youngsters develop up a little faster.