Battle Royale

Takami Koshoun

While I can't find any publication figures on *Battle Royale*, Viz' blurb on the back assures me it was a runaway bestseller (their words) in Japan, and that the manga which is based upon it has sold similarly well. For that matter, Kinji Fukasaku's film adaptation has very little box office information about it at IMDB, though I am prepared to accept that it, too, was a smash; pretty much everyone I know who likes (or is even curious about) modern Japanese film has either seen it or wants to see it. (Unfortunately, as of now I still fall into the latter category.) It is a film that comes readily to the fore when a Japahorror newbie asks, "so what should I see first?" In other words, in all sorts of media, *Battle Royale* has turned into something of a phenomenon (assuming one believes Viz' assertions, which I've no reason not to). Like the not-nearly-as-deserving The Da Vinci Code, reading Battle Royale will show you pretty easily what would cause it to become a major bestseller. With a few exceptions (the introduction and first chapter are interminable), Koshoun keeps the pages turning in this six-hundred-plus-page epic. The pace is exceptionally done once you've gotten to page forty or fifty, the subject matter has that "beauty of a particularly gruesome auto accident" feel to it, and the main characters are well-enough drawn that you can at least empathize with them on a surface level.

The plot is exceptionally simple: a junior high school class, forty-two students, are taken to a remote, evacuated island and ordered to participate in what is called The Program. It's a game of sorts in which the objective is exceptionally simple: be the last surviving student. To that end, students are equipped with basic survival equipment and a random weapon or two with which to defend themselves against, and kill, their classmates. There are a few extra rules thrown in to make sure the game doesn't stagnate, but that's the gist of it. And really, what could be more fun than six hundred pages of fifteen-year-olds killing each other?

As a straight genre thriller, the book works on just about every level. It's prime genre writing, right down to characters wandering around with "kill me" stamped on their foreheads and the final battle being, for all intents and purposes, obvious by the time you've reached the end of the first few chapters. In the larger picture, though, it's not quite as successful as the cover blurb and the adaptations would have you believe. It's obvious that Koshoun meant *Battle Royale* not just as a thriller, but as both a satire on modern civilization and a rant against fascism (how much fascism Koshoun attributes to current-day Japanese civilization is a valid question, but one to be answered with far more authority by a Japanese critic, or at least someone living in the country capable of reading the novel in the original), *Battle Royale* leaves way too much out to really be effective. Every once in a while, some of the characters stop what they're doing and mouth various platitudes about how awful the government is and how they'd like to strike against it, or how awful a civilization must be that would allow such a game to go on. None of it really works, at least in translation. Ironically, the places it works best are in one student's assessment of the government as unbeatable, simply because despite how awful it is, it works (cf. Mussolini making the trains run on time), which rather undercuts the satire angle.

Another place it fails somewhat, and this is obviously no fault of Koshoun's, is in the English translation. Where other translators might have glossed over some of the Japanese idioms, or at least made them more familiar to human ears, the translation seems almost literal in places, to where the text, especially in internal monologues, sounds like badly-dubbed dialogue from a sixties Godzilla movie. This, of course, leaves the reader somewhat jarred (but with, it should be said, a feeling of amusement).

Despite all its various faults, I will emphasize my earlier statement that Battle Royale is a good-- no, a great-- genre thriller. The back cover compares it to Lord of the Flies, but it seems to me that a better comparison would be to The Most Dangerous Game with the twist that everyone is both hunter and hunted. This is one hell of a fun ride, so pony up your E ticket and hop on.