Book Review: Battle Royale by Koushun Takami

Book #103 of 2022:

Battle Royale by Koushun Takami

First published in 1999 (or 2003, for the English translation), this controversial thriller posits a dystopian Japan where school classes of fifteen-year-olds, selected by random lottery, are forced to fight one another to the death each year. The children are kidnapped, locked into metal collars lined with explosives and GPS trackers, given an assortment of weapons and the instruction to kill their classmates, and then set loose on a deserted island that will steadily grow more and more off-limits as the time goes on. It’s one part The Long Walk, one part Lord of the Flies, and one part obvious early precursor to The Hunger Games.

It’s also astonishingly graphic in its violence, even by the standards of those already-bloody comparison works. Although written pre-Columbine, it’s hard to read now, two decades of school shootings later, without at least a twinge of unease at all the juvenile murder. Not that books like this have necessarily normalized or even encouraged such massacres, but author Koushun Takami is clearly being political with this concept as a critique of totalitarian government, and it’s discomforting to realize how his provocative excess has grown less and less removed from our reality today, and accordingly difficult to enjoy the subject as fiction. I’ve never seen the movie adaptation, and I certainly don’t intend to now.

Yet for all those qualms, it really is a fantastic story. The presentation of 42 Japanese character names is initially somewhat overwhelming, but many die soon after becoming the focus of a chapter, which makes it easier to track the ten or so who predominate throughout the text. What follows is a pulse-pounding page-turner, especially with each section ending on a dwindling reminder of how many students remain alive. And while the Hunger Games similarities are unavoidable for a modern reader, I greatly prefer how this novel takes us from perspective to perspective, rather than staying fixed on just a single hero like Katniss. Takami writes with great empathy for these doomed schoolchildren, only a couple of whom are truly bloodthirsty and relishing the opportunity to lash out at the cohort they’ve known all their lives. For the most part, they are just frightened and trapped by circumstances into becoming the worst versions of themselves at the least convenient moment. It’s a trust exercise writ large, and it’s heartbreaking yet understandable as we successively get to know them and see them fail.

In fact, I’d argue that the real thematic point of the project, beyond its gore and its pointed digs at bureaucratic notions of acceptable losses, is in the importance of community-building. Again and again across the plot, the players who band together survive for a while longer, while the loners or the groups who fracture under the strain inevitably come to a sorry end. It’s a tragic arc that repeats itself in various configurations till the end, and it’s why that conclusion does not actually follow a particularly grim fake-out in the final pages, besides just the fun of the twist. For the moral heart of the tale being told, it matters who ultimately leaves the island and how.

Even setting all that aside, the book is packed with iconic scenes and personalities (many of which are expanded upon further in the manga version by the same author). They live and breathe until they don’t, feeling like real teenagers in their nobility and foolishness alike. An overactive sex drive distracts and kills some, while a core protagonist goes out of his way to protect a dead friend’s crush. There are kids who willingly if not eagerly participate in the game, while others aim only for survival and a few seek a way to bring down the system on its overseers. All in all I can understand exactly why I found it so striking back in high school myself, although I don’t think I’ll need to reread it again now for quite a long time to come.

[Content warning for rape, underage prostitution, suicide, homophobia including slurs, domestic abuse, and gun violence.]

★★★★★

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