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Hi there everybody. I recently was Googling, “Are book book review blogs even relevant anymore?” And lately I’ve been trying to find more people to interact with on book review blogs and trying to engage with them, and I’ve found a couple of people, but it seems like it’s kind of hard-going, and a lot of the blogs that I’m finding are maybe people that I’ve followed in the past and we no longer follow each other for whatever reason. It just seems like there used to be a large number of blogs, and now it’s whittled down to far fewer blogs. And so a lot of folks are saying that the best place to do book reviews is on YouTube or Instagram. And I’m not getting into Instagram. So, I figured what I would do is record a video and then pull the transcript and put the text onto my website so that you can engage with it either as a video or as just reading text because I know some of you have mentioned that you don’t have the time like to watch a video. Maybe you’re out in public or at work or whatever, so you don’t have time to watch a video or you can’t turn on the volume.

So, yeah. Going forward, I think I’m going to be doing videos with transcripts, and I’m hoping you get a pretty similar experience to what you’ve gotten in the past. Today, I am reviewing Battle Royale by Japanese author Koushun Takami. The copy that I have was the first translation into English by Yuji Oniki. There is a later translation, but I didn’t read that one. The book was also turned into a manga written by the same author, illustrated by another individual, and then it was made into a movie, which came out in 2000.

The original book (in Japanese) was published in 1999 to much controversy. It was the year that the Columbine High School shooting happened. Battle Royale actually has a lot of violence involving teenagers, so it was pretty controversial, yet it was a massive bestseller and is still relevant today. Hunger Games obviously borrowed a lot from Battle Royale, although I don’t believe Susan Collins has acknowledged that. If I mean, if you’ve seen Hunger Games and you read to my synopsis, you’ll see how similar they are. Battle Royale came out first. And then director Quentin Tarantino has talked about how the scene in Kill Bill with all the sword fighting was inspired by Battle Royale. He does give credit to the author. Good on him for that.

What we have is a book that is 624 pages. It is a speedy read, though. Battle Royale is set in an alternate 1997 Japan, and for reasons that are not super clear, the government has decided that every year they’re going to pick a class of students, aged 15. The students are basically put on a bus and then they’re gassed, so they pass out and wake up later with collars on. They’re on an island where a man comes out and starts telling them about how they are going to engage in a battle royale to the death until one person is standing. The collars, which you can see in the cover art, will track their pulses. So, if they’re dead, the government people running this event will know. If the students try to leave the island, there are ships around the island that will kill them. If they fuss with their collars, the collars explode. If after 72 hours there’s more than one student left, all the collars go off. Basically, it’s a no-win situation where they have to engage in battle to the death.

In the front of the book is a map of the island broken into grids. Announcements are made about sectors, like “A5” that become a no-go zone. If you’re in that sector at the time when it becomes a forbidden zone, your collar will go off and you’ll explode. Over the course of the three days, more and more sectors of these get blacked out, which basically funnels the students together.

So, the real crux of the book is then what do you do? These are your classmates. You know them. Are you going to panic and just try and kill everybody because you’re terrified? Are you the kind of person who’s just been waiting for an opportunity to harm your peers and this is go-time (which reminded me a little bit of the movie The Purge, if you’ve seen that)? Are some students just eager? Do you cooperate? Do you trust no one? And so that’s explored through many different characters.

I will say that the very first part of the book is incredibly off-putting. When you get to chapter zero, there are a lot of names. There are 42 students participating. You’re going to hear most of their names in chapter zero, but really you just need to know that you’re following basically one character named Shuya Nanahara. Other chapters will talk about different students, giving you a moment to get to know a person, but because the whole point is a battle royale, you do lose those students very quickly. I feel like the author did a great job of making me care about each person for the most part. There’s a couple I could have done without and limited the list to 35 students. We didn’t really need 42.

I think that in the book you do feel each death intimately. A great example is one young lady who is very into a Japanese pop star. She’s in the official fan club. She’s written into the fan club (because this is back in the day when you could do that), and she’s gotten a special locket with the pop singer’s picture in it. She’s hiding out in the bushes and talking to the picture asking him to protect her. She’s worried about how she just wants to go home and use her pimple cream and drink hot cocoa. The chapter is only like three pages long, but you really just feel like you know this person. And then she’s dead. It is heartbreaking.

I don’t think the book takes violence lightly. There is a lot of it, but it’s not just violence for violence sake. I did have a book club that I led discussing Battle Royale. Some of us read the manga, some of us read the book, some of us listened to the audio book, some of us watched the movie. Later on I watched the movie and found it was similar. One reason the book club got confused was because in the book the characters are referred to by their first names and in the movie they’re referred to by their last names. It felt like we couldn’t line the characters up in our discussion. I also feel like in the movie you have none of that interior dialogue, so you don’t really get to know these students, and  they die pretty fast. The movie does kind of feel like, “oh, this is just very violent because it’s violent.” The book does not feel like that.

Battle Royale feels like an important and timely book. Are we desensitized to violence? What is the value of teenagers, especially when they’re at a very frustrating age, where maybe they’re rebellious, but they’re still children? Would the government ever initiate a program where it can just snatch people off the school bus and detain them somewhere? (and in my video I wink here, ugh. The US). So, it feels like a very timely book.

I do recommend it. It’s still extremely popular. I recommend this edition in particular because at the end is what the author basically says is his definitive interview. He doesn’t want to be interviewed about Battle Royale anymore. The interview is dated 2009. Takami has written nothing else and emphasizes not that he just hasn’t published anything else. He has literally not written anything else. Super interesting author. There’s also a forward in my edition that talks about the importance of having a book and a movie. Why why do we make books based on movies, movies based on books, things like that. So, highly recommend it. I hope you check it out and let me know your thoughts in the comments.