Grab the Lapels

Battle Royale by Koushun Takami, Edited by Yuji Oniki

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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.

23 comments

  1. An interesting experiment in finding the differences between orality and literacy. Already I observe that you’re wordier verbally; when you write I think you condense more of your thoughts.

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  2. I can definitely see what you mean about the Hunger Games having similarities to this one. I think I first heard of this one for that very reason but I’ve somehow never gotten around to reading it. With the emotional depth and various food for thought involved I think I’d probably get on well with the book. The movie potentially sounds a bit too slasher adjacent for my tastes though. But I’ve been putting a sci fi TBR together and will be sure to add this one to it.

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    • I wouldn’t call it sci-fi. No futuristic tech or anything, just a different version of Japan. I think I read somewhere it’s like if Japan won WWII and had an empire. You’re right, the movie does start to feel slasher adjacent (with a dash of telenovela).

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  3. I appreciate you keeping a text translation! I often read book blogs during work downtime and can’t listen to a video. This book sounds a lot like Squid Game too. Good to know about this original text that so many other things are based on/inspired by.

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  4. This does sound like Hunger Games owes a lot to it!

    I haven’t watched your videos yet because I usually read blogs early in the morning while I have my morning coffee and I’m trying to keep it quiet for the rest of my household!

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    • That’s okay that you haven’t watched my videos. The text review is similar/same for more options for my followers.

      I have never read Hunger Games, but I saw the movies. They are definitely made for young people whereas Battle Royale is not….I don’t think. We talked about that in book club; who is the audience? It’s about teens but it doesn’t seem like it’s for teens.

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  5. Yassss Battle Royale!!! SO good!!! Loved it. Saw the movie and it was good but the book was better. And YES Squid Game is great. Loved it. Another good one is Alice in Borderland. I’ve also read all? most of? the Hunger Games books. Saw the first movie but didn’t like the movie enough to continue the movies. But Battle Royale tops all of the above.

    As for BookTube, not really a fan of listening to people yak. I prefer written blogs. But you do whatever you enjoy doing. Lots of people love watching BookTube.

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    • Thanks for commenting on my “yakking,” ya weirdo. 🤣 No, in all honesty, I’m glad to see a fellow Battle Royale fan on here. Did you ever read the manga? I only read the book translated into English by the first individual, and I’m not sure why they retranslated it. I think the movie definitely missed out on all that great internal dialogue. It was still fun, but. Also, there was the weird scene during which Mitsuko uses her sexuality to disarm one boy and she kills him, but in the movie they’re a pile of naked dead teen boys?? That feels like such a Stephen King- Beverly-in-It thing to do.

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      • First, thank you for not being offended by my “yakking” comment. Hee hee!

        Manga!!! There’s Battle Royale manga??? No, I didn’t even buy my very first manga until, like, a month ago!!! I will look into that!

        The book translated into English by the first individual…and it was retranslated? What?? Sorry, I read your post right before bed and everything is just now sinking in. Which translation did I read and do I still own the book?? Chat says that since I read it during the peak Hunger Games craze, 2008-2012, it would be the Yuji Oniki translation.

        I saw the movie on Nov 19, 2015 and I was one of two females in the audience. I don’t remember any particular scenes, like the one you mention, but I remember the audience did more laughing than gasping in horror. It felt very campy because of some of the dialogue and OMG the dramatic ways the kids would die. And the music…very famous classical music pieces…one is a waltz…playing while kids are murdering each other. Um, no. Made it too comical.

        I ran into the other lady at the parking ticket machine after the movie and she asked me what I thought. I told her I the book was better, she asked me if the book was more serious and was surprised when I said I don’t remember any comedy whatsoever in the book. I told her I was pretty much on the edge of my seat for all 600-ish pages!!!

        I read It when it first came out in the 1980s so I don’t remember the Beverly scene you mentioned. Unfortunately, I’m one of those people who forgets everything they read the minute they finish reading. It’s terrible. But I did look up what you’re talking about and yes, that all sounds like a similar kind of WTF moment.

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        • Yes, the second English translation came out in something like 2014. They translator’s name sounds very American, so I’m glad that I got the translation by a Japanese individual. I watched the movie on hoopla, which is an app that I can use through my library that has ebooks and streaming movies. It’s also free right now on Tubi, but that means they’ll be commercials. So, if you want to rewatch it, it’s free right now! Depending on which country you’re in…. I just realized I thought you were in America, but I’m not sure. Yes, the scene has the main female killer walking away from an area that has like three or four dead naked boys laying on the ground. The suggestion is that she sexed them to death. I guess it just weirdly reminded me of the scene in the book It in which Beverly sleeved with all of the boys give them a gift or something?? It’s been explained to me many times, but I don’t get it. I did find parts of the book humorous, especially the girl that I mentioned in my review who’s obsessed with a Japanese pop star and is asking him to protect her while she’s out in the woods. I do think it’s much more edge-of-your-seat than funny, though.

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          • You guessed right. I’m in America, Los Angeles to be exact. I’m glad I got the translation by the Japanese individual as well. I enjoy Stephen King books, but I’ve never met a movie of his that I’ve liked, so I will probably pass on watching “It”.

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  6. I’m so intrigued by this author who hasn’t written anything since, and is sick of talking about it. Can’t really blame the guy i suppose. I like your video blogs / transcripts, I can watch and read a bit of each. I’ve never read this book, nor seen the movie, I don’t tend to like too much violence (I get bored of it, actually), but I’m intrigued by the ‘lore’ that surrounds this one, if you know what I mean.

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    • I totally know what you mean. There is a whole fan-fav cult type thing around the book such that in 2011 the author said no more interviews, lol. Even he is crazy-surprised that so many people were into his book. I love that his origin for developing the novel was basically kids fight to the death, so he asked his friend to pretend, like “What would you do?” The friend immediately wants to cooperate, and that’s when the author felt he himself was a terrible person because he would have destroyed his buddy!

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  7. First, I know what you are saying about book blogs, though it seems like there is still a strong core of book bloggers. I like Instagram, but not for book blogging. It feels more like “book influencing” because there’s such little depth of analysis or discussion, just people showing pictures of books they’ve read or, more often, are going to read.

    Second, I listened to one of your video blogs – when you did that internship during your studies – and I really enjoyed it. I’d love to listen to these, but I usually read blogs – like others you mention – in places where I don’t want to disturb people. For the same reason, I do a lot less dictation of notes in preparation for my blog posts, than I’d like to.

    Third, this books sounds really intriguing. Would you call it “alternative history”? I think though that it is “speculative fiction” because it’s setting up an unreal situation where people are being controlled in a way that’s imagined not from the real world? But, I really could not read a book where the characters, particularly people I come to like, die one after the other, or, maybe have to hurt someone else in order not to die. Interesting concept but not something I want to read or see. What was the author’s impetus for writing this book? (I can see though why you found it “timely” for now, but what was his reason?)

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    • Ah! I’m glad you liked my video post from 2025. I’m doing all of them as videos going forward with the option to read as well. I can see on my YouTube stats that people ARE watching them. I don’t know if they’re my regular book bloggers or new people. I would have said book bloggers are everywhere, but I certainly cannot find them, or if I do, it’s people doing a post a day with cover reveals, little challenges, wrap-ups, etc. that I don’t really care for.

      I would say this book is alternate history, much like The Man in the High Castle. I believe someone said imagine if Japan won WWII and changed the world’s superpowers. The situation seems unreal, but is it THAT unreal? As I note in my review, in the US we are putting people away in camps without due process, people cannot find their children once they are separated, and the president has no oversight because Congress doesn’t want to anger the president’s base. The midterms cannot come fast enough, and while I don’t want to get my hopes up, I think change is coming…

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