Simone and Her Books

I had originally read this book back when I was 23 and commuting via bus to work. It got a lot of interest from people who had read it before and absolutely adored it and honestly, that boosted my confidence that I would enjoy the book as well. And lo and behold, I did. I remember the violence, the brutality of these students, the sheer primal need to survive. But that was pretty much all I remembered until I decided I would read it again.

Here’s more about the book

Koushun Takami’s notorious high-octane thriller is based on an irresistible premise: a class of junior high school students is taken to a deserted island where, as part of a ruthless authoritarian program, they are provided arms and forced to kill one another until only one survivor is left standing. Criticized as violent exploitation when first published in Japan – where it then proceeded to become a runaway bestseller – Battle Royale is a Lord of the Flies for the 21st century, a potent allegory of what it means to be young and (barely) alive in a dog-eat-dog world. Made into a controversial hit movie of the same name, Battle Royale is already a contemporary Japanese pulp classic, now available for the first time in the English language.

Find it on Amazon | (not available on Bookshop.org)

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My thoughts

If I could suggest doing anything with your reading life, I highly recommend revisiting some of the books you read when you were younger. Maybe it’s the nostalgia or maybe it’s my hazy memory that made this reread well worth it. My original copy of this book got lost somewhere in the mingle of moving across the country. Maybe I lent it to someone and they never returned it. Maybe I just gave it up because I thought I wouldn’t reread it. Whatever the cause, I found another copy of this murderous thriller in a local used bookstore.

The book was pristine. If someone had read this copy, then they read it with the level of care most readers put into their books and not the monstrous way I like to read. I broke in the spine. I wrote in the margins. I had a conversation with this book and it’s all because on this reread of one of my favorite books from 15 years ago, I realized I missed a whole lot.

If you’re not aware of what this story is about, you will if you’ve ever played any sort of online multi-player video game that’s been invented since the early 2000s. Counterstrike, PUBG, Fortnite all use this book as the blueprint for their games: you’re trapped on an island with a bunch of strangers and you must be the last surviving member to be claimed the winner.

Battle Royale starts off with a Japanese middle school group heading off to the countryside for a weekend retreat. On the way, their bus is mysteriously gassed and when the kids wake up with metal collars around their necks, they are told they are now in The Program. The rules were simple: be the last person to survive on the island. Do whatever it is you need to do in order to survive, and don’t get killed. The story is set in the perspective of Shuya Nanahara, but you read from the perspectives of pretty much all of the 40 classmates on this island with him.

This is where I think Takami excels. He was able to diversify each of these characters providing personalities that truly humanized them. Some were scared. Some didn’t want to participate. Some played the game. And in each of these classmates, Takami creates their own interests, personalities, likes/dislikes, and all of them. You can recognize some of these people in your own class when you were growing up and it made reading their deaths all the more gruesome. Because not only was Takami good at creating these personalities, but he was also good at creatively killing them off.

But I think what I loved the most about this book the second time around was the world-building. How I missed this the first time I read it, I will never know. But it’s this alternate history world where Japan and China somehow came together to create one totalitarian state. The people of Japan were forced into what seemed like a communist world and the Program in which these kids participated in was a tactic to instill fear and untrust across the masses. It’s a cautionary tale at the heart of a world that could have been and could be in the future.

The story is also hyper realistic. While the idea that the government gathering a bunch of middle school students on an island to kill each other may be farfetched, what Takami doesn’t skip on is the realism towards people’s death, the way they think. There are no Mary Sues here. There is no hero. And the realism in this story is what drives this idea that this could possibly be a future if we’re not careful.

Overall, this fast-paced thriller really blew me away with its literary prowess and ability to immerse you in the story. Highly recommend it for folks who wanted something much more realistic from The Hunger Games.