I've always been rather fond of the idea of children killing each other; not in real life, I should probably point out, but in fiction. It's not only a concept designed to horrify the reader, but it's also a great opportunity for the writer to reflect on mankind's innate abilities and emotions, to say something about us a species and as a society. The idea of judging a society by how they treat the weakest among them is an old one, and setting it up so that the children get to battle it out themselves can be a great recipe for some pretty harsh satire. Of course, the benchmark is Golding's Lord of the Flies, though the book that really suckerpunched me in my own youth was Stephen King's overlooked The Long March.
Battle Royale shares traits with both of those: the theme from Golding, and the tightly plotted genre sensibilities (and clunky prose) from King (and a slight dash of Orwell for good measure). In a world where things went differently from WWII and onwards, Japan (AKA The Republic of Greater East Asia) is a tightly controlled dictatorship in which American influences are very much frowned upon. Children are kept ignorant with strict discipline and harmless entertainment... and kept on their toes by the Battle Royale: a yearly competition in which entire high school classes are kidnapped and taken to a remote place, given weapons and told to kill each other or be killed. Only one child is allowed to survive. This, of course, is broadcast as entertainment, the ultimate reality show, and is also a popular sport for gamblers. (This is both the strength and the trappings of genre literature; it allows the writer to take elements of a society - the conformity of Japanese culture, the tendency to look down on others, the very strict patriarchy - and amp them up, make them tangible.)
The novel follows one class of 15-year-olds who suddenly find themselves caught up in this; trapped on a deserted island and having to slaughter each other if they want to survive. The horrible thing about Battle Royale is precisely that it's a Japanese book. It's about children who have been taught from an early age to conform, to dress alike, to not question authority... and who are suddenly handed a gun and told to kill each other. To be individuals. Cut-throat competition at its most non-subtextual. In a sense, if Golding's book was about the animal underneath the thin layer of civilizaion, then Takami's is about how thick that layer can be, and how hard it can be to ignore it.
Battle Royale was initially savaged by the critics in Japan for being violent, and yes, it is. Very very violent. That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing; again, there are very strong elements of satire and social criticism and Takami isn't aiming for subtlety. Japanese society is (in)famous for its high pressure, and when the children get the scoop on what they're supposed to do before they die, they all react in different ways; some kill themselves rather than compete, others lose their mind completely and are quickly killed off by their more cold-blooded classmates, most fight desperately for their lives and fail; in the end, only the best and the worst are left standing. Yet Takami does his best to give all 42 of them their own story, present them all as individuals with bad and (except in some cases) good sides, and while this is admirable it's also one of the major problems of the novel. Even if Takami is very inventive when it comes to killing them off, they soon all start to look a little too much alike, especially since he uses the same tools to characterize them all; which bands they like, what their family is like, whom they have a crush on, etc - at times, this reads less like a novel about 15-year-olds and more like a yearbook by 15-year-olds. That, along with the fact that nobody ever seems to have told Takami about "show, don't tell", tends to make it a well-plotted but not always very well-written book. Of course, another problem with genre literature is that it rarely gets the sort of translator that could do it justice, and some of the aforementioned clunkiness feels more like a bad translation. Still, a skilled editor could easily have tightened up the plot by cutting some of the overly verbose and repetitive character descriptions (which are even repeated several times for our main characters) out of this book.
I watched the movie version long before I read the novel, and it might just be familiarity, but I must say I preferred the movie; it cuts down on the number of protagonists, focuses on fleshing out the ones that carry the plot, and leaves characterizations more up to the camera than to endless backstories. What the book really has going for it in comparison is the dystopian angle, which it milks pretty well, and which in a sense makes it a more relevant work than the rather self-contained movie. For all the gore (and it's good gore, if you're into that sort of thing), the scenes that tend to stick are the ones where the more fleshed-out characters interact in desperate (and mostly futile) attempts to find their way out of an oppressive society - it's no coincidence that the main character keeps quoting Springsteen: "Tramps like us, baby, we were born to run." And while I can't help wishing Takami had had a better editor and translator, it's still a vicious if blunt piece of satire and quite the pageturner. Though mostly, of course, it's about 15-year-olds in sailor suits blowing each others' heads off.
