PART ONE
START GAME
42 students remaining

A countdown! I love those.

This chapter opens with a 0, presumably because this setup chapter comes before the actual game begins.

As the bus entered the prefectural capital of Takamatsu, garden suburbs transformed into city streets of multicolored neon, headlights of oncoming cars, and checkered lights of office buildings.

The problem with translated books, of course, is that the translator needs to know what they’re doing with the language as well as know how to construct decent sentences of their own. I found the people in charge of Boogiepop’s translation quite good, while I picked up a .HACK book to see the sort of unreadable mess I’d expect from a fourth grader. I’m going to avoid making comments on the writing style because it doesn’t tell you much about the original author. A lot of nuance is lost here, but that’s inevitable, and since this is another culture, it’s not like I know what nuances to be picking up, anyway.

At any rate – it’s an ordinary day as seen through the schoolbus window by Shuya Nanahara, who the book identifies as (Male Student No. 15, Third Year Class B, Shiroiwa Junior High School, Shiroiwa Town, Kagawa Prefecture). It’ll continue to identify each student by number. I’ll just repost the list at the end of the chapter with whatever notes there are.

From the manga, Shuya is sort of the main character. He’s extremely (unrealistically?) good and kind of boring, so you can argue Katniss is an improvement, but the fact is, it’s not as if the casual sociopathy of the Hunger Games kids is realistic either. And as I was saying then, if we’re to have a hero, let them actually be one, you know?

It used to be that Keds weren’t hard to find, but now they were extremely rare. The canvas of Shuya’s shoes were torn on the right heel, and the stray threads stuck out like cat’s whiskers. The shoe company was American, but the shoes themselves were made in Colombia. At present, 1997, the Republic of Greater East Asia hardly suffered from a shortage of goods. In fact it was rich with commodities, but imports were hard to come by lately. Well, it was only to be expected in a country with an official policy of isolationism. Besides, America—both the government and the textbooks called them “the American Imperialists”—was an enemy state.

So sounds like this is a Japan that won their side of the war, or else just declared themselves the only Asia that mattered. Probably the former.

The place is pretty strict – electric guitars are frowned upon and rock music flatly banned.

Chinese books in translation were fairly easy to obtain, not surprising considering the Republic claimed China as “part of our homeland.”

So yeah, sounds like they took China. I wonder what the implication that has in Japan? My immediate thoughts are that the place must be a sea of corpses and I can’t see how Japan could hold it without constant war, so they must have killed off much of the population and be resettling it, but I understand Japan doesn’t exactly teach much about what they actually did to those places.

In fact this country, under a unique system of national socialism ruled over by an executive authority called “the Dictator” (Shinji Mimura once said with a grimace, “This is what they call ‘successful fascism.’ Where else in the world could you find something so sinister?”), had no national religion. The closest thing to religion was faith in the political system— but this wasn’t paired up with any established religion. Religious practice therefore was permitted as long as it remained moderate and at the same time wasn’t guaranteed. So it was only practiced in private by dedicated followers.

So at a guess, history diverged at least around the leadup to WW2, because Japan then did have a national religion it combined with its political system. Here, maybe they kept things separate, and perhaps also had leaders levelheaded enough to prevent things like the atrocities at Nanking, which would be necessary for it to be feasible to have a republic including China on any level.

As Shuya was raised in a Catholic orphanage (which he says was lucky, as the state orphanages are apparently far worse and exist largely to produce soldiers) this is a clue that he’s not exactly a class well loved by the government.

The group of delinquents that included Ryuhei Sasagawa (Male Student No. 10) and Mitsuru Numai (Male Student No. 17) was sitting on the wide seat at the back of the bus.

Shuya comments earlier that girls naturally form cliques, but doesn’t make any statement about the boys despite them having similar groupings.

The leader of this group is Kazuo Kiriyama, who I remember was really awesome in the manga. Here, we’re told he’s able to take on local yakuza in a fight, is the son of corporation’s president, is the top student in class without apparent effort, and also he’s the best athlete. Shuya and his friend Shinji are the only ones who come close. Shuya has no idea why he’s a gang leader, and says he’s never done anything bad he knows of, but does feel there’s something just…weird about the guy.

He was absent a lot. The idea of Kazuo “studying” was completely absurd. In every class Kiriyama remained quietly seated at his desk as if he were thinking of something that had nothing to do with class. Shuya thought, if the government didn’t have the power to enforce compulsory education on us, he probably wouldn’t come to school at all. On the other hand he might just show up on a whim. I don’t know

This will actually be important. For now, Shuya’s just surprised he showed up for the trip.

Then Noriko shows up to offer him cookies. She’s kind of flustered about it, and then we learn Yoshitoki’s got a crush on her, so it looks like love triangle time. Oh, and Shuya’s got a crush on another girl entirely, Kazumi, who’s a year older and already has a boyfriend.

She was tall (almost the same height as Shuya, who stood 170 centimeters) and plump, but with her remarkably mature face and her hair bundled by her shoulders, she looked awesome with her alto saxophone. Shuya was thrilled by the sight.

Aw.

Then there’s Shogo Kawada, who transferred in and is a year older because he missed school due to some illness.

There was a rumor that he’d been a notorious thug at his last school and that his hospitalization was a result of a fight. To support this rumor, his body was covered with scars. A long scar from what appeared to be a knife wound ran over his left brow, and when they changed in the gym lockers (this was besides the point, but Kawada’s body was built like a middleweight boxer’s), Shuya was shocked to find the same kind of scars covering his arms and back. There were two round scars next to each other on his left shoulder. They looked like gunshot wounds, but that was unbelievable.

Everyone expected he and Kazuo would get into a fight over who was the biggest badass except for Shogo and Kazuo themselves, who were both fine continuing about their lives.

Shuya doesn’t feel right judging the guy based on these rumors…or, I guess, the ample evidence he’s been in nasty fights. Oh, Shuya. He considers if they should offer him a cookie, but the guy seems asleep so… While they’re wondering, Shogo says no thanks without opening his eyes.

Anyway, the bus keeps going and Shuya notices everyone’s asleep even though it’s only about ten. And he’s feeling weirdly tired, too. And…the bus driver’s now wearing a gas mask. But Shuya’s already too drugged to quite figure out what that means.

One person does, though.

Shogo Kawada was standing up and struggling to pry open a window. But whether it was jammed shut from rust or a broken lock, the window refused to budge. Shogo slammed his left fist against the glass. He’s trying to break the glass. Why all the fuss?
But the glass didn’t break. The fist ready to strike the glass all of a sudden went limp and clumsily dropped. His body collapsed into the seat. Shuya thought he heard that low voice he’d only recently familiarized himself with faintly gasp, “Damn.”
Almost immediately Shuya fell asleep too.

Meanwhile, scary government men are visiting their families to say that all ur kids r belong to us. Most of the parents don’t protest. Some do, and it ends badly for them.

The bus then drove to a pier, where armed and masked men collect the kids onto a boat.

So, class list so far:

Males
1 Yoshio Akamatsu: “the biggest kid in the class, the timid type, the kind of kid who’d always end up the target of pranks and insults. “
2 Keita Iijima
3 Tatsumichi Oki: jock, handball.
4 Toshinori Oda
5 Shogo Kawada: Looks older than the rest, has facial hair already, transferred in, scarred.
6 Kazuo Kiriyama: Awesome.
7 Yoshitoki Kuninobu: Shuya’s friend since childhood, they grew up in the orphanage together.
8 Yoji Kuramoto
9 Hiroshi Kuronaga
10 Ryuhei Sasagawa: Delinquent.
11 Hiroki Sugimura: Tall and knows martial arts. Seems tough but is actually shy, likes Chinese poetry. Shuya’s friend.
12 Yutaka Seto: Class clown.
13 Yuichiro Takiguchi
14 Sho Tsukioka
15 Shuya Nanahara: Main character? Minor but utterly harmless teenage rebelliousness.
16 Kazushi Nüda: jock, soccer.
17 Mitsuru Numai: Delinquent.
18 Tadakatsu Hatagami: jock, Shuya’s friend when they were younger. ‘Shuya had started playing electric guitar, which was considered an “unpatriotic” activity. Tadakatsu’s mother was uptight about that sort of thing.”
19 Shinji Mimura: Shuya’s current friend. ‘short hair and wore an intricately designed ring on his left ear’, highly athletic, knows a lot of information, particularly about the outside world.
20 Kyoichi Motobuchi
21 Kazuhiko Yamamoto: Sakura’s boyfriend.
Females
1 Mizuho Inada
2 Yukie Utsumi: class representative, braided hair, Haruka’s volleyball teammate
3 Megumi Eto
4 Sakura Ogawa: Kazuhiko’s girlfriend.
5 Izumi Kanai: ‘the preppy whose father was a town representative’
6 Yukiko Kitano
7 Yumiko Kusaka
8 Kayoko Kotohiki
9 Yuko Sakaki
10 Hirono Shimizu: Part of Mitsuko’s group.
11 Mitsuko Souma: Delinquent group leader.
12 Haruka Tanizawa: Yukie’s volleyball teammate, exceptionally tall;
13 Takako Chigusa
14 Mayumi Tendo
15 Noriko Nakagawa: She has a crush on Shuya he’s unaware of and Yoshitoki has a crush on her she may be unaware of. She’s nice and likes literature.
16 Yuka Nakagawa: Yoshitoki says she’s fat.
17 Satomi Noda : “model student who wore wire-rimmed glasses which suited her calm, intelligent face”
18 Fumiyo Fujiyoshi
19 Chisato Matsui: always quiet and withdrawn
20 Kaori Minami
21 Yoshimi Yahagi: Part of Mitsuko’s group.