A new POV!

Today it’s Mitsuru Numai!

17 Mitsuru Numai: Delinquent. Part of Kazou’s gang is all we know about him so far.

His weapon is a pistol.

Along with most of the guns used in this program, this mass-produced model was imported cheaply from Third World countries that had remained neutral towards both the nations of the Republic of Greater East Asia and the American Empire and its allies.

Huh, I usually think of guns as something you export to third world countries. Maybe this has something to do with Japan lacking guns normally, or the lack of quality metal they have on hand.

I’m still not sure if “Greater East Asia” means they control a chunk of east Asia or if it’s just referring to Japan.

Anyway, while the gun is one of the best weapons (…actually, I’d think the bowgun is better, since it wouldn’t give away your position and the ammunition is reusable) what’s more important to him is the compass, because that’s directing him toward Kazuo’s meeting place. Kazuo passed a note to everyone saying to meet on the southern tip of the island.

everyone was an enemy in this game. That was the fundamental rule. But the bond in the “Kiriyama Family” was absolute. It didn’t matter that they were labeled thugs. They were thick as thieves.

And of all of them, Misuru is closest to Kazuo. He’s the whole reason Kazuo’s in the gang at all.

The book explains that Mitsuru was a bully ever since elementary school but then goes on to deny he’s cruel. Rather, he got into fights among the tough boys to establish who would be on top. I’m not sure if this is some translation issue or if Japan has a different view of what bullying involves.

But anyway, it does a decent job of making a sympathetic thug character – although one wonders how broad a net he was casting. There’s a big difference between two aggressive kids deciding find out who punches harder and him jumping any boy who looks like he won’t fall over in the face of a stiff breeze.

The book seems to be going for the former, but our one scene isn’t so clear.

As expected, there were two or three competitors. It all happened after the entrance ceremony and class introduction, after school, when he was in the process of taking care of the last one.
In the deserted hall by the art classroom, Mitsuru grabbed the kid by the lapels and shoved him against the wall. The kid was already bruised above the eye. His eyes were brimming with tears. It was a cinch. It’d only taken two punches.
“Got it? So you don’t mess around with me.”

Now, he’s presumably going to let the other kid go at this point, but he also says he chose the area because there were no teachers around, not they so it seems he was the one deciding to get in a fight. But let’s give the book this and assume Mitsuru isn’t an asshole and only gets into fights with relatively willing opponents.

Anyway, at this point four other kids show up, several years older.

“You’ve been naughty.” His “faggoty” voice made the four of them crack up, laughing, “HEEEE,” as if they were all insane.

No, book.

These guys are a lot more brutal than he is. One kicks his front teeth out, then another kicks him in the stomach, then they start breaking his fingers. Mitsuru’s screaming.

The door to the art classroom suddenly slid open.
“Can you guys keep it down?”

It’s Kazuo.

His family seemed to have recently moved here. No one knew who he was, but since he was quiet and appeared obedient Mitsuru didn’t pay much attention to him. Given how his looks were so refined, he probably came from a nice family. Someone like him would do his best to avoid fights, so he was nothing to worry about.

This is the strongest point in favor of Mitsuru not being a particularly nasty kid. Whatever his selection criteria, it does avoid people who look like they don’t want to fight.

The other boys knock the brush out of his hand, so he beats them into a pulp.

The boy approached Mitsuru. After looking him over he only said, “You should have your hand examined at a hospital.” Then he went back inside the classroom.

Mitsuru is in awe of how awesome Kazuo is, as everyone should be. He decides to devote his life to serving Kazuo. He always believed there should only be one king, and now that he realizes it isn’t him, he’s happy to fall into step behind the guy.

He’s also in awe of what a mystery the guy is. Kazuo brushes off the question of how he’s such a good fighter by saying he learned. In the manga, the beatdown happens while he’s reading an anatomy textbook, which makes it a little easier to understand.

Another odd point, Mitsuru learned later, was the fact that Kazuo had broken into the art classroom to paint the day they met. When Mitsuru asked why he did that, Kazuo only replied, “I just felt like it.”

Kazuo is an odd duck. The book goes on to say Furthermore, the quality of the painting depicting a view from the classroom of the empty courtyard far exceeded the first-year junior high level, but Mitsuru never got to see this painting, because Kazuo had tossed it into the trash after completing it.

Mitsuru would probably have fanboyed even harder over that. Anyway, he decides they’re now best buddies, so he shows Kazuo everything he knows.

The small town, including the cafe where his friends hung out, the place he stashed stolen goods, the shady dealer who provided illegal goods.

So there’s more to criticize him for than just fighting, it seems.

Kazuo gets into some few other fights with older kids and effortlessly beats them up as well. He also plots all their capers from then on, and always manages to bail Mitsuru out so he’s never again caught by the police.

He was concerned his gang might be a bad influence on Kazuo, who was so obviously well bred. After thinking about it a lot, Mitsuru finally shared his concerns with Kazuo.
But Kazuo only said, “I don’t care. This is fun too.” Mitsuru decided it was all right then.

So in conclusion, Mitsuru figures everything’s good and sets off for the southern tip.

He saw only one person the whole time. The figure who vanished into the residential area southeast of the school was probably Yoji Kuramoto (Male Student No. 8).

Don’t know anything about that guy, either.

Mitsuru’s a bit on edge after seeing the bodies outside the school, but he just focuses on getting to the meetup location.

A little bit further ahead the coast curved right and left, and somewhere in the middle of this curve a
rugged reef extended eastward from the hill and sank into the ocean like a buried dinosaur only revealing
its back.

That’s a nice image.

He climbs it and finds Kazuo.

Kazuo Kiriyama was in the shadow of a bulging boulder. He was sitting on a protruding rock. “Boss…” Mitsuru said with relief.
But…
Mitsuru noticed three lumps lying at Kazuo’s feet.
His eyes squinted in the dark… but then they immediately widened.
The lumps were humans.
The one facing up, glaring at the sky, was Ryuhei Sasagawa (Male Student No. 10). The one lying on his side, scrunched up, was Hiroshi Kuronaga (Male Student No. 9). It was undoubtedly them, the other members of the Kiriyama Family. The third one was wearing a sailor suit uniform, and because she was face down it was hard to tell, but she looked like Izumi Kanai (Female Student No. 5)

Mitsuru doesn’t understand.

Kazuo says they attacked him and that’s why he killed them.

Mitsuru couldn’t believe it. Hiroshi Kuronaga was a nobody who tagged along with the group, so he was all the more loyal to Kazuo. Ryuhei Sasagawa was more arrogant, always putting up a front (sometimes it got to be a hassle to stop him from picking on Yoshio Akamatsu)

Hm, that’s an interesting note. So it seems Yoshio’s perception that everyone else supported the bullying was wrong. Probably Mitsuru wasn’t particularly direct about it.

but Ryuhei had been extremely grateful ever since Kazuo pulled some strings to stop the cops from arresting his younger brother for stealing. These two would have never betrayed Kazuo….

But then Mitsuru repeats Noriko’s sentiment about not knowing for sure what’s inside someone’s head. Maybe they cracked.

He can’t explain the girl’s body, though.

“So I-Izumi tried to kill you…too?”
Kazuo nodded.
“She just happened to be here.”
Mitsuru hesitated, but then forced himself to believe what he said. Well, maybe it was possible. I mean, that’s what the boss said. He spat out, “I-I’m all right. I would never think of killing my boss. Th-this game is bullshit. We’re going to take on Sakamochi and those bastards from the Special Defense Forces, right? I’m totally up for it—”

Well, nice knowing you for the chapter, Mitsuru.

Kazuo keeps being weird, saying, “I’m fine either way.”

So…

“I sometimes lose track of what’s right and wrong.”

Mitsuru starts to realize something’s up.

Kazuo went on, “Like now. I just don’t know.” The sight of Kazuo going on like this seemed, strangely enough, sad.
“Anyway.” Kazuo looked back at Mitsuru. Then, as if he were following a musical score that had suddenly switched to allegro, he began speaking rapidly, as if it were beyond his control. “I came here. Izumi was here. Izumi tried to escape. I held her back.”
Mitsuru held his breath.
“That’s when I tossed a coin. If it came up heads I’d take on Sakamochi and—”

It didn’t come up heads, so he decided on playing the game instead.

Mitsuru looks back on their relationship. He’d told Kazuo his hairstyle looked good, for example, and then Kazuo hadn’t changed it, but what if that was just because Kazuo never cared enough to do anything different? What if all the times Kazuo seemed to take his advice were the same way?

All of a sudden the one thing that had disturbed Mitsuru from early on returned with full force. Mitsuru thought it wasn’t such a big deal, so he’d done his best to ignore it all this time: Kazuo Kiriyama never smiled.
Mitsuru’s next thought might have been touching on the truth: and it always seemed like a lot was going on in his head. Which was probably the case. But maybe there’s something incredibly dark going on in Kazuo’s mind, something so dark it’s beyond my imagination? Maybe it isn’t even something dark, maybe it’s just an absence, a kind of black hole—

He realizes far, far too late, though.

Also, Kazuo has a machine gun. The book reports it sounds like a typewriter.

there were four finger-sized holes running from his chest down to his stomach. His back for some reason had two large can-sized holes.
…
As he fell, his head hit the rock and bounced back up five centimeters only once.

That’s it for Mitsuru. Kazuo goes over to check the body.

This was no emotional response. He didn’t feel anything, no guilt, no grief, no pity—not a single emotion. He simply wanted to know how a human body reacted after it was shot. No, he merely thought, “It might not be such a bad idea to know.”

So yeah, that’s Kazuo.

I actually feel really disappointed about this, because the idea of someone who’s an amoral sociopath being on the side of good is just a lot more interesting, you know? Particularly here. Imagine you’re the government. You drop sociopath boy into your murder games and figure it’ll be fine, right? He’ll kill people, you’ll whatever it is you’re getting out of this, everyone wins.

But imagine his coin toss came up the other way and he starts murdering his way through the officials on the island. And they’re flipping out because one kid has gone on the warpath, and the last one gasps out just why is he doing this, what did they do to him that made him willing to go on the even more suicidal path of taking on the government with no care for his own life? And the answer’s just “I flipped a coin” and they’re taken out by the only kid in history who doesn’t give a shit about what they did.

It’s just more interesting than just that the sociopath decides to kill people. Come on, who doesn’t expect that?

Kazuo touches his head because he has this strange almost-itch there occasionally, and the book explains that when he was a baby, his mom was in an accident and a splinter went into his unborn skull. The doctor managed to save him and they thought he was okay, but actually it caused some very slight brain damage. (The book adds, unnecessarily, that there’s no one left alive who knows this, because the doctor and his dad both died of natural causes not long after.)

And therefore he feels no emotion. Eh, sure. Brains are weird. Would have been better if it hadn’t been explained in such exacting and therefore inaccurate detail, though (front of your brain is for planning, not emotion).

34 students remaining

That’s a sharp reduction in numbers already.

So, the people who die this chapter are largely uncharacterized people – the only one we’d heard much of anything about was that Ryuhei was a bully and Izumi a preppy girl. It does a good job of developing Mitsuru before his death, and gives us as bit more detail on Ryuhei, but basically, the non-viewpoint character deaths are just body count. It didn’t even make a particularly big deal of Mitsuru having any connection to them, which rather undercuts the horror – he’d been going on about how the whole gang is close, but isn’t too bothered by Kazuo killing them once he gets over the surprise. It’s a bit odd after how much Mitsuru was set up as a non-evil bully delinquent with a strong sense of loyalty that the author didn’t really embrace that.

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.” Bowgun weapon, kills Mayumi, killed by Kazushi.
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. A sociopath who decides to play the game by flipping a coin.
7 Yoshitoki Kuninobu: Shuya’s friend since childhood, they grew up in the orphanage together.Killed for threatening Sakamochi.
8 Yoji Kuramoto: Seen briefly by Mitsuru.
9 Hiroshi Kuronaga: Part of Kazou’s gang. Killed by Kazuo.
10 Ryuhei Sasagawa: Delinquent. Part of Kazou’s gang. Bullied Yoshio. Had a younger brother. Killed by Kazuo.
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: Part of Kazou’s gang. Escaped Kazuo’s massacre.
15 Shuya Nanahara: Main character? Minor but utterly harmless teenage rebelliousness.
16 Kazushi Nüda: jock, soccer. Killed Yoshio by accident.
17 Mitsuru Numai: Delinquent. Part of Kazou’s gang, pistol weapon, tried to keep Ryuhei from bullying Yoshio, believed himself Kazuo’s adviser. Killed by Kazuo.
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. Extremely cool under pressure.
20 Kyoichi Motobuchi: Class representative, dad’s a government official.
21 Kazuhiko Yamamoto: Sakura’s boyfriend.
Females
1 Mizuho Inada
2 Yukie Utsumi: class representative, braided hair, Haruka’s volleyball teammate. The first one to speak after their abduction. Noriko’s friend.
3 Megumi Eto
4 Sakura Ogawa: Kazuhiko’s girlfriend.
5 Izumi Kanai: ‘the preppy whose father was a town representative’. Killed by Kazuo.
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. “Even though Mitsuko had the gorgeous looks of a pop idol, she always wore a strange, listless expression on her face.”
12 Haruka Tanizawa: Yukie’s volleyball teammate, exceptionally tall.
13 Takako Chigusa
14 Mayumi Tendo: The first death in the game, killed outside the school.
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. Suffering a leg injury.
16 Yuka Nakagawa: Yoshitoki says she’s fat. Class clown.
17 Satomi Noda : “model student who wore wire-rimmed glasses which suited her calm, intelligent face”
18 Fumiyo Fujiyoshi: Killed for whispering to Yukie. “She was the nurse’s aide. She was quiet but very caring.”
19 Chisato Matsui: always quiet and withdrawn
20 Kaori Minami
21 Yoshimi Yahagi: Part of Mitsuko’s group.