Chapter Twenty begins in the “Okishima Island Tourist Association” which, despite its name, we’re assured is actually a pretty ordinary looking town hall.

Yumiko is hanging out there thinking about church. Interesting that so far the only real religion has been Christian. That’s particularly weird given this is crazy dictator Japan that hates the West, so you’d expect them to crack down even more on Christianity.

Anyway, she’s specifically thinking about what the priest there liked to say.

“The sun will come every day, blessing every one of us with joy.”
Oh yeah, I am so blessed to be part of such a wonderful game, ha ha ha.

She sort of is blessed this day though – she’s hanging out peacefully with her friend Yukiko, so things could be much worse. But anyway, we can guess she’s not particularly religious or particularly reverent.

Yumiko and Yukiko had been friends ever since nursery school.

They weren’t actually together in nursery school and they didn’t live near each other, but both their parents went to the church.

Yumiko approached the quiet girl left alone by her who were preoccupied with some other task and said, “Don’t you think this is all so stupid?”
The girl looked a little shocked, but then she smiled. They were friends ever since.

That is pretty much the limits of my own experiences with religion. To this day I’m kind of confused why I went off to so many religious day camps and stuff. I guess Mom really wanted me out of the house.

So anyway, the moral here is that kids all over the world are exactly the same.

Although their names sounded similar, they were very different from each other. Yumiko was energetic and got labeled a tomboy. Even now (although the chances of that “now” returning were very, very low) she batted fourth on the softball team. Yukiko was domestic and baked cakes for Yumiko. Yumiko was now fifteen centimeters taller than Yukiko. Yukiko often said she envied Yumiko’s height and her well defined face, but Yumiko was in fact more envious of Yukiko for her petite body and round cheeks. That’s right, they were totally different, but they were still best friends. 

This is very cute.

They got very lucky by not only being right next to each other on the class list but by the fact the boy who would have gone between them was Yoshitoki, so Yumiko just waited for Yukiko, and then they left well before Yoshio showed up to kill people.

You know, I wonder if the alternating boy/girl thing is in part to make this kind of thing harder to do? You have to figure most kids’ friendships will be with people of the same gender and that also they’ll generally know that side of the class better, as well as that generally the girls have more to fear from the boys. A lot of the girls might have pooled outside the doors and waited for each other if they hadn’t known it’d be a boy following right behind them.

Anyway, they’d acted pretty well so far – they didn’t hole up in the big residential area but found a single building and locked themselves in. Unfortunately they haven’t been able to actually rest, so they’re been sitting together all night exhausted and terrified.

What in the world were they supposed to do now?

Interestingly, the announcement kind of propels her. She’s been sitting paralyzed at the idea of the danger, but hearing about all the deaths makes her start to think. She can’t believe that people are really willing to kill each other.

But if someone tried to kill her& if she could assume that much, then she would probably fight back. Yes.

And there’s a megaphone nearby. She has an idea but she’s still too scared to do anything. She doesn’t believe people really want to kill each other but there’s still this horrible fear of the idea.

Yukiko says that they should eat instead of sitting there stressing.

Yumiko’s weapon is two grenades. Yukiko’s is a set of darts complete with dartboard.

This makes me wonder what would happen if you somehow had an organized class. The person with the grenades should chuck one into the room of soldiers. On that signal, the others who have guns rush back in to blow away Sakamochi and the remaining soldiers.

Yumiko and Yukiko hang out a little longer. Yukiko has stopped shaking after eating, and says she’s glad they’re together. Yumiko is still concerned about her plan, since it’ll put both of them in danger.

While she’s trying to figure out what the right thing to do is, Yukiko asks if she has a crush on anyone.

Wow. This was exactly the kind of topic you discussed at night when you’re on a study trip. After going through the rituals of playing cards, pillow fighting, and checking out the inn, late at night you could bitch about your teachers, or talk about the future, but none of those were in the same league as this topic. It was the holy topic.

I’m not sure I’d really think it was the biggest issue ever, but sure.

Yukiko says her crush is on Shuya. Surely people must have crushes on someone else?

Anyway, it doesn’t surprise Yumiko, either because she knows her friend well or because absolutely everyone has a crush on him seriously. Also, she knows a lot about him, probably because everyone includes her.

He was 171 centimeters tall, weighed 58 kilograms, his eyesight was 1.2 in the right eye, 1.5 in the left, and although he was thin he was muscular. In elementary school he was a Little League shortstop and batted first, but he quit and now preferred playing music. He was an excellent singer and guitarist. Because of his status as the team’s best player during his Little League days, combined with the fact that the first kanji character to his last name meant “seven,” he had the baseball nickname of “Wild Seven,” just like the cigarette brand. His blood type was B, and he was born, just as the first character of his first name indicated, in the fall. He lost his parents when he was young, and now he lived in a Catholic orphanage called the Charity House. He was best friends with Yoshitoki Kuninobu (oh God and now he was dead) who also lived in the Charity House&His strongest subjects were in the humanities, literature, and English, so he was a decent student. He had a unique face, his lips were slightly curved, but his double eyelids were sharply defined and kind looking, so he wasn’t bad looking at all. His hair was slightly wavy and long, covering his neck and touching his shoulders.

How little the divide between schoolgirl crush and stalker.

Yumiko’s always been concerned about the height because unless he grows she couldn’t wear high heels because then she’s be taller.

Interestingly, their imminent deaths are not why she doesn’t bring this up. Instead, in fine anime tradition she’s going to pretend she doesn’t have a crush so as not to step on her friend’s toes. Well, at least that’s better than the Naruto route of declaring eternal hatred over a guy who doesn’t even know you exist. It’s also a nice reminder that the Madoka girls were actually extremely sane about the whole thing.

Yukiko says she wants to see Shuya and starts crying. Yumiko comforts her that she’s sure Shuya will be okay. Then Yukiko asks who she has a crush on.

Oh no! Yumiko has to make something up. She considers Tatsumichi (Even though his face was kind of coarse he seemed like a nice guy.) Shinji seems like a good choice what with being perfect in every way as Shuya’s established but while he’s popular with girls in general, the girls in their class ignore him because they think he’s a playboy.

Mitsuru Numai acted like he was a badass, but he didn’t really seem so bad. He was kind to girls (oh God but he’s dead too now).

This seems to confirm that her description of Tatsumichi is meant to be saying he actually isn’t a bad person, rather than that you never really know people. We didn’t spend any time in Tatsumichi’s head, but acting like a badass while not actually being a bad guy is a pretty good description of Mitsuru.

She also considers the brooding Hiroki, and this not being a western novel that just means “kind of withdrawn” and not “Edward Cullen”. Apparently the martial arts thing is considered a detriment to most because it scares a lot of the girls, which seems to say bad things about the basic society they’re in if a guy knowing how to fight frightens them.

But he was close to Takako Chigusa. Takako would get on my back if she ever found out, she can be so harsh. But she’s a good girl. Come to think of it, everyone was, both boys and girls.

This is so adorable and so sad. She doesn’t want to say she’s got a crush on him because what if during the murderdeath games Takako hears she was crushing on the same person? And she’s such a nice person too! Everyone is! (Except, uh, Kazuo, Mitsuko, possibly the rest of Mitsuko’s gang or at least Hirono who liked to stab Megumi’s skirts, and probably a chunk of Kazuo’s gang too, Ryuhei tormented Yoshio and really, the fact they dragged a girl along does not seem good.)

This thought makes her think she should mention her plan. She asks Yukiko if she thinks people really want to kill each other. Obviously they did kill each other, of course.

Nine students have already been killed since our departure. They couldn’t have all been suicides

You know, actually – what might the suicide rate here be like?

I mean, I would assume if you grabbed random kids for the first childmurder games, then you wouldn’t expect that many suicides that fast. But this gets into my complaint with the Hunger Games, once it’s established and part of your life, there must be people who’ve come to the conclusion that suicide is the best option. I’d expect that to be even more common in Japan where they have a lot more problems with suicide, unless I’m missing some important cultural component about what circumstances are and aren’t appropriate.

Plus some of the weapons would make it pretty easy. I don’t know if I could throw myself off a cliff but one person’s going to get cyanide, which is basically useless for anything but suicide. Or you could just go into a forbidden zone – the fact the collar is designed to make escape impossible means you can be almost certain it’ll give you a quick death in the process.

So basically, nine people blowing their heads off or jumping off cliffs right at the start of the game doesn’t seem impossible, especially when there was sustained gunfire so everyone on the island knows at least one person has decided to kill the rest of them. They’ve had four hours by this point to explore a little, verify that phones aren’t working, the collars don’t come off, and there are offshore ships ready to murder them if they try escaping.

In fact, depending on how beaten down the kids are, I could see some classes going with mass suicide.

Anyway, Yumiko lays out the problem of fear. They’re terrified, so probably everyone’s terrified. In fact most people are probably more terrified since they’re all on their own. And if either of them saw someone else, they’d be terrified and want to run away…

“What if you couldn’t?”
Yukiko seemed to consider the situation carefully. Then she spoke slowly, “I-I-I just might fight.

So again we return to the problem of fear.

I really like the psychological focus of all this, which is also why, while individually engaging, I don’t much like Kazuo or Mitsuko’s presence here. They throw a spanner in the works by being totally disconnected from the spectrum of fear and how you respond to it that governs the rest of the class. Remove the element of fear, and those two will probably still murder their way through everyone.

I think it’s because we’re so terrified we become deluded that everyone else is out to kill us and so we resort to fighting. And in that state even if no one attacked, we might even end up attacking others on our own.”

Yukiko brings up just want I mentioned about Mitsuko and Kazuo, that there’s some she can’t trust.

Yumiko ups the stakes.

“We’re going to die the way things are going. Time limit? If no one dies in the next twenty-four hours? Even if we survive that long, we’ll still end up getting killed.”

So, she says, it’s not just about trust. They need to get everyone together to have any chance of escape. And then she says that when she was in elementary school, she once didn’t trust a friend of hers. She had this special pen and when it went missing, she accused her friend of stealing it, because her friend had the opportunity and also she was a bastard so no one thought much of her. Then in the end it turned out she’d just left the pen at home.

Anyway, the moral for her was that from then on she resolved to always trust people.

“So let’s consider this situation now. Well yeah, Mitsuko Souma does seem dangerous. That’s her reputation. But I doubt she’s so bad she’d actually get off on killing people. She can’t be that bad. No one in our class could be that bad. Don’t you think?”

Admittedly I don’t think she does actually get off on it, but otherwise it’s depressing to keep seeing this brought up.

Mitsuko’s actual character so far has been fine, but the way she’s the face of the trusting people issue creates problems.

And now we get to Yumiko’s plan – if they can get in touch with the other students people will stop attacking each other. This is honestly a pretty good plan if you take Kazuo and Mitsuko out of it.

She asks what Yukiko thinks.

After two full minutes she mumbled, “Remember how you once told me that I’m always too worried about other people’s opinions?”
…
Yukiko smiled gently. “I think you’re absolutely right. That’s my opinion.”

So they’re going to do it. Yumiko thinks that yeah, it may not work, but she doesn’t want to just give up and die. They need to take the chance.

And so it’s decided. Use the megaphone to talk to the rest of the the kids on the island, in the process revealing their own location.

29 students remaining

That’s right! New viewpoint characters and neither of them died in their introductory chapter.

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. Hatchet. Runs into Shuya and Noriko, attacks when Shuya reaches for a weapon and accidentally killed in the resulting fight.
4 Toshinori Oda
5 Shogo Kawada: Looks older than the rest, has facial hair already, transferred in, scarred. Shotgun. Saves Shuya and kills Kyoichi.
6 Kazuo Kiriyama: Awesome. A sociopath who decides to play the game by flipping a coin. Current kill count: 4.
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. Popular with the girls.
16 Kazushi Niida: 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. Sees Shuya’s fight with Tatsumichi. Pistol. Killed by Shogo.
21 Kazuhiko Yamamoto: Sakura’s boyfriend. Gun. Commits suicide.
Females
1 Mizuho Inada: A friend of Megumi’s.
2 Yukie Utsumi: class representative, braided hair, Haruka’s volleyball teammate. The first one to speak after their abduction. Noriko’s friend. Not playing, joined up with Haruka, sees Kazuhiko and Sakura’s suicide.
3 Megumi Eto: Friends with Mizuho and Kaori. Had a crush on Shuya. Diving knife. Killed by Mitsuko.
4 Sakura Ogawa: Kazuhiko’s girlfriend. When she was young, she saw her father killed by the government. Commits suicide.
5 Izumi Kanai: ‘the preppy whose father was a town representative’. Killed by Kazuo.
6 Yukiko Kitano: Yumiko’s friend. Dart and dartboard. Crush on Shuya.
7 Yumiko Kusaka: Yukiko’s friend. Hand grenades. Crush on Shuya she’s hiding. Plans to use a megaphone to get in contact with the rest of their class and get them to stop killing.
8 Kayoko Kotohiki
9 Yuko Sakaki: Sees Shuya kill Tatsumichi and runs away unnoticed.
10 Hirono Shimizu: Part of Mitsuko’s group. Tormented Megumi.
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.” Has a sickle and a diving knife. Killed Megumi.
12 Haruka Tanizawa: Yukie’s volleyball teammate, exceptionally tall. Not playing, joined up with Yuki.
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: A friend of Megumi’s.
21 Yoshimi Yahagi: Part of Mitsuko’s group.