So, Battle Royale. Let’s quickly list off what I remember of the Hunger Games similarities.

Introduced to us as a televised thing, and both make a point of showing the victor of the games.

Government program that’s been running seventy-five/seventy-four years.

Exactly even genders, although in Battle Royale that’s by chance. Come to think of it, the way the kids are identified by district number (with a boy and girl with the same number) and here their class number is repeated over and over is pretty similar too.

Book broken into several parts – something that makes sense in Battle Royale, which has a ton of chapters, and less so in Hunger Games.

Set in a semiforested area familiar to the main character. In the Hunger Games, there’s a lot of talk about the exotic settings, but the first game is her own native biome.

The main character’s love interest is already in love with them but they’re completely unaware of it. The love interest suffers a leg wound due to a selfless action that requires medical care, then becomes extremely feverish requiring a subplot about acquiring antibiotics.

In Battle Royale, the plan for meeting up again involves setting two fires, then listening for a bird call. In Hunger Games, Rue is set off to make three fires (only managing two) and to make a bird call to indicate if things are well or not.

The true purpose of the program in Battle Royale turns out to be preventing people from working together and a betting game for the higher ups, which is what Hunger Games attempts in a more hamfisted and less plausible manner.

The movie is the thing that it’s certain Hunger Games’ author saw, and I haven’t seen it myself so I’m not sure if there’s more or less parallels to be found there. But she’s definitely familiar with the story, there are just too many similar beats to this and just generally, looking at this book as the inspiration makes so much more sense than her reality TV+Iraq claim.

But let’s move on and just consider the story.

The prose is definitely clunky. There’s apparently a retranslation but I haven’t read it. Presumably that cleans things up and hopefully without losing what I liked about this. But I will say that sheer readability is one thing the Hunger Games does better – although when the description here is good, it’s miles better, and it really does detail and horror much better.

I think the story suffers a bit from a lack of focus, with Kazou the biggest sign of that.

The thing is, you can tell a story about ordinary people in extraordinary situations or extraordinary people in the same, but both at once tends not to go well. Shinji’s whole subplot had issues due to sitting on the fence about what it wanted to be, and I think it’d have been a lot stronger if he’d been toned down to clever but not a wonderkid. Dial back everyone until they’re within normal variation and definitely don’t rely on Kazou to murder people all the time – it’s a cheap way of resolving stuff like Yumiko’s attempt at peace, that should have been allowed to play out without the impossible sociopath waltzing in.

Or yeah, just say Kazou was deliberately added in for the lulz and put the focus on the horror of being trapped with a psychopath. That’d fit with the counterpart to trust issues that the story had, the idea that actually most people don’t want to hurt you and are worthy of trusting. Maybe the reason so few games end due to the timer running out is because the government manipulates things to make sure they get their approved ending that classmates are willing to murder each other. The chosen psycho doesn’t even have to win! Half the class apparently saw Kazou shooting Yumiko and Yukiko, everyone looked at that and learned that saying you don’t want to fight means you get brutally murdered. Even if Kazou had died in his next attempt, the damage was done.

Maybe even have Kazou not be a real student at all. Or even in the class. Maybe they always seed these things with a government volunteer. You could even keep it a secret by having some of the deaths not give a culprit and try to trick the reader into thinking it’s a student when it isn’t.

I liked the focus being spread around and I think I’d actually have preferred to have that even more so – check in early with Mizuho to learn she’s nuts (and have some decent suspense about if she’s just going to get herself killed, or if her delusions will lead to her going on a killing spree), see more kids meet up peacefully or just try to navigate the area safely without always dying that chapter. (That’d also have helped with suspense – once you realize whoever you’re meeting will inevitably die, it’s hard to be surprised.) I liked the flashbacks and all the different thoughts and reactions of the characters – they were all very well fleshed out for such a large cast. Shinji and Shuya’s groups are comparatively not that interesting – a lot of Shinji’s stuff is showing off how cool he is but not accomplishing things, so that could’ve been trimmed a bit, and Shuya, Noriko and Shogo’s philosophy discussions were okay but not really furthering the atmosphere very well – too peaceful, too reflective, too not-horror-and-fear, plus they always figured out what had happened and recapped it, which was a waste of time. Their speculation could’ve been cut back and more focused on how it wasn’t necessarily right.

Suspense was an issue. Like I said, mostly we meet characters so we can see their gruesome deaths, and having more check-ins with the cast without in ending in blood would’ve helped make it less predictable. Having another person in the core group to die would also have helped out a bit – I knew they’d be safe to the end just because Shuya and Noriko weren’t going to die midway through and Shogo was needed so we’d find out what the plan is. Making it less clear who the main character was, and having someone else in their group die off partway through would have made things feel a lot more threatening. I think Shinji was meant to do something similar, but to me his death just cemented that the main group would make it because they were the only ones left to follow.

The fact Shogo won’t give his plan hampers things a lot, because it made me sure he couldn’t die until he explained and Shuya, at least, couldn’t die because he needed to explain it to someone, even if his explanation was just that it was all a lie. The book plays with the idea that things don’t always work out cleanly but doesn’t commit to it – people always get time to explain what’s going on. If it really committed, then it might have been able to set things up so it’d feel possible for Shogo to die and take the secret of escaping with him. Maybe have him refuse to tell them because he says he doesn’t trust them yet and he wants them to need him alive.

That said, it makes up for that at the end, where there’s been so many gory deaths that it feels very plausible for Kazou to do real damage to them (and, without the meta bit about Shogo’s explanation, it’d seem at least possible for the end to have Kazou win). When Shogo was shot, I was expecting it to have been fatal right then, with him just having the time to tell them the secret.

And once Kazou’s dead…the plot armor’s gone, and it really does seem like it could end with Sakamochi right, Shogo betraying them and leaving the island a second victor.

I do think the ending escape wasn’t handled too well. Maybe if there was less talk about how super the collars were in the first place, since surely the bomb bit would discourage most kids from even trying to mess with them. Have it be more like my suggestion for avoiding superhackers – the kids don’t know where to begin, and generally, those who try get blown up while they’re learning before they accomplish anything.

And Shogo really should have told them on the walk up. The whole conversation about how he was betraying them really didn’t make sense and could so easily have gone wrong, however dramatic it was.

The girls…

It’s definitely a mixed bag. Since the manga is a revised version of this, I think stuff like Yoshimi might have been recognized as a problem and her chapter meant to be more ambiguous. I certainly liked the manga Mitsuko much, much more.

Sexism and feminism in Japan are very different from how things are in America, so I can’t say exactly where this book falls – a Japanese feminist might notice all sorts of things here I’m blind to. Most of what I see here is the sort of cultural sexist background that I see a lot in manga, of girls and boys making statements about how girls and boys should be, and I’m not sure how serious I should take all of it. But overall it seems pretty positive, and the worst that can be said for the general treatment is that they aren’t particularly important – Noriko is minor compared to Shuya and Shogo, and the other hero group is Shinji and Yutaka. For much of the book, Hiroki is searching for two girls and handling himself well, while Takako is nowhere near as capable or driven and Kayoko spends the entire game huddling in the forest in terror. But there’s a lot of good in the book – girls survive the games almost exactly as often as boys and we see a lot of different girls in this book, reacting in different ways, including the necessarily bad to keep them human (the girls are good enough for six of them to join together at the lighthouse, and they are bad enough that this ends in death), there’s Takako’s chapter, there’s the way Noriko is handled at the end, first shooting Kazou and being the one who, after all he’s done, finally stops him, and then being the one strong enough to pull Shuya onto the boat rather than the other way around. And for all Shuya’s protectiveness of Noriko, we never seem him actually tell her she can’t do something because she’s a girl.

And that’s pretty good for a book written a decade and a half go.

On the other hand, the most you can say for the portrayal of homosexuality in this book is that the author knows it exists. And “existing” might put it ahead of almost all the books I’ve read so far – Graceling has two characters revealed in a later book as gay and I think someone said one of the characters in A Great and Terrible Beauty is similarly revealed in one of the later books. Depending where you stand on terrible stereotypes vs not existing at all, this book can be seen as a tiny, tiny step up compared to most of them.

Overall, I actually liked this book. It managed to make killing enormous numbers of kids every year more plausible than the Hunger Game’s two dozen and managed to make the motivation actually make sense. It also had the scarier government. The Battle Royale government seems hideously dysfunctional to me, but still capable enough to keep itself running. It’s a government whose purpose is to keep itself in existence at any cost, and nothing else matters. Maybe the program works like Sakamochi claims. Maybe it doesn’t and it’s just running because it doesn’t hurt the government enough for anyone to care to stop it. Avoiding harm to its citizens isn’t a priority. But while it doesn’t care about lives or suffering, it does care about protecting itself. The government in Hunger Games is a joke easily outwitted by two kids. In Battle Royale, realizing they were tricked means they decide to kill all three kids and do it, as they’ve done everything here, with amazing amounts of overkill.

I had a lot of problems with Yoshimi and Sho, but they were only two chapters out of a long book, and otherwise it handled things well. It likely helped that in terms of philosophy, I agree with the idea people are overall basically good but some aren’t, and that stress makes good people act badly, so the book making the motivation behind almost everything fear worked well for me.

And so we’re done! Next up will be Unwind (it shouldn’t have been on the current poll since it won the poll-antipoll of the one before, but I wasn’t paying attention) followed by The Host, current poll winner and truly weird sounding story. I might even like it! The same cannot be said for Unwind. Next month will be a month of seething and bile.

Since those two will take us a while, the poll will be down for a bit while you can suggest what you want regarding future books and any other stuff.