Battle Royale
Ratings172
Average rating4
Wow, this was bad, really bad. It starts with the reason for this novel's popularity: It consists of 98% pure violence porn: We get to witness how about 40 15-year-old classmates from junior high school brutally murder each other. Actually, they're more like slaughtering each other and through my reception of the text, I had the very unpleasant feeling of watching a violence-obsessed author act out his most revolting fantasies. Takami almost gleefully presents his sadistical ideas with excessive and gratuitous violence.While I presume the novel is meant to be a commentary on societal pressures and the dehumanising effects of violence, I felt that the graphic descriptions of bloodshed and gore were used purely for shock value and did little to further the plot or develop the characters.Speaking of which: The next percent is the characters displaying the character depth of a paramecium, a single-celled organism... Takami tries to give each of them a backstory but I struggled to keep track of them all and found that they blended together in my mind. The main characters, Shuya and Noriko, were somewhat more developed, but their “romance” felt forced and unconvincing. I never truly became invested in their story or cared about what happened to them. I also found the writing style to be uneven and clunky at times. While some passages were well-written and evocative, most were either very simplistically or even awkwardly phrased. The final 1% is made out of extremely naïve theories, e. g. “A bad person was simply born that way.” And that's the maximum level of “critical thought” this novel reaches...Despite not being the worst book I've ever come across, this revolting, violence-glorifying monstrosity still ranks among the top 5.Zero stars out of five.Blog Facebook Twitter Mastodon Instagram Pinterest Medium Matrix TumblrCeterum censeo Putin esse delendam
an all time favorite for me i cant express my love for this book enough the length intimidated me but after about page 350 i flew through HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend
Paradoxically both too long and too short. Way too short to give any of the characters the gravity their melodramatic deaths seem to want to evoke. But simultaneously written in an overlong repetitive style that made the entire thing drag.
That's 2 books in a row this year (this and The Shining) that I read because I absolutely fucking love the movie and heard the book was even better and ended up being super disappointed. Insanely rare that this happens to me :(.
I'm having bad luck with books this year. So many 2-3 stars :(.
THIS BOOK WAS AMAZING
A soul crushing take on fascism & a deep dive into the effects of extreme despair and will to live on humans.
There were time I was literally too anxious to read because I was TOO INVESTED I felt like I was also hiding on the island
The ending quote made me tear up GOD it just tastes like hope and pain at the same time
Gobbled these 600 pages in like 2 days & im a slow reader, that's how good this book is
One of the most thrilling & emotionally engaging dystopian books I ever read
6/5
THIS BOOK WAS AMAZING
A soul crushing take on fascism & a deep dive into the effects of extreme despair and will to live on humans.
There were time I was literally too anxious to read because I was TOO INVESTED I felt like I was also hiding on the island
The ending quote made me tear up GOD it just tastes like hope and pain at the same time
Gobbled these 600 pages in like 2 days & im a slow reader, that's how good this book is
One of the most thrilling & emotionally engaging dystopian books I ever read
6/5
Ho iniziato questo libro con grandi aspettative, la quarta di copertina mi aveva affascinato molto, sebbene non ami particolarmente la cultura giapponese e i manga, ho un'età per cui è cresciuta a Spider-Man, non a Dragon-Ball. In ogni caso, avendo amato libro come il “Signore delle Mosche” ed “Hunger Games”, mi sembrava che la tavola era apparecchiata a dovere.
La prima cosa che mi ha travolto sono stati i nomi, tutti che mi suonavano uguali e praticamente per tutto il libro, a parte i quattro o cinque personaggi fulcro della storia, non ho capito chi faceva cosa, chi uccideva chi, dove si spostavano i vari ragazzi nell'isola, quarantuno studenti sono molti e questo mi ha scombussolato un po', ma alla fine non era poi questo grande problema visto che mediamente i vari personaggi venivano presentati per morire poche pagine dopo.
Quello che veramente non andava, mano a mano che proseguivo con la lettura e scemava la curiosità iniziale sono due cose: la prima è la prosa, qualche peccato immagino lo abbia commesso il traduttore, ma il tutto è troppo lineare, semplice, troppo scarno e con punte di stereotipi dei più banali. La seconda è che questi ragazzi di quindici anni che sono dei Rambo (quasi tutti) che si pigliano pallottole in corpo e ancora si lanciano in combattimento, preparano bombe, violano sistemi militari, mettono su giri di prostituzione... insomma io ho una figlia di quell'età e se la buttassero su un isola a sopravvivere uccidendo il prossimo, credo che stramazzerebbe al suolo immobile, altro che maneggiare pistole come se non avesse fatto null'altro nella vita.
Il tutto con dietro la bandiera di quanto siano brutti e cattivi gli stati totalitari che piegano la vita dei cittadini... ma davvero? Meno male che ce lo insegna questo libro!
Ah già poi c'è il finale, e io lì che leggevo e speravo che so... che il tutto era un videogame e il giocatore si sconnetteva dalla macchina per poi scoprire che in verità il gioco era reale e il tutto iniziava adesso, o che era una prova per testare gli umani da parte di una razza aliena, o che gli studenti uccisi si risvegliavano come zombi... o che ne so... tutto meno lo scontato finale che letto.
Ma anche no.
2.5/5 stars. Would have been more but the translation was fairly average; a vehicle referred to as a truck, car and a pick-up in the space of 1 page. Plus you know, all the violence.
Be warned - you won't be able to put it down! Kudos to both the author and the translator for bringing this story to the masses.
Battle Royale constantly shifts perspectives, but you don't get lost at all. That's some serious literary voodoo. Oh, and the plot line is awesome. Sure, you may have already read/watched The Hunger Games which were published 9 years after this book, but I promise you there's a lot of new material here. It's brutal, graphic, and dark but also honest. How else would the Program go down?
And just you wait for the ending :)
Interesting cultural note: I initially found it very difficult to keep track of all the Japanese names. Since nearly every book I read is “English first,” it's not an issue I encounter typically. Always good to be reminded of the biases we face every day - not every book character is going to be named Jill and Jack.
Story: 4 / 10
Characters: 2
Setting: 5
Prose: 2
Maybe most translated, young adult books are bad. Anyway, definitely some of the worst writing I've come across. The story does get better as it goes on. Nevertheless, who really wants to read a story with 46 characters?
Absolutely do not read.
Action packed? Fun? Cliche? Most definitely.
Battle Royale is mediocre. If one's idea of a good action read is rushed with adrenaline, finesse mandatory, then it is excellent. In my case where the characters themselves make a big percentage for my rating for the novel, it is not.
The gore, the meat of the story, flies off the pages despite the occasional typo or sentence lost in translation. In the end that's what this six-hundred paged demon is about: a mainstream interpretation of once average or not-quite-average kids either becoming predator or prey to save their ideals or themselves, usually the former in the last two cases. It attempts to be “dark” and “bloody” and somewhat succeeds. It's not the “deep” in classic literature, but the “deep” in YA novels designed for a popcorn movie. The themes are discussed in Battle Royale, but it reaches the sighting of the bone when I wanted to taste the marrow.
There is a quick summary of each narrator before their imminent death which fails to garner sympathy. To be fair, a chapter or two is dedicated even for the minor ones and an effort was done bringing some personality to each person–even if their motivations seemed all the same in my head–but the characters were too one-dimensional, and the reader's growing desensitization as the story went by made each death's impact falter. This is impossible to fix, as detailed backstories would wane the sprinting pace of the story.
The plot is predictable. It's not difficult to tell what would happen within the first few paragraphs of each chapter. It does fly by at the speed of light, and by the time I was done the only sign that the book was six hundred pages were my tired arms.
Action junkies will love this, but people who dislike gore and lack of events besides stabbing and shooting in their stories won't. It isn't horrible, though. The enjoyment of the reader depends whether they are able to ignore its flaws and enjoy the show.
I didn't think this book was going to end. Just when you thought there was one ending, the story was still going. I really liked it though.
A concern in judging translated fiction is where to place the blame for mediocre prose. Battle Royale has a magnificent premise (kids sent to an island and forced to fight to the death in order to survive) and over the 600 pages of the novel, Takami does a great job of managing a cast of dozens and providing a reasonable amount of attention and focus to all the various students on the island. But the way he tells his story, the way he describes the action and the characters, is absolutely dreadful. It reads like something I would write. But because I'm not reading the novel in the original Japanese, it don't know if Takami is to blame, or if this is an example of lazy translation.
A concern in judging translated fiction is where to place the blame for mediocre prose. Battle Royale has a magnificent premise (kids sent to an island and forced to fight to the death in order to survive) and over the 600 pages of the novel, Takami does a great job of managing a cast of dozens and providing a reasonable amount of attention and focus to all the various students on the island. But the way he tells his story, the way he describes the action and the characters, is absolutely dreadful. It reads like something I would write. But because I'm not reading the novel in the original Japanese, it don't know if Takami is to blame, or if this is an example of lazy translation.
This was an interesting experience for me - I came to the novel after having seen the film version and having read the manga (well, chapter 1 of it, anyways), and yet, at the same time, this was the first time that I can really saw that I got something other than mindless violence from Battle Royale.
The basic premise: a futuristic, totalitarian Japanese society has set up a game where each year, one high school class is randomly chosen to participate. Participants of the ‘game' are placed on an island, each given a randomly assigned weapon, and are told that the last one left surviving will be the one allowed off of the island.
It sounds grisly and violent, and it is - there were parts where I had to put the book down for a bit lest the violence overwhelm me. However, like any truly good violent piece of art, that violence is used as a metaphor - in this case, for how society tends to pit people against each other, and how living a dog-eat-dog type of life might end up with someone on top, but it also ends up with a lot of corpses along the way.
There are a lot of characters in the book, and it's a little hard to tell them apart from each other originally (due to them all being the same age, from roughly the same background, etc), but throughout the book you get to learn more about all of the little details that make up a life. You learn about their personal history, their silly little feuds and crushes, and the dreams they had for the future, before the game got in the way. If anything, that's the most horrific part of the book - not the blood and gore, but seeing people go from these little concerns over which boy (or girl) likes who, and then being thrust into a world where their very lives are at stake.
To sume up: the basic concept is The Running Man meets Lord of the Flies, with bits of slasher movies and The Catcher In The Rye thrown in for good measure. And, if you can get past the violent elements, it's definitely worth reading.