Battle Royale

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.