Battle Royale - Koushun Takami & Masayuki Taguchi

I wanted to read the Battle Royale manga 10 years ago but did not have the necessary employment to fund the expensive volumes. Flash forward to 2015, and the price had only increased as the series became rarer and out of print. I eventually managed to obtain a complete set in good condition on eBay, but was the long wait worth it? Not only is this is the first manga series I will review, but it is also the first I have read, and as such, the format took quite some getting used to. Despite being spread across 15 volumes, the self-contained story, cumulative chapters, and fast reading pace influenced me to review the series as one book. It was originally serialised from 2000 to 2005, based on the 1999 novel of the same name by Koushin Takami, which I haven't read yet. I was however, a fan of the film adaptation, which formed my introduction.

Set in a dystopian future, each year the Japanese government randomly selects a class of high school children and forces them to compete in a survival deathmatch for reality TV known as 'The Program.' The teenagers are equipped with explosive collars that detonate if more than one combatant is left alive at the end of the time limit, randomly assigned weapons, and a map of the area with designated danger zones that change periodically. After a brief prelude which introduces the main players, this year's crop of unlucky teens are kidnapped and sent to a deserted island where all but one will meet a grisly end. The manga does a good job of exploring each of the 42 students and providing them with varied back stories, although most fall under classic stereotypes. The main protagonists are Shuuya Nanahara, a pacifist would-be rock star and his dull love interest, Noriko Nakagawa. Other characters include previous program survivor and hardened combatant, Shogo Kawada, the sensitive kung fu artist, Hiroki Sigumuru, and basketball ace and computer hacker, Shinji Mimura. The two main antagonists are Kazuo Kiriyama, an emotionless killer with brain damage, and the deranged femme fatale, Mitsuko Souma, also a psychopath.

Without revealing too much of the story, which is mostly bouts of action scenes with gratuitous violence and sex, interspersed with melodramatic soul searching and flashbacks, I would like to say a few words on the English adaptation by Keith Giffen, which can be appalling at times. I understand the need to slightly alter things for a translation, but substituting Japanese figures with American equivalents was a step too far. For instance, why on earth would Japanese school children know who Donald Trump and Polyanna are? In a manga of over the top splatter violence, this criticism may appear rather trivial, but it was nonetheless jarring and very ill-advised. (I hope Giffen reads this one day so he can see how ridiculous it was.) My other complaint is that some of the characterisation is utterly bizarre. There is a cross-dressing homosexual, who looks and acts like a 40 year old sleaze queen, yet whom we're supposed to understand is the same age as his teenage classmates. Mitsuko and her constant nudity is also a problem, definitely overstepping the line into full blown hentai every time she makes an appearance. I noticed with suspicion that the perverted volume 8 was noticeably more worn than the other books.

I appreciate that I am no longer the target audience of this series, having arrived at it too late, but I retain a soft spot for the film I loved as a teenager and Taguchi is an astounding illustrator, if a little too disgusting at times. I cringed at the frequent eyeball gouging and finger nail tearing. To try and analyse the manga in terms of anything deeper would be nonsense, yet I'm sure many younger readers have done so. The broad stabs at authoritarian regimes and the cliched Lord of the Flies tropes are of course clumsily present, but the true purpose of the series is to sate the gore lust of teenage boys. I cannot really recommend the series to anybody due to the difficulty in getting hold of a complete set, but I hear the novel is good. As an introduction to manga, I couldn't have wished for anything better, and although I'm not sold on the genre in general, it was nice to vary my pattern of reading weighty classics. Battle Royale has had a huge influence on popular culture, spawning the inferior series of books, The Hunger Games, and inspiring many of Quentin Tarantino's action films. The story can be repetitive and angsty, but the absurdity of the plot and its dynamic illustrations earns it a space on my bookcase.

Rating: 4/5