Battle Royale, Ultimate Edition, vol. 1
by Koushun Takami and Masayuki Taguchi
Rated M for Mature, age 18+
Tokyopop, $24.99
On one level, Battle Royale is an ultra-violent manga version of Survivor. The plot is brutally simple: It’s a game show in which an entire ninth-grade class is put on a remote island, handed weapons, and told to kill each other until only one is left. Each student gets a random weapon, anything from a fork (yes, a fork) to a submachine gun, and everyone is fitted with an explosive collar can be detonated by remote control. If more than one person is left at the end of the game, everyone goes boom. All the action is captured on hidden cameras for the entertainment of the masses.
The title spread shows a bunch of muscular guys pointing various weapons, plus a girl who looks pretty worried and another who is showing her panties. I figured I would hate it.
I was wrong.
I expected this book to be one long gore-fest, but a large portion of it is taken up with stories about individual students. Most are told in flashbacks that deftly sketch the emotional connections between individuals before showing how they react to the crisis at hand. These side trips are engaging enough that it’s often a surprise when one of the people involved suddenly gets a cleaver to the head or explodes in a hail of bullets, although not every story ends this way. After all, you can’t kill everyone in the first volume.
In fact, what keeps Battle Royale interesting is the fact that several students refuse to play the game. At the beginning of the story, the class is drugged and brought to a remote island, where a sadistic “teacher” outlines the rules, emphasizing his points by displaying the mutilated corpse of their real teacher. The first student to stand up to him, Yoshitoki, is immediately gunned down, and Yoshitoki’s best friend, Shuuya, racked with guilt because he did not act quickly to help his friend, won’t play along.
That becomes the defining question of the story: Who will buy into the game and who will resist? The game seems to be completely stacked against anyone who refuses to play, but several students choose to follow their own moral compass no matter how hopeless the situation looks. By the end of the third volume, several students have banded together in groups of two or three and decided to opt out, although no one seems at all sure of how it will end. It’s complicated by the fact that even those who don’t want to play are still faced by classmates who want to kill them. And of course, you can’t really trust anyone. That message is emphasized over and over, usually to the tune of splashing blood and flying guts.
Meanwhile, the thoroughly unpleasant “teacher” is watching the action through the hidden cameras. It’s easy for both the characters and the reader to get caught up in the story and forget that everything is being televised, but after all, that is the point (although what purpose The Game serves in the larger society is not yet clear). The omniscient teacher comments on the action and hints at some plot twists, although that may be misdirection—it’s too early to tell.
The violence in Battle Royale is explicit and gory beyond any realism. Taguchi is unflinching in his depiction of faces being torn apart, intestines cascading out of bodies, and blades slicing through flesh. It’s horrible, but at the same time there’s a cartoonish element that kept me from being totally grossed out.
What disturbed me a lot more is the stereotyped way in which women are depicted: Either as wimpy victims or as evil whores. The men react to the game in complex and interesting ways; the girls mostly tremble and cry. The one pair of girls who decide they are going to take a stand are portrayed as noble but stupid; they overcome their fear and broadcast their refusal on a loudspeaker, giving away their location and, naturally, getting killed. The evil women are at least more interesting, but they’re all playing the game, and they’re all pretty nasty, while the boys have more complicated personalities.
The book also has a twisted view of sex. Nobody seems to enjoy it that much, and rape is used as a means to compel submission, often in conjunction with murder. The teacher is particularly vile in this regard, but you’re supposed to hate him anyway; it’s worse when the students are raping and pimping each other. Nice school.
The art is dynamic but uneven. Taguchi does a good job of giving each character a unique look and personality, but his grasp of proportion and foreshortening is shaky. He also draws some characters in a fairly realistic style and others as obvious cartoons, which is particularly disconcerting when the two types share the same panel. Needless to say, the weapons are drawn with loving care. And did I mention there’s lots of violence?
The Ultimate Edition bundles three of the original volumes into a single hardback volume for $24.99, which is already a good deal. The trim size is larger than standard manga, which makes the comic easier to read; a dramatic tale like this really benefits from a little extra room. Unfortunately, the print quality is not very good, with some smearing in the first two parts and a seriously blurry part three. Extras include preliminary character sketches, detailed sketches of the weapons, an interview with Takami, and an essay by a clinical psychologist about how people react under stress (executive summary: everyone is different). There’s also a bonus short story at the end that manages to be even nastier than anything in the main story, without any of the redeeming features such as complex characters or an interesting plot. I’m not sure what Tokyopop was thinking of, but in my opinion the book would have been enhanced considerably by leaving it out.
Battle Royale is not for the kiddies. It’s loaded with violence and manages to work in some sex as well, but there’s a lot more to it than that. The Ultimate Edition is particularly nice because it encompasses enough action to really draw the reader into the story; if I had only the first volume, I might not have stuck with it. With three at once, I saw enough of the story unfold to stay interested.
This review is based on a complimentary copy supplied by the publisher.
