Book Review: Battle Royale (Koushun Takami)

You may have heard of The Running Man and The Hunger Games - disturbing tales of the future in which human lives are put on the line in bloodsport entertainment.  From Japan, Battle Royale is another horrific vision of the future:  42 junior high school students rounded up on an island and forced to fight to the death under the eyes of an authoritarian government.

The harrowing premise is what initially hooked me into the BR films, and finally into this novel.  It has aspects that are familiar to the genre (which is not that big to begin with - just like The Running Man and Escape From New York, characters are coerced into action with explosive collars.  The survivalist struggle and the game-like nature of the whole affair will bring The Hunger Games to mind - I've seen many people accusing it of ripping off BR).  While the set-up and concepts used are neat, they are actually the low points of the book.  Some of the things that makes this perfectly readable are its agreeable pacing, its harrowing action scenes and violence, and the dynamic ways in which characters clash and band together.  The only bad thing is that this is a long book that chronicles every single student - it's not confusing, thankfully, but it can feel like a daunting read because of its sheer length and the level of detail Takami went into.

Fortunately, it is the characters that keeps this whole story glued together.  The three main characters are a likable bunch, whose struggles comprise the bulk of the novel and all its more thrilling parts.  What's really surprising is that the other 40+ characters receive a good amount of treatment too - even if they have short-lived parts, the author gives you just enough to understand them as people.  Thus, all the death in the book carries substantial weight.  Having to track all these characters, the plot moves around at a good rate, but it doesn't amount to much more than a struggle for survival (and possibly escape) on one island.  Background is given on the type of government that runs the BR program, and the characters often vow to tear the system down, but it's all left as a mere cliffhanger.

This novel is written with plenty of flair.  It does a great job of getting into each characters' thoughts and feelings.  There are some parts that come off as a little odd, such as in how specific it gets with certain details (like character height and weight) and general wording.  Dialogue appears realistic, but it can be rather melodramatic, especially when characters talk about their love lives and crushes (in this respect, it almost comes off as very anime-like).  Chances are that some of these aspects are just inherent cultural traits to Japanese literature that I might be ignorant of.

Battle Royale is a perfectly enjoyable and juicy read.  It's not always the best story or prose, but it is uncompromising in its vision, and compelling with its characters.

Comparatively, the novel is a grade better than the movie - the film does have good moments in its own right, but it always came off as rather stuff and drab to me.  However, I do prefer the Hunger Games a little more, thanks to its pacing and worldbuilding.

4/5 (Experience:  Good | Story:  Pretty Good | Book:  Pretty Good)

Manga Review: FLCL (Hajime Ueda)

What the F is FLCL? If you've seen the 6-episode anime series, you still may not know or care, other than it's one incredibly weird, wild, and trippy series where a kid sprouts robots from his head and keeps getting run over by a girl on a Vespa.  Yep, strange stuff indeed.

I picked up this manga volume believing that it would be the basis for the anime, but now I see that it's the other way around.  And it's a bit of a relief, because I was perplexed to find that I loved the anime way more than this manga.  As weird and convoluted as the anime got, it actually made sense after so many viewings.  I could watch the series and identify how each piece fits; with the manga, not so much.  It's like a massive remix of everything, and it just made it all confusing.

To be fair, it is a very easy thing to read.  The pages breeze by, thanks to the simple, to-the-point writing.  Artwork is stylishly crude and simple.  It's far from detailed or elegant, but that's also the beauty of it; it's like a form of minimalist pop art, and I can't help but to stop and stare at the weird, blocky, featureless faces on each page, because they look cool as they are.  However, the book misses a lot of the manic energy that made the anime so great, and the action scenes in the manga tend to be very blurred and confusing.

The story is where the book loses me completely, because as far as I can tell the story makes no sense at all.  Having seen the anime a few good times, to the point where I can understand it on a deeper level, I can tell that the manga hits up a lot of the same major events.  All the main characters are represented, and generally fulfill the same roles.  The minor characters receive more attention.  The problem I see is that there's no clear direction for the plot; it just wanders from one random scene to the other.  The characters have no evident motivation, so there's no natural progression from one scene to the next.  I think the worst thing is that all the elements I could draw connections with in the anime are flipped around so much that I can't figure them out in the book.  In the end, I was just confused.

As mentioned above, the manga is drawn with a heck of a style.  All the characters look really slick, and the world they inhabit is pretty well-rendered.  Writing is okay, but it doesn't explain much at all of the plot or characters, and it seems very simplistic overall.

The FLCL comic has a lot of craziness, but unlike the anime, there's no real semblance of method to make the madness palatable.  It could just be that I didn't "get it," and it might take more readings to fully appreciate.  Right now though, I just like the pretty pictures, and still value the anime version for having a stronger narrative, more compelling characters, and a batty style.

3/5 (Entertainment:  Pretty Good | Story:  Poor | Manga:  Pretty Good)