Hello there everyone! I’m continuing my focus on school-related manga series with this week’s review. When growing up, I’m sure everyone had both classmates that they liked and classmates that they hated. But, if you were ever thrown into a battle of life and death against your classmates, would you be able to willingly kill them? Such a hard question is the scenario in this week’s manga, Battle Royale, an adaptation of the infamous Japanese novel written by Koushun Takami. Takami was also the writer of the manga, although the writing duties for the manga was helped out by Masayuki Taguchi.
In Battle Royale, we follow the members of a class of 42 9th graders as they participate in The Program, an annual event that takes a randomly selected 9th grade class in Japan and transports them to a remote island where they battle it out until only one is left alive. Of the 42 students, Battle Royale mainly focuses on seven of them. Our protagonists are Shuya Nanahara, our righteous, if not naive, main protagonist, Noriko Nakagawa, a selfless and gentle girl who has a crush on Shuya, Shogo Kawada, a transfer student who was actually the winner of the previous year’s Program, Shinji Mimura, a very smart and very athletic pretty boy, and Hiroki Sugimura, a gentle giant kung fu master. Our antagonists on the other hand are Mitsuko Souma, a beautiful but extremely emotionally damaged girl, and Kazuo Kiriyama, a prodigy at practically everything he tries but is void of human emotions after suffering a brain injury at a very young age.
The story begins with Shuya and his best friend, Yoshitoki Kuninobu, as children in an orphanage. They sit down to watch their favorite show, Maximum Carnage, when it is interrupted with a live broadcast of the results of the most recent Program, revealing the winner to be a girl who has a deranged look on her face and is covered in blood.
I'm going to Disney World!
After that the story skips ahead to Shuya’s and Yoshitoki’s 9th grade graduation trip. On the bus ride to their trip, all of the students on the bus start falling to sleep. The only one who realizes what is going on is Shogo, who starts trying to break one of bus windows to allow fresh oxygen into the bus, but ends up passing out as well. The students wake up in a classroom with their personal belongings missing and each of them wearing a metal collar around their necks. They are greeted by a fat and ugly man named Yonemi Kamon. Kamon informs the students that they have been selected for The Program, even though some of the students in the class are children of government officials, this is because the government decided that The Program makes everyone equals, so no one is safe. He then tells them that all of their parents and guardians were informed of their selection, and that all of them gives them their support.
Yoshitoki stands up and asks Kamon who was told about his selection as he is an orphan, and Kamon tells Yoshitoki that the woman in charge of the orphanage that Yoshitoki and Shuya live at was told. Kamon then goes on to say that she loudly protested their selection, and then not so subtly implies that he raped her. This enrages Yoshitoki, as Yoshitoki was madly in love with her.
Yoshitoki smash!
In his rage, Yoshitoki bum rushes Kamon, but Kamon shoots him in the face twice with a revolver. Shuya gets up in a rage over the death of his best friend, and also begins to charge Kamon, but is cut off by Shinji with a flying pimp slap to the face.
Bitch be cool!
Shinji then has a conversation with Kamon about how Kamon loses money for each student he kills before The Program begins, making Kamon burst out with laughter. After Shinji and Shuya return to their seats, one of the girls in the class begins talking to her friend. This angers Kamon, and in response, he throws a knife right into the center of her forehead. With this, The Program begins. The students are each given a pack with a map, a compass, food, water, and a random weapon or item. Some are useful like a variety of guns, and others are things like paper fans.
After being set free onto the battlefield, Shuya teams up with Noriko and Shogo, and they come up with a plan to try and beat the system and get as many people to survive as possible. Shinji and Sugimura also agree with this idea, and they do what they can to help. These five spend the rest of the story trying to survive and convince others to join them, and not kill them on sight.
The manga lasts 15 volumes and all of the volumes were published in North America and the UK by Tokyopop, with a few changes, such as adding dates into the story that weren’t in the Japanese version and making The Program seem like a reality TV show. For the most part, the story presented in the manga mirrors both the original novel and the movie adaptation, though the characters are much more fleshed out in the manga, as most of the characters gain flashback sequences to give them personalities, and it makes a lot of the deaths that much more weighted.
If you love the Battle Royale franchise, I highly recommend the manga as it gives new light on the characters, if you have never experienced Battle Royale before, I suggest watching the movie or reading the novel first, just so you kind of know what you are in for. This manga is not for the weak at heart, but if you can tough it out, you’ll find a great adaptation of one of the best pieces of Japanese literature there is.