Battle Royale

My Rating:

☆☆☆☆☆

As you can tell from all the rereads, I really, really like this book! I honestly can't remember at this point if I read the book or watched the film first, but I do know I read/watched them for the first time very closely together and found both immensely entertaining. The movie was on Netflix at the time, and I believe it was the first Japanese film I'd ever watched (and, come to think of it, may still be the only Japanese film I've ever seen). I bought my copy from Books-a-Million a little after Christmas 2013 and read it over a weekend shortly after spring semester courses began.

Of course, most dystopian novels run the risk of comparison to The Hunger Games, but Battle Royale more than most, despite having been published nearly a decade earlier. In fact, Collins had to address and deny the rumors of plagiarism, given the striking similarities (down to small details) between her work and Takami's. 

The edition I bought was the 2009 VIZMedia copy, which included a new afterword from Takami reflecting on the past ten years since the work had been published, which I found rather sad. It was mentioned in an interesting article (which I'll link): "In a 2009 edition of Battle Royale, the author wrote an interview/afterword hybrid as a kind of goodbye to the mega-popular story. He wanted to say everything he could about his work so that he could finally leave it behind and start on another story. (Sadly, Takami has still not released any new work since Battle Royale)". That article was written ten years after the publication of the 'new' afterword; twenty after Battle Royale's publication. I can only imagine how difficult and daunting it would be as an author, to write a second book while knowing it would follow a debut novel of such success.