Battle Royale (Paperback)

This is genuinely the most moving novel I've read in a long time, and I urge you to read it. After the daze of the violence has worn off, you will remember the desperation and the tears: Hiroki's search for Kayoko, Shuya's faltering love for Noriko, the superb enigma of Shogo. These are living, breathing characters and some of the most genuine human beings you'll ever encounter inside the cover of a novel. I came to "Battle Royale" expecting reams of gunfire and a stoic Japanese detachment to death: I hardly expected so much passion and quite so many tears. I cannot praise Koushun Takami's novel enough. What a shame the idea that it is violent and shocking (a "notorious high-octane thriller" as the back cover blurb crassly puts it) or was made into a "super-cool" (Jonathan Ross) movie might prevent this novel winning every literary prize on the planet.

There are some problems. The American publisher Viz should be commended for their English versions of Japanese manga and novels, and of course they want to shift units, but they could have done better with the presentation. The blood-and-black cover is unappealing, the pulp graphics ill advised, and the book's narrow text columns, gaping leading and over-large word spacing shout sloppy computer design: worse are the innumerable typesetting, spelling and grammatical errors throughout. There's a rule of thumb which says you should only ever translate into your native language. The translator here, Yuji Oniki, does a good job but is let down repeatedly by an odd choice of phrase and an uncomfortable grasp of English. Not knowing the difference between "stationery" and "stationary" is forgiveable (most native English speakers don't either) but what is a "retort meal"? It's a phrase known in Japan but meaningless to a Western reader.

Another annoyance is the author's decision to tell you the number of surviving children at the end of each chapter. This may heighten the tension, acting as a sort of countdown, but makes reading the book a pain, since deaths usually occur suddenly in bursts of unexpected violence at the ends of chapters. When you turn the page, your eye can't help but be drawn to the bold letters telling you how many children are left at the end of the chapter you're reading, and this negates the suspense. At the end of one chapter, I was confused because the count didn't match the deaths: this meant I figured out before I read on that one of the characters must actually still be alive.

Finally, there is an unavoidable cultural problem. With 42 first and family names to remember, helpfully listed at the beginning of the book (there are also gridded maps of the island in the end pieces, though they're not necessary), it's hard to keep track of characters unless you're good with Japanese names. The convention is to refer to characters by their family name unless they're a really close friend, but you'll still be confused if you don't know whether Kitano is a first or family name, or whether Hirono is a boy's or girl's name. To an English speaking audience, a class of Johns, Michaels and Marys would have been much more immediate: this small hurdle tends to distance the characters until you get used to them, and you do soon become involved.

The worst thing that could happen to "Battle Royale" now is an American movie version. The best thing that could happen is that the novel takes on a life separate to the existing movie (which, don't get me wrong, is terrific) and finds its way into the quality literature section of the book shops. Whether that means a new or tightened translation is debatable: it definitely needs a new presentation. But this book should find its way into the school bag of every 15 year old. The violence and alienation will be the first attraction, but the book has such a strong moral core, and is so life-affirming, that it shouldn't be dismissed as mere shock. After all, the villains of the book aren't the children forced to murder each other for the entertainment of their elders, it's the adults who put them there. The movie fudges the issue by changing the concept of the novel from a totalitarian regime killing off its children as a means of keeping its adult population in order to a well-meaning government attempting to control an out-of-control youth. In the book the children are blameless victims: anything else is a negation of the central message of the novel, which is that every person chooses their own moral code based on who they are, the life experiences they carry with them, and the things society makes them do.