The novel starts off with a literal bang. In this republic, citizens are tightly controlled and influence from the outside world (especially the United States) is strictly forbidden. Anyway, as stated above, Battle Royale is set in a dystopian nightmare version of “modern day” (since this book was published in the 90s, it’s set in the 90s) Japan, specifically the Republic of Greater East Asia. The lines between the two age ranges are getting very blurred these days. If BR were published in 2019, I’d say it would be classified as a YA novel instead of an adult. There’s a lot of gore in BR, and Takami holds nothing back in his fight scenes. All of our characters are teenagers, but the violence found in this novel as opposed to THG is intense. It’s hard to say whether Battle Royale is a YA novel or not.

The bells are ringing now, aren’t they? One very important thing to note is that Battle Royale was published in Japan in 1999, then translated to English in 2003–many years prior to Collins’s Hunger Games. The two works are similar in a lot of ways, but their differences make for a much more interesting discussion… The conceit of both novels is nearly the same: Teens forced by a brutal totalitarian regime to kill one another while the public is helpless to do anything about it.

Ring any bells? The reason why I’m bringing this up is because Battle Royale and The Hunger Games are cut from the same cloth. If you aren’t familiar with Battle Royale by Koushun Takami, then you might be familiar with its American counterpart, The Hunger Games.

Koushun takami