Teeny Shiny.
I've never had a book (or any other media, for that matter) get to me as much as Battle Royale has.
It's a fairly simple premise. A Japanese class of forty-two students are put on an island and forced to kill one another until there is only one left. Survival of the fittest at its core.
But the author takes pays such painstaking detail to the minds of the kids involved; giving all of them backstories, ulterior motives for why they act how they do; nearly every student is given a detailed background so that the reader can really understand what's going through each character's head.
I'm nearing the end of the book, and the section I just finished really got to me. One of the somewhat main characters (most characters are given a few chapters, though there are some that get far more), Hiroki, as spent the entire day and a half (chronicled through five hundred pages) scouring the island he's on trying to find a female classmate, Kayoko. Throughout the novel, it's never revealed why he's so desperately trying to find her. Everyone assumes that he'd be looking for his best friend/supposed girlfriend, Takako, whom he does find (and dies in his arms), but his real goal is Kayoko. He finally finds her, and she freaks out, due to paranoia and exhaustion, and runs from him. He chases her down, she turns and shoots him, in the chest.
After she realizes what she's done, she runs to him. He explains in his dying breaths that there's a way to escape the island. But the real reason he was after her, that he braved the fear of death for all that time...
Was simply to tell her that he loved her.
She had no idea, until she reflected upon it right after he died. Little things he had done for her suddenly became all the more clear.
Hiroko didn't sleep, didn't eat, was stabbed in the shoulder, the stomach, and shot twice (not counting the fatal wound Kayoko deals him). All just to tell a girl who had no clue that he loved her.
Corny? Definitely. But it touched me, none-the-less.
Then, she was killed by one of the main 'villians' of the novel, on top of Hiroko's corpse, weeping.
A fitting end, I suppose.
It's a fairly simple premise. A Japanese class of forty-two students are put on an island and forced to kill one another until there is only one left. Survival of the fittest at its core.
But the author takes pays such painstaking detail to the minds of the kids involved; giving all of them backstories, ulterior motives for why they act how they do; nearly every student is given a detailed background so that the reader can really understand what's going through each character's head.
I'm nearing the end of the book, and the section I just finished really got to me. One of the somewhat main characters (most characters are given a few chapters, though there are some that get far more), Hiroki, as spent the entire day and a half (chronicled through five hundred pages) scouring the island he's on trying to find a female classmate, Kayoko. Throughout the novel, it's never revealed why he's so desperately trying to find her. Everyone assumes that he'd be looking for his best friend/supposed girlfriend, Takako, whom he does find (and dies in his arms), but his real goal is Kayoko. He finally finds her, and she freaks out, due to paranoia and exhaustion, and runs from him. He chases her down, she turns and shoots him, in the chest.
After she realizes what she's done, she runs to him. He explains in his dying breaths that there's a way to escape the island. But the real reason he was after her, that he braved the fear of death for all that time...
Was simply to tell her that he loved her.
She had no idea, until she reflected upon it right after he died. Little things he had done for her suddenly became all the more clear.
Hiroko didn't sleep, didn't eat, was stabbed in the shoulder, the stomach, and shot twice (not counting the fatal wound Kayoko deals him). All just to tell a girl who had no clue that he loved her.
Corny? Definitely. But it touched me, none-the-less.
Then, she was killed by one of the main 'villians' of the novel, on top of Hiroko's corpse, weeping.
A fitting end, I suppose.
posted by Uncle Funky Pants at 3:57 AM
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