Battle Royale

Battle Royale is a novel written by Japanese by Japanese author Koushun Tamaki. It was first published in Japan in April 1999, and it is one of Japan's best-selling and most controversial novels.

It is recommened for ages 14- 27



Plot Overview
Battle Royale takes place in an alterante timeline, according to the book's prologue, Japan is a police state, known as the Republic of Greater East Asia. From time to time, fifty randomly selected classes of secondary school students are forced to take arms against one another until one student in each class remains. The program was created, supposedly, as a form of miltary research, though the outcome of each battle is publiczied on local television. A character discovers that the program is not an experiment at all, but a means of terrorizing the population. In theory, after seeing much atrocities, the people will become paranoid and divided, preventing an organizied rebellion.

Under the guise of a 'study trip' a group of students from Shiroiwa Junior High School, a Junior High School operated by the fictional town of Shiroiwa, are coralled onto a bus and gassed, only to be awaken in a school on an isolated, evacuated, wearing metal collars, around their necks. After explaining about the rules of the program, the students are issued survival packs (along with a random weapon or tool) and sent out to an island one by one. While most of the students recieve guns and knives, some students accquire relatively usless items like bommerangs, some common dartboard darts, and a fork. In some cases, instead of a weapon, the student recieves a tool. Hiroki Sugimura finds a radar that tracks nearby students, and Toshinori recieves a bulletproof vest.

To make sure the students obey the rules and kill each other the metal collars around their necks track their positions and explode if they linger in a "Forbidden Zone" or attempt to remove their collars. The Forbidden Zones are randomly chosen areas of the map that increase in number as time goes on re-scuplting and shirnking the battlefield and forcing students to move around. The collars sercetly transmit sound back to the organizers of the game, allowing them to hear the students' conversations, root out their escape plans, and log their activites.

The students are also given a time limit, if the twenty-four hours pass without someone being killed, then all of the collars will be detonated simultaneously and their will be no winner. It is metioned that only 0.5% of the Programs end this fashion. The game last seventy-two hours, if their is no winner, then all of the collars will explode.