バトル・ロワイアル (Battle Royale)

Fukasaku's film adapts Koushun Takami's novel, published the year before, and keeps its premise without softening: a class of junior high school students is taken to an island, collared, given a weapon each and told that only one may leave. The novel's roll call of students with their own interior lives is what the film compresses hardest, and it compensates with the on-screen death counter. The film was debated in the Diet on release, which is part of why the title is known outside Japan at all.

Hwang Dong-hyuk has said he wrote the first version of the script in 2008 after reading Japanese survival game comics, naming Battle Royale among them, and that he wanted to make a Korean one. What he kept is the premise rather than the tone:

• A closed arena, a fixed cast, and a rule that only one of them leaves
• Rounds announced by an unseen authority, with the running count of the dead as the structure
• An ordinary social relationship reused as the alliances: classmates there, debtors here

The difference is who runs it. Takami's is a state programme, Hwang's is a private entertainment sold to the rich, and that swap is the whole of the show's argument.

Haro Aso's manga sits inside the Japanese death-game genre that Takami's novel opened to a mass audience in 1999, and the furniture is shared: ordinary young people given rules, a sealed arena, and a countdown that kills whoever fails to comply. What Alice in Borderland adds is the puzzle. Survival turns on solving the game rather than on outlasting the others, and the playing cards classify each trial by type, which moves it toward Kaiji and Liar Game. LOW: a genre debt rather than a stated one, and the more direct parent is the manga tradition rather than Takami's single book.

Takami has named Golding's novel as a starting point, and the book is built as a reply to it. Golding puts schoolboys on an island and lets the violence arrive from inside them; Takami puts a class on an island and has the state issue the weapons and the rules, which moves the argument from human nature to what a government can make people do. Same island, same children, opposite verdict.

The same ancestor, reaching Japan by a different route. Connell's island, its time limit, and its rule that survival is the only victory condition are the engine Takami runs on a class of fifteen-year-olds. What Takami adds is that the hunters are each other rather than a host: there is no Zaroff on the island, only the government that put them there and a map of expanding forbidden zones to keep them moving.

Takami has identified King's novel as his favorite Stephen King novel and said it influenced his depiction of the totalitarian government and its deadly competition.

Takami grew up during the student protests and clashes with police in Japan, which informed the authoritarian political environment of Battle Royale.