As a tragic Greek character, my hamartia was always my inability to let things go. I’ve got the hubris, don’t worry, but mainly, I’m just painfully stubborn. I am unable to let sleeping dogs lie. I constantly beat the dead horse. I…never mind, that’s all I’ve got for Southern charm on that one. If there’s another catchy colloquialism for that, let me know.
Feeding that slightly obsessive flame, today’s blog is going to focus on the one issue that’s been hashed and rehashed to death: the comparison of Suzanne Collins’
Hunger Games trilogy with the Japanese novel
Battle Royale by Koushun Takami. Except my review will be better. Here’s why:
See, what drives me INSANE is most reviewers’ comparison of the
Hunger Games books to the more widely known
Battle Royale film. (Just a few, check out
here, another good one
here, or
here where an io9 reviewer admits, "While we didn't have a copy of Takami's book handy, we did get a chance to screen the
Battle Royale Blu-Ray release, which is what we're using as basis for most of this debate.")
This is stupid. It bothers me. This apples-to-oranges understanding enrages me on a fundamental level. It’s in the same pit of hell in the dead center of my forehead that wonders why Rose and Jack couldn’t share the damn door or why Charlie couldn’t have just run out of the radio room and THEN slammed the door and swam out with Desmond. No harm, no foul.
Stupid.
Battle Royale has certainly benefited from the comparison, however ill-devised. The once-obscure Japanese tale has now gotten serious American attention. Mostly, however, this attention has focused on the cult film, which is apparently easier to watch and review than a 600-page novel. Ugh. But the book has been affected as well. Latest copies of the English edition published by Haika Soru in San Francisco have a round yellow sticker stuck on the cover declaring the novel as “The Original Survival Game!” (I pity the poor interns who had to peel and stick those all day.)
With
Catching Fire coming to theatres in November, it’s only inevitable that this debate is going to come up again, and I need to get out my 2 cents before I implode all over my keyboard.
Disclaimer: This review is largely not concerned about the general premise similarities--kids killing each other in an arena-setting--which can be explained from many dystopian antecedents. Instead, I will pinpoint and illustrate the many eerie similarities in character, plot, and detail that link Battle Royale (the book) with Hunger Games (the book).
Hopefully someone will come across this blog and this post before turning to bad reviews’ reliance on the film as their marker of difference. So here we go, to save the day:
The Basics
Battle Royale by Japanese writer Koushun Takami was published in 1999. (For reference, it was printed and distributed in English in 2003;
Hunger Games came out in 2008.) The story appears in three mediums: the original novel, the manga (started in 2000, issued over five years), and the more widely known film (also 2000). Takami helped co-write the manga. (There is also a terrible 2003 sequel to the film that has no textual basis and will, for this review, be dutifully ignored.)
Terrible. Just terrible.
Battle Royale’s basic storyline revolves around a class of middle school students that is selected to complete in the annual government "Program," a fight to the death by the students. Like
Hunger Games, there can be only one victor. The book focuses mostly on the experiences of Shuya Nanahara, who is trying to protect his best friend’s crush and bands together with a mysterious transfer student, Shogo, to undermine the point of the Program by surviving. (Unlike the movie, Shogo is not a glutton for punishment who “volunteers” but instead had recently transferred to the school. Neither, for the record, does Kazou Kiriyama volunteer. He was already a student in the selected class.)
This review deals with the
Battle Royale book first and foremost, but Takami’s authorship of the manga makes it relevant to this discussion and I’ll deal with it here. (In an effort of full disclosure, I’ll admit that the manga was my favorite of the three versions if only because the character of Shinji Mimura, keeper of my heart, owner of my soul, is really expanded upon.)
The manga is essentially the same plot as the book but instead takes the time to flesh out the background and identity of every single classmate--to really humanize them during this state of war and in all the chaos of destruction and death. The character development is stunning in the manga.
The manga still focuses on Shuya as our main character but does expand to show in him relation to two other heroes, his friends and foils: Shinji Mimura and Hiroki Sugimura. I’m a sucker for a good bromance, and I loved the manga’s attention to how each of the three approached their situation, how they acted, and how they viewed each other and other classmates. Shuya struggles to decide what to do and how to accomplish his goals of surviving and protecting the female lead, Noriko. Mimura, the beat of my heart and the fire of my literary loins, by contrast starts trying to fight back against the system. Finally, Sugimura searches for his friend and worries about turning violent in a game of violence. Each of the main three--and all of the classmates, really--internalize their condition and give commentary on society forced into a state of violence.
The Comparison/Contrast
As good as the first two books of the Hunger Games trilogy are, there are too many similarities between the books
Battle Royale and
Hunger Games for comfort, despite Collins’ repeated insistence that she had never heard of
Battle Royale before early criticism. Here I’ll go point-by-point down the list and point out the similarities found in the books that have raised eyebrows.
The Background
- In Hunger Games, we know that the USA has collapsed and that North America has banded together to create the regionally-organized Panem. (Thanks to years of Latin education for driving that world play through my skull....)
- In Battle Royale, the world similarly falls apart and Asia forms a new identity as the Republic of Greater East Asia, a conglomeration of defunct Asian countries in the area.
The Premise
- For Collins, in response to the rebellion of District 13, the government creates the Games as a weird deterrent for any future uprisings. I question the Capitol’s tactics of control measures, but that’s not the point here.
- In Battle Royale, the motives for the Program are never as hammered-in as in Collins’ more teen-oriented work, but they again serve as a method of public control, as we learn from the dialogue between characters and revealed exposition.
The Story
My bone to pick with
Hunger Games isn’t the premise itself of having kids duke it out Thunderdome-style because the government tells them too. That’s fine. I will buy that two separate authors followed
Lord of the Flies’ writing on the wall and came to that conclusion. That--let it be stated for the record--does not bother me. I have fewer issues with the similarities in premise than I do with the eerie amount of similarities in that plot’s execution.
Battle Royale and
Hunger Games have essentially the same characters with inverted gender roles. (One could even argue that Katniss emerges as the heroine as the result of the Americanization and target audience of the story.)
Let's take a look. The main character in
Battle Royale, as stated earlier, is a boy named Shuya. Like Katniss, he bends the rules established and enforced by the government. Katniss crosses the electric fence and hunts, Shuya is obsessed with American rock-and-roll music and secretly plays guitar.
Their experiences gained by breaking the rules feed into their experiences in the Games/Program, albeit this manifests itself in different ways. For Katniss, it’s literal: her hunting experience gives her a physical and tactical advantage over the other players. She can hunt with a bow and arrow, so she has the skill to take out that pig during the rankings and trigger the explosions during the Games. For Shuya (perhaps because
Battle Royale is more adult, or at least, more subtle), the advantage is an ideological one. Because of his prohibited exposure to American culture, he doesn’t buy into the violence he’s forced into and the Greater Republic propaganda as his fellow students do. Many of his classmates, who have been raised in the mindset of the Program, do not have the vision to see beyond their condition and recognize its moral depravity. They participate. Shuya, idolizing America and its supposed freedom, has the tools to see beyond and, ultimately (and here’s where he picks back up with Katniss), use these tools to survive.
Both suffer the death of a parent and a strained home life because of it. Katniss, as we all know, lost her dad in a mine collapse and then had to fulfill the role of head as household while her mother dealt with her subsequent depression. Shuya grew up with no parents, raised in an orphanage, after the government killed his father and his mother died a little while later.
Both, despite their tools and survival, are “corrupted” by the Games. What I mean is that both resort to morally gray tactics to ensure their survival. Katniss abuses her relationship with Peeta to get the supplies and public support that they need to escape. Shuya, by contrast, after a novel of pacifism and a constant refusal to kill and a struggle to save everyone he meets, willingly murders several soldiers in the very end of the book as part of their escape plan. (The manga, it must be noted here, changes Takami’s original ending and allows Shuya to escape without taking any life.) Both take full advantage of the tools available to them (the approval ratings of teen true love, a loaded gun), even in ways that question the established moral goodness of their character.
More striking are the similarities between
Hunger Games’ and
Battle Royale’s main love interests.
BR’s “Peeta” is the sweet and caring Noriko, whom Shuya comes to love over the course of the story. Noriko, like Peeta, serves as the moral center of the books. Both are conscious of the risk of losing one’s self amidst the violence and disorder and express their anxiety and concerns. Noriko, like Peeta, is ideologically outside the game/system, so she is able to retain her identity and her purity in spite of the horrors around them. In fact, their morality is in such confrontation with their violent surrounding that a physical sickness occurs. (Don’t worry. Getting there in a second.) Like Peeta, Noriko also has the ability to “see” people, to “read” them and elicit a desired reaction.
Tangential but I feel like pettily pointing out: both characters give some kind of food (bread for Peeta, homemade cookies for Noriko) as a token of affection to the main characters before the start of the Games/Program. Now I’m being bitter, but hey, just saying.
That’s all, you say? That’s the best I’ve got for similarities between characters? No. It gets better.
Despite the gender switch, Peeta and Noriko fill the same space in the story and their storylines are effectively the same: both characters’ participation in the Game/Program revolves around a critical injury that puts them out of the contest and demands the main characters’ assistance. Peeta gets wounded, Noriko gets wounded. Both, from their wounds, get dangerously ill while in the Game/Program and need immediate and serious medical attention that changes the course of the plot and offers the solution to their predicament.
You see, not only do both love interests/moral compasses almost die from their exposure to the fight, but by taking care of the injured love interest, both main characters come to their means of escaping the Game/Program. For Katniss, she learns that by exploiting a romance with Peeta, she can control public approval and ultimately use her
Romeo and Juliet rehashing to undermine the Capitol. For Shuya in
Battle Royale, his quest to save Noriko leads him to Shogo, who admires their devotion and goodness and resolves to help them escape the Program together. Through their love interests’ injuries and their efforts to save that person from death, both main characters discover the means to their own salvation (and their companions’).
Battle Royale’s influence also reaches into
Catching Fire. Collins’ second book features the return of a badass young fighter who played in the Games before and decides to help the two main characters escape while secretly plotting against the system itself because he lost the girl he loved to the Games a few years before.
Likewise,
Battle Royale features the return of a badass young fighter who played in the Program before and decides to help the two main characters escape while secretly plotting against the system itself because he lost the girl he loved to the Games a few years before.
...wait, what?
No, I can’t make this up. Finnick Odair, as we know, was the victor of the 65th Hunger Games, who fell in love with Annie, the winner of the 70th Hunger Games from his same District. After the violent horrors of the Games, Annie mentally snapped and is regarded as unstable in the Games’ aftermath and during the events of the trilogy. She becomes effectively lost to the Games.
The loss of the repeat player’s love in
Battle Royale is more explicit. We find out that Shogo Kawada, the class' mysterious transfer student and Shuya's new ally, has played in the Program before and won. Now he's back with a plan for revenge. Why revenge? Shogo confesses that before the Program, he was in love with his girlfriend and classmate Keiko Onuki. She is killed during his first stint in the Program. Shogo, like Finnick, has not gotten over his lost love and carries around her picture with him at all times, agonizing over her unknown feelings towards him during the Program.
Both Finnick and Shogo swear revenge on the system/government as a result of their experiences and their loss. Both are also, at the same time, manipulated by the system. Finnick is whored out and his public image crafted as a “ladies’ man” in the Capitol. The government places Shogo into a new class after surviving the Program once and then choses him again.
Both plot against the system and in the process grow to admire and assist the main characters and their love interests. Hate to be a Debbie Downer, but in the end, both also sacrifice themselves to save the others and die saving the main characters.
The Details
Besides the strikingly similar aspects of character and plot, there is a heap of smaller stuff too that adds up to discomfort when taken together:
1. Both identify contestants by number. In Hunger Games, each Tribute is identified numerically by their district: our Katniss is the “Girl from District 12” and the book repeatedly label contestants as Boy #1, Girl #8, etc. Battle Royale follows Japanese school forms, so each student is IDed by their classroom number, boy and girl (Girl #14, Boy #14). Much like the identification of Tributes in Hunger Games.
2. Both are popular with the public, televised, and most importantly, watched. Voyeurism is an important theme in both these works. Who watches and why they are watching is an important question: is it out of fear? anxiety? pleasure? sadism? For all my railing against the Hunger Games series, it is, in my belief, the best book-to-movie adaptation I have seen in a VERY long time. I love in the film when they deliberately show Gale refusing to watch the start of the Games and instead sitting alone in the field looking out, watching nature, not the macabre, unnatural show the Capitol has created (a la trackerjackets, mockingjays, and those creepy Tribute-hounds). That’s powerful stuff.
The Hunger Games, we know because it’s repeatedly emphasized, is on every screen in every home, school, and business. You can’t escape watching it because the Capitol doesn’t want you too--as it’s their “effective” measure of control.
Same in Battle Royale. The film doesn't make this clear after the beginning, but everyone knows about the Program because it’s on the telly. The novel and book mention the previous contestant, and the movie, to its credit, opens with news crews’ frantic efforts to capture the first look of the earlier Program winner: a bloodied girl who can’t stop smiling. She is plastered onto the television screen. It is unclear--and I would argue, unlikely--that the events of the Program are aired live in the Greater Republic, although the Program is definitely a focus of the media. Reporters and the government advertise the Program and its results, again, as a method of control. Bets are taken on who will survive. In the end, Shuya asks a question that gets no answer, "How many of you watched for the blood and how many for the semen? Come on, any Mitsuko fans out there? Kiriyama?"
Whether the Program is aired live or not, it is still filmed and watched by some--the government officials. We know from the novel that there are cameras installed in certain areas of the island to allow the Program’s administrators sight in the field. Kinpatsu Sakamochi complains and becomes suspicious of Shogo because he, Shuya, and Noriko were hidden from sight during their last and critical final moments in the game.
This is not trivial. Participation and voyeurism matter. To drive this point home, the last issue manga poignantly highlights the quote: "You watch. That’s why they died. Because you watch."
3. At the end of each day during the Hunger Games, the cannon shoots and we hear our daily death count. Battle Royale does the exact same thing. There are daily announcements during the Program to detail who has recently died.
4. Players’ (Tributes’ and students’) movements in the field is restricted and controlled by a watching “Game master.” Katniss is redirected by the firestorm; Battle Royale students have to keep track of “danger zones” that are lethal to cross into.
5. All contestants (again, Tributes and students) are tracked by devices. The Tributes are injected with the GPS, the students have their iconic collars.
6. Both books feature a non-threatening, more passive-player female character who unknowingly consumes poison and dies.
7. The world is off its rocker--both worlds, actually. Hunger Games makes this clear. President Snow is clearly manipulative and diabolical towards his ends. He's the villain, that's supposed to happen. Same with Sakamochi. They're supposed to be the bad guys.
More troubling is the general lack of empathy and compassion from everyone else. Which brings us to the most disturbing part of the inhuman world in Hunger Games and Battle Royale. The Capitol not only tolerates but celebrates the Games: they dress Katniss up, parade her around. Even District 13, which is supposed to be the hero risen from the ashes, reveals itself as twisted with lost morals.
While clear in Hunger Games, the lack of empathy and human compassion is more subtle--shocking given the gore and violence in BR, but through that subtlety more powerful--in Battle Royale. Yes, we have the brutal murdering of classmates, their psychological and (as Collins leaves out, given her audience) sexual torture. That's obvious.
The io9 review suggests a major difference in Hunger Games and Battle Royale is the fact that the Tributes are at least given training before the Games. I'm personally not convinced a couple days' of training will really change your odds, but it's a legit difference. We do get to see the Games before the actual Game, and they do get training.
In a way, this softens the similarity between Battle Royale and Hunger Games' level of heartlessness. Hunger Games demands a couple days' training that, in the case of Peeta, did make a difference. The Tributes were "prepared." Battle Royale drops some gas into a school bus and dumps the class onto a vacated island, hands them some weapons, and calls it a day. So while both focus heavily on the public's delusions and lack of compassion, there are some differences here.
But sadism in the world of Battle Royale runs deeper than just a government forcing kids to kill. We learn that the Program and the Republic have been in existence for more than 50 years. 50 years. While other nations are strikingly absent from Hunger Games, they are not in Battle Royale, and this makes all the difference. Panem is an island, absent from any global involvement; conversely, Shuya looks up to America as a beacon of freedom and hope, but the reality is much more complicated and darker than his teenage hopes let on. The Program is feared but any resistance is eliminated until resistance curbs itself and the torture becomes expected and accepted. The government achieves full control. Takami says in Battle Royale that losing players on the Greater Republic's baseball Olympics team are killed. This behavior in the Greater Republic isn't secret. It's televised, in the media. It's known. Takami mentions a French foreign exchange student who is killed in the Program a few years before. The brutality of the Greater Republic is known across the globe...and is allowed to continue. No one has intervened. Murders of children continue. This lack of humanity is tolerated. Apathy reigns.
Apples to Oranges
The first problem with comparing the
Hunger Games book series to the
Battle Royale movie is that the film changes a lot of the themes of the written media. For example, the film dumbs down the whole oppressive government theme and instead focuses on this adult vs. student generational divide. The moral and mental gap the generations create serves as the root of the film’s Program.
The second problem with comparing books to film is that the
Battle Royale movie leaves out a lot of subtle details that allude to even more similarities to Collins, ones discussed here in this post. This is especially true in terms of characterization and exposition. (As much of a cult classic the film is, I’ll boldly admit here that compared to the awesomeness and powerfulness of the book and manga, it ranks dead last of all the versions.)
This lack of detail in the film that exists in the novel leads
CinemaBlend reviewer Eric Eisenberg to incorrectly state,
[B]ecause we don’t get a larger sense of the world the title exists in, the audience is under the impression that the life as we know it is otherwise exactly the same. Such is most definitely not the case in Hunger Games. In Ross’ film everything has changed, with global war completely reshaping the socio-political landscape, particularly in America, which has been renamed Panem. [...] Battle Royale makes very little distinction between our universe and the one in the story, but The Hunger Games may as well exist on a totally different planet.
As I’ve (hopefully) demonstrated in this blog, just no.
Similarly, in
the io9 review mentioned earlier: "In the BR movie The Program was enacted specifically to scare the pants off the new rising groups of angry and violent youths." Again, it’s just not so in the book.
Last example, I swear, several online reviews have identified similarities between Katniss and the upper Districts "volunteering" with Shogo's and Kiriyama's willing participation in the Program. But, as pointed out earlier, that is only in the movie. In the original novel, both were in the class before they were selected for participation. So the comparison is just not accurate.
These apples-to-oranges, book-to-film reviews are misshaping the discussion of plagiarism and influence that Hunger Games demands. People Google the debate and get false information because of these bad, unjustified comparisons.
Conclusions
Ultimately, there’s no way of really knowing Collins’ awareness of
Battle Royale. She could be completely innocent, and unless Collins has a jumping on the couch confession moment on Oprah, there’s no way we’ll ever get a confession that would detract from the magnitude and selling power of her series any time soon. When questioned about her knowledge of
Battle Royale in 2011 by the New York Times:
When I asked Collins if she had drawn from Battle Royale, she was unperturbed. "I had never heard of that book or that author until my book was turned in. At that point, it was mentioned to me, and I asked my editor if I should read it. He said: ‘No, I don’t want that world in your head. Just continue with what you’re doing.'" She has yet to read the book or to see the movie.
For the rest of the article, head
here. In the same breath, Arvind Dilawar wrote
an excellent analysis questioning Collins’ claim of ignorance when it came to Battle Royale.
Truth is, there are differences between
Hunger Games and
Battle Royale that craft them into two different stories with two different goals. That said, the number of similarities are too striking to not take notice.
I find it interesting, if tangential, that both Collins and
Battle Royale readers cited reality TV as a source of influence on their works. In his foreword to the English edition of
Battle Royale, Max Allan Collins (author of
Road to Perdition and several movie novelizations, including The
Mummy, Air Force One, Waterworld, etc. and no relation that I could find to Suzanne Collins) admits that "over-the-top game shows in Japan certainly fed into the original source novel” and that his son Nate understood the film as “a wild, violent satire of reality TV."
[Suzanne]
Collins has also stated that she got the idea for Hunger Games by flipping channels on TV between a game show and war footage from Iraq.
I’m not sure what that similar association of reality TV and horrible violence and abuse of our youth is supposed to tell me, but I’m sure nothing that Piggy and the conch shell never taught me in fifth grade. We have the ability as humans to be violent, to abuse, to kill, and books like
Hunger Games and
Battle Royale recognize those fears in their fullest potential--to abuse and kill our children, those we are supposed to protect and aid. It turns that ability to hurt into a tendency and an addiction.
In that way,
Hunger Games and
Battle Royale have adjacent but distinct ends. The
Hunger Games series is about reinforcing humanity’s goodness and fighting for the collapse of an oppressive regime. In
Battle Royale, escape is the only option available. In fact, the one character (Shinji Mimura) who does actively fight back is killed. The book ends with Shuya and Noriko not just on the run from the Greater Republic but actually, literally running from cops who have recognized their faces. Ignoring the terrible sequel film, they don’t take down the government. They don’t overthrow a regime. The novel ends with the Greater Republic’s future and fate undecided but with oppression still handily in control. The
Hunger Games, perhaps in a teen fiction’s demand for conclusion and upholding of a moral world, does end this way: with the collapse of the system and the installation of something good that the main character helped create.
By contrast,
Battle Royale concludes on a darker note that reminds us that we as readers are living in our own oppressive regimes that deny the importance of freedom and life and rely on violence and control. Just like how the last lines of the manga inserts us as readers into the story as participants, so too does the book demand our social action:
Now, once again, ‘2 students remaining.’ But of course they’re part of you now.
In the end, I think the differences in tone and conclusion--arguably the most apparent differences between
Hunger Games and
Battle Royale--stem from the issue of target audience.
Hunger Games is a book about teens for teens.
Battle Royale might be about teenagers but is geared for adults. In
the same New York Times article, Collins admits, “I don’t write about adolescence. I write about war. For adolescents.” As a consequence of its audience,
Hunger Games dials down the issues of morality, violence, identity, and choice that
Battle Royale loads into every scene.
Clearly, this argument has been played out across the internet, but hopefully someone will read this and think before comparing the
Battle Royale film to the
Hunger Games novel series again. Because it’s painful, people. Read a book.
TL;DR: Analysis of the BOOKS, not the subsequent films. Similar premise is understandable and excusable; amount of similarities in character, plot, and detail are not.
