THIS IS INCREDIBLE AHHHHH

It lost me in the middle a bit, but that introduction and conclusion were so brilliantly constructed. The menace was so palpable. And the characters, alive!

During the middle part, Takami introduced most of the students, something that could be daunting to write and not rewarding in the end. It did get a bit repetitive and predictable every time a new student was presented because you'd know that they'd be dead by the end of the chapter. But I'd have to commend Takami because each student had their own lives and personalities, and were not treated as merely numbers and side characters that would forward the story to its eventual and inevitable end or serve as a respite from the leads. In fact, some of the kids really left a mark. My personal favorites among them were Takako Chigusa and Sho Tsukioka.

I wasn't feeling Shuya and Noriko as the main leads right at the beginning and I only somewhat tolerated them coming at the ending, but I did grow to like them! I'd still like read more about Shinji Mimura and Hiroki Sugimura whose arcs were brilliantly written. But I guess it's safe to say that Takami's best constructed character here was Shogo Kawada. I'm not going to spoil anything by talking about Shogo, so let's leave it at that.

The game itself was relentlessly violent and gore. The author didn't shy away from giving the whole picture, along with its dirty, disgusting bits. And his political critique was equally scathing and explicit. He didn't sanitize and bow down to anything. And this made the novel much more revolting, effective, and memorable.

That ending came like Shogo's rushing truck across the island. It was the cherry on top of this really, really good book.

At first I thought that Koushun Takami's Battle Royale simply had the advantage of being one of the first of its kind (it's not lost in me that this is called a somewhat of a  retelling of Golding's The Lord of the Flies), but it's more than that: this was also an intelligent, well-constructed, and amazing piece of work.