The most Punk Rock novel I’ve ever read.
 Battle Royale is the next step after Lord of the Flies; after you examine the cruelty of humans in a vacuum, you must examine our cruelty in the systems we’ve created ourselves.  It’s so incredibly difficult to fix a broken system when people insist on participating in it, and “play the game.”
It was difficult to keep up with so many names, but that can be attributed to me being a westerner not accustomed to Japanese names.  Even so the author did a great job with context clues, so even if you didn’t remember a character immediately he helps you with what they did previously.  
What really blew me away was how effortlessly the narrative voice changed; we got a perfect psychological imprint of each character as they became the focus.