Dystopias: Battle Royale vs The Hunger Games

Recently I've been getting into translations of popular Japanese novels. The first one I read was a not-so-small popular Japanese book that has very much to do with young adults and youth in general, that book is Battle Royale by Koushun Takami. It is one of the bestselling books in Japan. I'm sure everyone knows by now I have a great love of Dystopias and Battle Royale was one of the things that propelled that love, after Ayn Rand's Anthem. I originally first saw the Japanese movie version and then, upon finding out it was a novel first, quickly added it to my to-read list. However, Battle Royale is quite a hefty 500+ page book and it wasn't until this past December, before going on a trip, that I picked it up as airplane fodder. Even then, the book was a complicated one to read and I took me more than a month to finish it. Ever since I finish reading, fellow YA readers have been asking me a lot about how it compares with The Hunger Games, since Hunger Games seems to hold a lot of similarities with it. So here are my thoughts on that comparison.

First off, the plot itself is quite similar in a few points. One, both books deal with the youth of their respective Dystopian societies and the ways the governments find to control them and, by extension, control the masses. The governments in both books know that the best way to control their society is by controling the children and youths first. Why? Well, because by controlling their children they can control the adults; law of nature, the adults will do anything to protect their young. Second, both plots involve a sort of game to-the-death as the method of control. In Battle Royale the setting is very bare and not as technologically advance, even though it is set in the future. The children are sent to an island and given weapons and supplies. In Hunger Games the children also battle it out to-the-death, but in a very different and technologically advance arena where they must fight for weapons and win viewers to get food. This similarities are pretty major and what make people think that The Hunger Games is the Western descendant of Battle Royale. Though Battle Royale may have been an influence, I think these two books couldn't be more different in various other aspects.

Now to the differences. First off, we have the ages of the children. In Battle Royale we have older youths, teenagers, in Junior High while in The Hunger Games we have children of varying ages from very young, like Rue who is 12 years old, to teens. The age difference has a very defined effect on the readers, we will not react the same to 12 year old Rue's death as we will to that of an older teenager in Battle Royale. This also leads to another point of Battle Royale. The book has 42 classmates as it's main cast. That means there are 42 very different and complex names to memorize and 42 different stories to tell. Hunger Games on the other hand, has about a half of the characters that Battle Royale does. This of course causes another connection problem, we probably will not relate to as many character in Battle Royale as we will in Hunger Games because there is simply no space to be able to flesh out 42 characters completely. These two main problems are what make both books different when it comes to a connection between readers and characters, and consequently the storyline.

Finally we have the issue of violence in the books. Battle Royale contains excesive amounts of violence, gore, sexual content and explicit description of various forms of death and murder. It was even hard for me to get through some of the scenes without cringing and turning away. The Hunger Games, on the other hand contains, violence but nowhere near as explicit. Though it was critized a lot for it's violence for a YA novel, Battle Royale takes it to another extreme. I believe this is the point where both books differ the most. Some people decide to read Battle Royale because they believe it will be like Hunger Games, but the truth is Battle Royale has quite extreme content.

In conclusion we can see that, though both books share similarities when it comes to plot and concept, the truth is they are two very different book from two very different genres: one belongs to the sci-fi/horror genre while the other belongs to the YA genre. That doesn't mean, however, that either of the books is worse than the other. Heck, the first reason I picked up Hunger Games was because I had seen Battle Royale before. There is obviously some influence presence. But they are entirely different things and it would be unfair to compare them in deeper aspects. They both remain wonderful works of literature in their own rights and are amazing and intuitive reads.