… that manifests a desire to be read after midnight once everyone else is asleep.
Battle Royale, now that I’m roughly a third into it, is nauseating, as one would expect, not so much for blood or gore but for the story concept of sending middle school students into an arena to kill each other, all in attempts to control the population. (Even now, I wonder how The Hunger Games managed not to be so sickening.) As far as writing goes, it’s neither brilliant nor terrible prose; it’s sparsely and matter-of-factly written; and it works because a more elaborate or heavy-handed prose style would detract from the other values of the book, particularly as a portrait of humanity’s instinct to survive. If Battle Royale is anything, it’s an excellent study of the human condition in an oppressed and conformative society (arguably allegorical to Japanese society and educational system), and the years have alienated me enough from the film* that I can appreciate the book fully for its own merit instead of drawing comparisons in my head.
Now. If only I would read this during the day and not after midnight becase I literally had to put a thirty-minute buffer of You Are Beautiful between reading Battle Royale and going to sleep in attempts to keep the bloody nightmares at bay. Lucky for me, however, I was so exhausted that my dreams are but hazy feelings that won’t be retrieved from the peripheries of my memories.
(*As far as I remember, the film was good, though I will not be watching it again any time soon to confirm my dusty memories.)