Battle Royale

Dear my loyal readers,

I too am a loyal reader. I am a loyal reader of many things: books, pamphlets, signs, warning labels, etc. Last night I picked up my brother's copy of Koushun Takami's "Battle Royal" translated by Yuji Oniki. Having just finished it about ten minutes ago, I can tell you is was really very good. No, maybe not my favorite book, but definately in the top three.

Despite being a translation and therefore automatically losing some of the linguistic references (for example the kana characters used to spell some of the names are discussed a few times, an aspect that looses meaning when the language switches to the English alphabet), I think Oniki did a wonderful job with this book. I rarely noticed problems with the language while I was reading and when I did, as I said, it was due to problems in translating meanings from one language to another and not really Oniki's fault. If you wrote "a stitch in time saves nine" in hiragana, I'm sure the rhyme would fail to carry over and therefore the alliteration would be lost.

As for Takami's plot and characters and the lot of that literary mumbo-jumbo, A+. I'm not given to finding deeper meanings or reading into text, but I totally dig books on the dangers of giving governments too much power. When government begins to dictate culture rather than being a facet of culture, things always seem to verge on the chaotic. At least they do in books. I think they do in real life too, but I can't really prove that right now. Anyways, just like "Farenheit 451," it is the epiphany of the characters that maybe the system they buy into isn't the good choice or, maybe more appropriately, that they have choice and their reactions are so interesting and exciting to me. It makes me feel like a cheerleader on the sidelines watching David decide he's gonna take on Goliath. Or maybe it's more like cheering for Saul? Wait, no, not really. It's like cheering for Nader during the 2004 presidential election.

To get back to my point, culture dictates government, but people dictate government. Actually culture dictates a lot of things, even science, but it shouldn't be used as an excuse for malicious or regretful actions. People will always be led by their own decisions and while cultural beliefs and norms may influence their decisions (i.e., church teachings, governmental laws, learned knowledge(To say there is learned knowledge implies there is innate knowledge. The existence of innate knowledge and it's breadth is a whole different bag of blog posts.)), their decisions in turn can help to transform culture.

Wow, I'm way off my original point now. "Battle Royale" is a great book. I'd love to learn kana so I can read it in the original language. I hear the movie is not so good and, having read the book combined with my natural disposition to dislike movies from books, I'd say read the book first. The build up to the final pages is incredible. That is all.