Next card. Ah.
Who is your favorite pro wrestler of all time and why?
I wonder if the typical reader will understand this, although I believe Mitsuharu Misawa's group, Pro Wrestling NOAH, sometimes appears over there in America. I may be digressing here, but of the wrestlers whose names I listed in the opening of this book, at least three have already passed away. In America, Road Warrior Hawk and Davey Boy Smith. Both of them seemed wrapped in armor made of muscle, but I think their sudden, premature deaths (both in their forties) were related to that very muscle. When Ben Johnson's world record for the hundred-meter dash was rescinded, I foolishly told my friends, "If only he had doped up more, he could have run it in five seconds!" The world of pro wrestling has similar stories. As a pro wrestling fan, I will say up front they didn't need to go that far for us, but they did, and in so doing, they were an inspiration to us in our youth. For that I thank them from the bottom of my heart. In Japan, Shinya Hashimoto left us, also at a young age. I hope all three are in a better place.
Back to the question. It's very hard to narrow it down to just one person, but I'll start out with one Japanese wrestler, Jumbo Tsuruta, and an American, Stan Hansen. I think the appeal of pro wrestling can be summed up, as Giant Baba once said, as "big, strong men charging at each other." Tsuruta had a substantially large build for a Japanese man. As an amateur wrestler, he competed in the Olympics, and his execution of Lou Thesz's back drop was beautiful. (He came down with hepatitis and died due to complications in transplant surgery.) He was typically calm, and his face was free of maliciousness even inside the ring.
I'm sure some of you know who Stan Hansen is, but when he entered the ring in All Japan Pro Wrestling, what a shock it was! All sorts of foreign wrestlers have done it since then, but watching him devastate one Japanese wrestler after another—even my idol, Asura Hara—with his lariat was really the biggest shock. (Had I seen the Road Warriors before Hansen, my reaction might have been different.) On top of that, he had a rugged, Western appearance that remained somehow charming, no matter how tough his performances in the ring.
While it's hard to narrow down the wrestlers, choosing an entrance theme is easy. No matter what anyone says, the best one was the song used by Dynamite Kid and Davey Boy Smith, Tom Scott's "Car Wars."
When I was making a movie in high school, I really wanted to use this song for a fight scene between the protagonist, his partner, and some evildoers, but I didn't know who recorded the song. Eventually, I had to make do with something else...while in tears. (I guess I should have just called All Japan Pro Wrestling.) (Well, at that time, I was still starting out, and I didn't have any connection with the world of superstar wrestlers.) For the opening theme, I used the theme from Clint Eastwood's The Gauntlet, "Bleak Bad Big City Dawn." (Of course, without permission. But at least it was a nonprofit "educational work.") I didn't own a record of it and instead used an aircheck of an FM radio broadcast.
Hmmm, what's the next question? Ahh.
Did you do a lot of weapons research for the book, or were you a gun enthusiast in your early life?
A lot of people seem to wonder about that. To reveal my secrets, the only resources I had on hand were a few issues of gun magazines I purchased from a secondhand bookstore. I didn't have any money at the time. I really don't know that much about firearms, and just about the only thing I planned out ahead of time was to make most of the weapons nine millimeter to make ammo supply convenient. (That's why Kiriyama's Ingram isn't a 45mm like normal, but a 9mm model instead.) Due to my lack of research material, after the book was published I received many corrections from gun enthusiasts, such as, "That kind of gun doesn't exist. That's the part number from a model gun."
Anyway, I only used weapons that appeared in my magazines or that I already knew about beforehand. But how much could I have known? Consider that in Japan the average citizen cannot, aside from some hunting rifles, possess any firearms.
I'm a fan of an anime series called Lupin III, Anyone who watched that show regularly (and really, any Japanese person who isn't aware of Lupin III must live in a hole in the ground) probably knows that
Lupin's gun is a Walther P38, and anyone who calls himself a fan had better know that his partner Jigen carries a Smith and Wesson Ml9. (In Japan, Lupin and Jigen have such a strong cultural resonance that I decided not to include those weapons in this book.) The creators of that anime didn't cut corners when it came to these details, and their fans took notice. But that's not where all of my firearms knowledge comes from. To explain further, I need to tell you a little more about my history as a reader.
The "Seat of Honor" I mentioned earlier was actually dominated by Japanese authors, such as Haruka Takachiho (space opera), Toshihiko Yahagi (Japan's finest writer of Chandler-esque hard-boiled fiction, who also wrote the story for one of Katsuhiro Otomo's manga), Saeko Himuro (girls' novels!), Hideyuki Kikuchi (sci-fi action, horror, fantasy, and to this day a master of the impartial viewpoint), Baku Yumemakura (fantasy, action, etc.), and ... Haruhiko Oyabu (let's just say he's a type of picaresque/romance novelist). (There's also Haruki Murakami, but his books were in hardcover, and there wasn't room in the bookcase for them. The "Seat of Honor" was only big enough for paperbacks.)
Before I entered middle school, I had read only a few sci-fi and mystery novels off and on. (I had hardly any interest in "literature." The truth is, I still don't have much.) I don't know what caused it, and it could have been as simple as the word "detective" being in the title of the first book I grabbed, but for a part of middle school I started reading a large number of books written by Haruhiko Oyabu, though I'm sure I've only read a fraction of his large body of work. I'm wandering off topic here, but he was also from the same prefecture as me, Kagawa, in Shikoku (just think of it as the fourth largest island in Japan). That may have been another reason for me to read so many of his books. Lion Avenue, a street in Takamatsu City, Kagawa, appears in one of his works as "L Avenue." (Takamatsu City also served as the setting for Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, but, unfortunately, no specific street names are mentioned.)
His literary style could be summed up by a single word: violence.
(Albeit a violence of a slightly different tenor as discussed by Kinji Fukasaku.) He paid an extraordinary amount of attention to guns and cars, and when a weapon or a vehicle enters the story, his descriptions go on and on. Incidentally, he got arrested for illegal possession of firearms . . . Anyway, I later stumbled across the author I still revere most, Hideyuki Kikuchi, and while he didn't go as far as Oyabu, he too gave detailed descriptions of firearms (not so much with cars, however). If I were to follow the proper tradition of the novels I had read, I couldn't get by with describing firearms as just a "revolver" or "automatic." The reason Sakamochi's gun at the end of the story doesn't have a name is because I felt like it should be a domestic, official military firearm, and I didn't want to disrupt the story with a long description of his weapon's name.
By the way, Oyabu was still alive when I worked at the newspaper and was once hired as a judge for the newspaper's literature award. I didn't work in the entertainment section, and I didn't have a chance to meet or even speak on the phone with him, but this man, who sent out violent story after violent story (Monsters Must Die, The Long Hot Vendetta, The Cursed Lugar P08) out into the world, was here judging harmless novels about family relationships in the countryside and such. Don't you find it heartwarming?
That's not enough of an explanation for you? Here's another. Since weapons were going to be appearing left and right, if I kept saying "revolver" and "automatic," it would get boring. Also, if I didn't even know how many bullets a gun could fire, I couldn't feel comfortable writing about it. Still not good enough? All right, to be perfectly honest, I myself don't see firearms as mere tools. I have a sort of nostalgia for them, or possibly even a childlike affection for them, let's say. I've already talked about my connection to Westerns and detective novels, but can you think of a Western wh
ere there weren't any guns? Or a samurai without a sword? Or even Bruce Lee without nunchaku? Even now, I bet that if you went to an outdoor booth at a Japanese festival, you could buy a flimsy cap gun or a plastic katana. (That reminds me, Oyabu wrote a particularly intense story, Red Shuriken, about a samurai that used both a katana and a gun.) Or nunchucks . . . well, I doubt they sell those, but regardless, boys like those kinds of things! (Well, that's politically incorrect.) (I think literary prize judges hate me because I talk about such vital matters so flippantly.)
While I'm at it, here's a little-known story about the manga version of Battle Royale. When the manga was first serialized in the magazine Young Champion, a "hanging ad" campaign was launched, a relatively rare treatment for a manga. Hanging ads are small posters hung from the ceilings of trains. The manga's creator, Masayuki Taguchi, came up with an image of Shuya Nanahara and the rest holding guns, but the train company's advertisement oversight committee rejected it, and we eventually settled on a lineup of the characters' faces in various states of anger, joy, grief, and so on. It's the design used on the jacket of the recent Japanese hardcover edition. (That's a blatant advertisement for you.)
This made Mr. Taguchi angry, since no one seems to mind if the aforementioned Lupin or James Bond carry guns. For some reason, those guns aren't seen as tools used to kill people, but rather as icons representing those characters. But if a child in a school uniform has a gun, that means trouble. I suppose. Setting aside the validity of that reasoning, it's not incorrect to think that the pistols carried by Lupin or Bond have become iconic. Those two don't jump out of the TV or movie screen and start killing people in real life. And if a kid like me starts to grow fond of those icons . . . well, in the end, the weapons manufacturers might make some money. Didn't Spenser and Rachel Wallace talk about this too?
And yet my somewhat metaphysical (?) support is restricted to handheld weapons only. I am not at all interested in tanks or missiles. In Commando, Governor Schwarzenegger's walking-arms-market amount of ordinance barely makes the cut. (I can hardly say that with a straight face.) Whatever sort of meaning it has for me comes from him being on foot. I have to think that if he climbed into a tank, he would have definitely lost something. (Stagecoaches aside, would Wyatt Earp ride a tank? Would Doc Holliday push the button to launch a nuclear missile?) And just to make sure all the bases are covered, I don't carry firearms in my own hands. After all, it's against the law. My apologies if I disappoint. I don't have nunchucks either. Please purchase them from a specialty store.
Well, let's look at the next card. Whoa, another tough one. . . .
You worked for a newspaper before becoming a novelist; do you see the media as complicit in the crimes of governments in the real world the way they are in the world of Battle Royale2.
Um, please don't hope for a particularly journalistic opinion from me. I was definitely not a first-rate journalist. My opinion just as a regular person? Well, it's relatively pessimistic. But Japan isn't a totalitarian country or one ruled by a single party. It's a country of free speech, right? And part of that freedom covers information closely related to current governmental policies. Don't you think there are often things that just seem dumb, even malicious? To give a relatively nonviolent example, yes, with the current worldwide recession spurred on by America's sub-prime loan crisis, Americans have stopped buying as many things (oh, thank you to everyone who purchased this book), and many companies here in Japan, starting with Sony and Toyota, have suffered serious losses. People can now explain that several loans bundled into unidentifiable securities spurred on distrust and then a collapse, or that it started because of dangerous loans that relied on real estate prices continuing to rise in perpetuity, and it's not that hard to understand.
But did even a single media institution in the entire world make a campaign to warn us of it ahead of time? It seems that some experts were trying to point out the problem, but when they did, there were other economists who found personal success by not pointing it out. The media has yet to seriously take on these economists. In the end, the only defense I can propose is not believing everything the media tell us and promoting critical thought and "media literacy" in early education. The members of the media, or the government, or Congress, or the judiciary, aren't all that smart, sadly enough. Oh, and neither are authors.
While I'm on the subject, please allow me to give a more major example. Whether we're talking about the emergence of the Nazi party or the national system of our "glorious" (I'm not patriotic enough to say that without quotes) Japan some sixty years ago, there was freedom of speech before those politicians took power. As a child, my mother lived through Japan's final war (not counting oddities like the War on Terror), and when anyone goes on TV or the like and says, "The citizens supported that war because they were drunk from our last victory," she gets indignant and responds, "They're wrong. We were against the war, but we just couldn't say it."
The problem isn't with any individual leader—and of course some politicians, members of the military, and even regular citizens had their own reasons to want a war—but I want you to understand how awful it feels to be caught up in an atmosphere of massive social change. Well, you all know about McCarthyism, so I'm preaching to the choir. And when the national system is transformed like that, the media can be very fragile.
Okay, on to the next.
You also have a degree in literature, but Battle Royale is a bloody, pulp-fiction thrill ride. Have you ever heard from your old teachers and classmates?
While it's true that I was in the literature department in college, my major was in aesthetics of the fine arts, or to be more precise, I only studied aesthetics in philosophy (Kant, Hegel, etc.) and design. I learned not by creating, but by looking. Even worse, I didn't have many colleagues. I wasn't a very good student, and I haven't spoken to my professors since, but my friends enjoyed my work. As for why I majored in aesthetics, I thought it would be cool to write "Majored in Aesthetics" on my bio. That's all! (My professors never knew what to say when I told them that.) The dream came true when I published my novel, but looking back, I should have been a good student and studied Chandler in the English literature department. I'm not sure if it was just youthful indiscretion, but that's the kind of fool I am.
All right, next. I feel like I'm starting to hear Dylan's voice.
If you type the words "battle royale" into Google.com, your book and movie dominate the listings, beating out the classic pro wrestling battle royal-type match and even the famous battle royal scene from Ralph Ellison's classic novel The Invisible Man. How does it feel to have your creation be so famous?
I don't personally search for the name of this book or my own name in Google. I used to do so, happily, when the book first came out in Japan, but I've since stopped. Of course, I like it when people enjoy my work, but there will always be some who say negative things, and when I see something like that, I can't shake it off. I'm easily hurt. Partly for that reason, I don't have much of a sense that my work is famous.
By the way, I have a story about looking up phrases. At first, I had decided to make the English name of this book Battle Royal. But, when I was talking to a friend (not the one who set his weapon down) and explained the idea to him and asked what he thought of the "pro wrestling term, written in English, Battle Royal" as the title. He said, "You mean Battle Royale?" with what was probably a French accent. My friend, who didn't know a single thing about pro wrestling, was probably making an association with cafe royale, but based on that conversation, I decided to make the Japanese title in the French style, and I kept the "e" on the end for the English title. That reminds me, a friend, upon reading a rough draft of the novel, critiqued, "Isn't that title too gaudy for this kind of content?" But I intended the title to be silly. I hope all of you in English-speaking countries will pronounce it through your noses.
Incidentally, Google, I use your search engine day after day (I even used it while writing this afterword), but I don't know what I t
hink about you scanning every book in the world. It's not just a matter of copyright. I think that authors have the right to control access to their work, at least while they are still alive. But you probably don't understand.
All right, well, next, is this the last one? Yes.
What will it take for Hollywood to remake the movie with American actors? Would you like to see such a remake?
Having something I wrote turned into another form of media makes my heart dance. But I have to take the opportunity to admit that I'm not as enthralled with Hollywood as I used to be in the '80s. (Although I use an Apple computer, ride a Dahon bicycle, and am fairly Americanized.) The following is business talk, but I am not currently in discussions to make an American version of the movie. And if it does come about, I have already decided who I want to work with. Therefore, people in the industry, please stop asking me. No, really.
Well, it's time to wrap up. I did have one more request from VIZ. I've been asked to write a new episode for this novel. Of course, I have several ideas that never made it into the book ten years ago. In particular, I had a scene above the lighthouse where the girls are holed up. Yukie Utsumi and Haruka Tanizawa have a conversation when they are changing guard shifts. Yukie Utsumi's father was a soldier in the Special Defense Army... and something like that. The two of them probably talked about boys and politics. But I can't write it anymore. This novel is incomplete in many ways, but if I start trying to add to it now, it may lose something special by removing those very deficiencies. So instead, let me show you a part that got cut out in revisions that I particularly like:
Noriko wasn't in the literary club, and Shuya first became aware of her talent when they shared the same class in second year. Ms. Okazaki, their Japanese teacher, instructed the students to write
Battle Royale (Remastered) Page 58