Battle Royale Volume 10 says farewell to beloved friends
With so much death and destruction in its pages, sometimes even a manga like Battle Royale needs to take a breath and let the reader catch up. Volume 10 of the manga gives us a chance to take stock of all the characters we’ve lost along the way, sometimes before we even got a chance to meet them.
For Shuuya, every death is a personal failure, and that sense of responsibility weighs heavily on him as he walks across the island.
Battle Royale Volume 10 is a long funeral
After the massacre at the end of Battle Royale Volume 9, it makes sense that we’d spend most of this volume taking stock of what had happened. We get our first glimpse of the outside world as Yuko’s parents wait beside the TV in the hopes that they will get some confirmation that their daughter is still alive. We see the faith in God that gives them the strength to face this uncertainty but also see the effect their faith has had on their daughter.
After Yuko effectively got all her closest friends killed, she tries to kill Shuuya to rid the world of what she calls the “demon boy” before realising her mistake just in time to kill herself by falling off the top of the lighthouse. The sequence, as gruesome as it is, features some of the most consistently good art thus far in the manga, with very careful attention paid to the anatomy and movement of the teenagers before Yuko’s untimely and violent end.
Shuuya then holds a short funeral for the girls and we can see the bravado and optimism that has carried him this far into The Program slipping. As he leaves to search out Shogo and Noriko, he revisits places we’ve seen earlier in the manga. The site of Hirono’s death at the bottom of the well. Where Yukiko and Yumiko met their end at the hands of Kiriyama while trying to rally the other students to the side of peace.
The death that seems to break Shuuya’s spirit, though, is finding Mimura’s corpse. He finds bits of his friend’s plan to destroy the school building and put an end to The Program once and for all, but can’t put it all together. This feels like the moment when Shuuya loses all hope and the narrative relies on seemingly divine intervention to restore it.
Shuuya discovers the last thing Mim wrote down. Scrawled onto the top of a car are the words “take the shot.” The same words that Mim told Shuuya during his near-death experience in the previous chapter. It feels a bit convenient considering the realism the rest of the manga tries to portray but it does give Shuuya some much-needed closure after his friend’s death.
Speaking of the divine, it feels like the writers have a bone to pick with religion and the way it manipulates people into doing horrendous things. On his way to meet with Noriko and Shogo, Shuuya meets Mizuho Inada, a young woman who seems broken by The Program. She can only point her gun and pull the trigger, continuing to do so when she is clearly out of bullets. Shuuya manages to escape, assuming that she is simply acting on instinct and that there is no humanity left in Mizuho left to save.
What we find out through a side panel is that she suffers from acute and specific hallucinations involving “Elder Gods”. She believes that she is their divine weapon sent to purge evil from the world and that she must have faith in their plan. Their “plan” seems to revolve around her taking her clothes off, scrawling strange symbols into the ground, and then being unceremoniously shot in the head by Kiriyama, who looks as confused as the rest of us.
I can’t see what purpose this served to the overall narrative at this point. The rest of the volume feels focused on reflection and steeling our heroes for the fight that is to come. Perhaps it is meant to shake our own faith in the same way that Yuko’s and Mizuho’s faith in God was shattered. Both placed their hopes for survival and justice in a higher power but neither were able to sense the death that was rapidly approaching them in the end.
Seeing Shuuya mourning his friends is interesting and heartbreaking, particularly his discovery of Mimura’s body. While we’ve known that Mim is dead since Volume 7, the separate plot strings of Battle Royale never brought him together with the other protagonists. Here we get to see Shuuya ponder the hopeless nature of The Program and are reminded, once again, that these are all classmates. They have a history together and formed friendships and alliances long before they set on the island, which makes the violence all the more baffling and upsetting.
There are only five volumes of Battle Royale left and just seven students left in The Program. There aren’t many plotlines that need to be resolved. A final confrontation against Kiriyama is clearly on the horizon, while we haven’t seen Mitsuko since the harrowing events of Volume 8. Sugimura still searches in vain for Kayoko, who is the last contestant we’ve not been properly introduced to.
While I’m thankful for the respite after the events of Volume 9, I do worry that there are a lot of pages left to fill and very few surviving students to fill them. Given Battle Royale’s penchant for flashbacks, I suspect we’ll see a lot of what the Class B kids were up to before they got picked for The Program. As Shuuya finally returns to Noriko and Shogo at the close of Volume 10, there is a sense that his resolve has been reaffirmed and he is ready to face whatever comes next.
The endgame to Battle Royale approaches but the most pressing question hasn’t been answered yet. If only one person is allowed to win, who among our heroes will be the one to make it off the island?
Battle Royale volume 9 can be tough to get hold of today, but if you want to try your luck with Amazon sellers, try here!
Join The Discussion
Rice Digital Discord
Rice Digital Twitter
Rice Digital Facebook
Or write us a letter for the Rice Digital Friday Letters Page by clicking here!
Disclosure: Some links in this article may be affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if you make a purchase after clicking on them. This is at no additional cost to you and helps support Rice Digital!
- Six of the best Stands in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure - June 2, 2023
- 4 of the best JRock tracks from May - June 1, 2023
- Hump Day Husbandos: Guts (Berserk) - May 31, 2023
