Battle Royale’s final chapter comes to a close
We finally made it. All the bodies are counted, and the Program’s final curtain is closed. Battle Royale is over, and we’re left in a world where we must make sense of its message. It is a complicated message but an important one. Even if sometimes it gets a little muddled and hard to listen to along the way.
Battle Royale’s bittersweet conclusion
Volume 14 of Battle Royale focuses on Kawada, Shuuya, and Noriko’s seemingly endless attempts to escape Kiriyama. The unfeeling maniac has been shot, blown up, and had a knife thrust into his eye – yet he still pursues them, driven by some sort of animal instinct to survive. Which is a fitting way for his story to come to an end.
It always had to be Shuuya that took the final shot against Kiriyama, a task he is understandably hesitant to undertake. Our boy has a kind heart, after all. It isn’t until Noriko is put in danger that Shuuya takes the shot we’ve been waiting for him to take since it became clear his collision course with Kiriyama was the only ending that made narrative sense. With a bullet through the throat, the seemingly indestructible Kiriyama’s story comes to an end.
As the main antagonist of much of Battle Royale, you’d expect Kiriyama to get a more dramatic send-off or a hint of redemption. Instead, he gets perhaps the worst punishment of anyone in the manga; the final bullet that takes his life somehow – and this bit isn’t explained in the slightest – returns his ability to feel emotions. In the closing seconds of his life, Kiriyama is given the full weight of his actions to bear.
We’re not left to linger on that thought for long. After all, our three heroes still have the seemingly impossible task of getting off the island. The collars they wear, which can monitor their every word and will explode if they set foot off the island, are the biggest barrier, but Kawada claims that he has a way around that. What plays out is the most transparent act of betrayal in Battle Royale’s 15 volumes, with Kawada seemingly turning on the other two to claim his winner’s spot for the second time.
I’m not convinced the reader is ever meant to believe that is what happens in the final chapters of the manga, but it somehow convinces the government official behind The Program. The bodies of the students are rounded up, Kawada is put on a heavily armed gunboat, and we see the final stages of his plan unfold. Shuuya and Noriko, who are not dead, board the deck and manage to neutralise the soldiers there while Kawada takes out the people behind The Program.
It all makes sense only in a narrative sense. Kadawa’s goal was never survival; he sought to deal a blow to The Program itself and to make those behind it feel vulnerable. As he finally succumbs to an injury he has been carrying for an unknown amount of time, he clearly has no regrets. This is more than we can say about Shuuya and Noriko, who are left to carry the burden of survival as the last of their friends dies in front of them.
If Kawada thought depriving The Program of a winner would impact it in some way, he was deeply wrong. In an eerily accurate portrayal of how media is able to control the narrative, Shuuya and Noriko are branded traitors and terrorists, forced to make their goodbyes to their few remaining family members before fleeing Japan with the help of sympathetic dissidents.
Despite the setbacks that Kawada gave it, The Program continues, with new students likely to be thrown into the same situation all over again. I wish the Battle Royale manga had spent a touch more time exploring the dangers of a news industry that only parrots the words of a corrupt and fascist state. People can’t rely on the media to protect them when the media is just another branch of the government.
The final pages are as melancholy and bittersweet as the 15 volumes that came before. Shuuya and Noriko make it to America but never truly recover from their experiences. Shuuya, for all the joy and faith he embodied as The Program played out, can’t even bring himself to put his feelings for Noriko into words and Noriko finds a way to accept it.
After all, they only have each other now. No one alive can truly understand their pain and trauma. As is repeated throughout the Battle Royale manga, no one truly survives The Program. Shuuya and Noriko are still alive, but the reader isn’t sure if they are truly living. This ending is many things but it is not a happy one.
As difficult as Battle Royale has been to read at times, I am glad that I did. Between the graphic imagery of giant penis monsters and the harsh messaging about the way that we as people can be absolute bastards to each other, there is a story about the importance of faith. Not in a higher power, which won’t come swooping to our aid in our time of need, but in ourselves. That faith can be enough to keep us moving forward even when everything seems hopeless.
It is also a story of trauma being both a driving force for someone’s actions and a weight that drags them down once they finally stop moving. There is no joy in their victory, which is understandable. They carry with them the dashed hopes and dreams of every student killed on the island and that is a terrible burden to bear. With surprising subtlety and skill, Battle Royale offers the most touching and realistic portrayal of PTSD I have seen in a long time.
The Battle Royale manga is pretty hard to come by these days, with the publisher out of business and the rights up in the air for years now, but you can occasionally find the volumes for sale on Amazon.
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