バトル・ロワイアル (Battle Royale)

Hwang Dong-hyuk has said he wrote the first version of the script in 2008 after reading Japanese survival game comics, naming Battle Royale among them, and that he wanted to make a Korean one. What he kept is the premise rather than the tone:

• A closed arena, a fixed cast, and a rule that only one of them leaves
• Rounds announced by an unseen authority, with the running count of the dead as the structure
• An ordinary social relationship reused as the alliances: classmates there, debtors here

The difference is who runs it. Takami's is a state programme, Hwang's is a private entertainment sold to the rich, and that swap is the whole of the show's argument.

Takami has named Golding's novel as a starting point, and the book is built as a reply to it. Golding puts schoolboys on an island and lets the violence arrive from inside them; Takami puts a class on an island and has the state issue the weapons and the rules, which moves the argument from human nature to what a government can make people do. Same island, same children, opposite verdict.

The same ancestor, reaching Japan by a different route. Connell's island, its time limit, and its rule that survival is the only victory condition are the engine Takami runs on a class of fifteen-year-olds. What Takami adds is that the hunters are each other rather than a host: there is no Zaroff on the island, only the government that put them there and a map of expanding forbidden zones to keep them moving.

Takami has identified King's novel as his favorite Stephen King novel and said it influenced his depiction of the totalitarian government and its deadly competition.

Takami grew up during the student protests and clashes with police in Japan, which informed the authoritarian political environment of Battle Royale.