battle royale

The summer of 2004 was a dismal one. I spent most of it on my friends couch. I was unemployed and had just had my visa to live in hungary revoked, forcing me to leave the country and move to paris, where (I was told at the time) I should work while killing time over the course next year, waiting to be allowed to begin a doctorate in another country. Had all of this happened just a few months later, it would have been unnecessary, hungary would have been in the EU and I wouldn't have needed the visa anyway to stay on there.
But things happened the way they did and I ended up unemployed and in paris.
It was a bad summer, but it would have been a lot worse without the gloomily entertaining presence of Laurent.
Laurent actually was employed, he just barely ever bothered to show up at his workplace. He got away with this as apparently he was a genius in some aspect of computer engineering. Since periodically his company would fly him to 5 star hotels in odd places (gabon, chad) I guess he must indeed have been bright.
He was also depressive, yet amusing in an off beat way. He liked gory asian films where lots of people get killed. So the best parts of that summer were spent on the couch watching strange Japanese, Chinese and Korean murder films with Laurent. I eventually got a job and he followed some girl (kiki? Miki? Niki?) off to gabon, I haven't seen him since. But then this weekend I was doing some returns at the bookshop, when the barcodes on my clipboard sent me into the manga section, which I normally avoid due to the unpleasant body odour that tends to accompany the teenage boys to that part of the shop.
There, going through the mangas to find the right ISBNs, my eyes passed over a copy of Battle Royale, one of the first of the many gory asian flicks I watched with Laurent.
If you don't know it, battle royale is a gory Japanese modern-day lord of the flies. Japan has turned into a police state, known as the Republic of Greater East Asia. In this sick society, obsessed by reality TV, a show called The Programme has developed. Supposedly started as a military research project, The Program is a means of terrorising the population, of creating such paranoia as to make organised insurgency impossible. According to the rules, every year since 1947, fifty 3rd year junior high school (14-15 years old) classes are isolated, and the students required to fight to the death until one student remains. Their movements are restricted and monitored by metal collars around their necks which contain tracking and listening devices; if any student should attempt to escape The Program, or enter declared "danger zones", a bomb will be detonated in the collar, killing the wearer. If the students refuse to participate, they will all be killed simultaneously. As you might imagine, a brave protagonist steps forward to attempt to destroy the perverted and twisted system.
So, anyway, I bought the manga, took it home and started reading. The quality of the images astonishes me, and the story is so dark you cant help get pulled in. to my surprise (I am not normally a manga reader) I found myself this afternoon placing an order on amazon for the next ones in the series. I already know how it all ends, but I want to read/see it again for myself in print.