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  Battle Royal (1)Battle Royal (1) Import live action / POP culture films on DVDAudio: JapaneseSubtitle: Eng/Chin
Battle Royale takes place in an alternate timeline or future where Japan is a police state known as the Republic of Greater East Asia. (The book specifies the year as 1997, suggesting an alternate present. The setting is a place known as Greater East Asia, in the Japanese district of the country.) Once a year, randomly selected classes of middle-school students are forced to take arms against one another until only one student in each class remains. The program was created, supposedly, as a form of military research, though the outcome of each battle is publicized on local television. Late in the book, character Shogo Kawada discovers that the program is not an experiment at all, but a means of terrorizing the population. After seeing such atrocities, the people will become paranoid and divided, preventing an organized rebellion.
Under the guise of a "study trip", the students are corralled onto a bus and gassed, only to awaken on an evacuated island with metal collars around their necks. After being briefed about their role in the program, the students are issued bags that carry bread, water, a map, a compass, a flashlight, a watch and a weapon or a tool and sent out one by one, with two minutes separating each departure. While most of the students receive guns and knives, some students acquire useless items like boomerangs and dartboards. In some cases, instead of a weapon the student receives a tool; Hiroki Sugimura finds a radar that tracks nearby students and Toshinori Oda receives a bulletproof vest.
To make sure that the students obey the rules and kill each other, the metal collars around their necks track their positions, and will explode if they enter a “Forbidden Zone” or attempt to remove the collars. The Forbidden Zones are randomly chosen areas of the map that increase in number from hour to hour, re-sculpting and shrinking the battlefield and forcing the students to move around. The collars also transmit sound back to the organizers of the game, allowing them to hear the students' conversations, root out escape plans, and log their activities.
The students are also given a time limit. If twenty-four hours pass without a single death, then all of the collars will be detonated simultaneously and there will be no winner. It is later mentioned by Shogo Kawada that only 0.5% of Programs end in this fashion.
In the end, only four students are remaining: Shuya Nanahara, Noriko Nakagawa, Shogo Kawada, and antagonist Kazuo Kiriyama. There is a car chase and shootout between the three main characters and Kazuo. They win, but two of their group must die before the game can end. Several plot twists ensue before the book ends with two of the three alive and on the run.
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