(Episode Two: in which our manga dabbler accompanies the ninth grade class of Shiro Iwa Junior High to an island getaway.)

Sometime back in the 1980's, during the heyday of Freddy Kreuger and Jason Voorhees, I remember attending a Freddy flick on a weekend matinee. I must've been going to the second show because I caught sight of a family on its way out of the theatre: father, mother and a boy who couldn't have been older than six. What the hell are you doing taking a kid to this picture? I thought about fifteen seconds after the family had stepped out into the sunlight. (Mister Quick Reaction Time, that's me!) When I was that age, the mere sight of a skull-and-crossbones on a pirate flag was enough to get me hiding behind the chair.

Standing at the bookracks - where All Age titles and Mature commingle freely - perusing the manga graphic novels, I was reminded of that moviegoing family. By now that boy is old enough to have kids of his own: do you think they read manga? Or read at all? I wonder.

The shrinkwrapped plastic covering the first volume of Koushun Takami & Masayuki Taguchi's Battle Royale (Tokyopop) contains a stark Parental Advisory - and it needs one. If I were to compare ratings systems, I'd say the book was a solid "R," for both graphic violence and a disturbing panel depicting rape. Tokyopop recommends an Age "18+" readership, though as with that Nightmare on Elm Street flick, you can bet that there are idiot parents out there, letting their kids read this stuff.

The cinema comparison is apt, since I'm told that this series also exists as a movie (and an actual prose novel). As I got into the first volume, I kept flashing on two filmic influences, The Tenth Victim and Mario Bava's Bay of Blood. The first, a 60's s-f film based on a story by Robert Sheckley, is easily explicated: it served as a source for Richard Bachman's The Running Man. The second's a bit more obscure: Bay of Blood (which was also released in this country under the much more evocative title, Twitch of the Death Nerve) is a darkly comic body count flick that features a large cast of difficult-to-distinguish characters bumping each other off. It served as an influence on the noticeably inferior Friday the 13th (some of that pic's most striking deaths were directly stolen from Bava) and has been called the first "real" slasher film (it was originally released in 1971).