Joe Lamantia.com

Appar­ently, if you wait long enough, all cir­cles close them­selves. Case in point: I’ve always thought Golding’s Lord of the Flies nicely cap­tures sev­eral of the less appe­tiz­ing aspects of the typ­i­cal amer­i­can junior high school expe­ri­ence.
And I’ve always thought that much of the real­ity tele­vi­sion pro­gram­ming that was all the rage for a while and now seems to be pass­ing like a Japan­ese fad, is sim­ply a chance for peo­ple on all sides of the screen to revisit their own junior high school expe­ri­ences once again — albeit with a full com­ple­ment of adult sec­ondary sex­ual char­ac­ter­is­tics. When I do chan­nel surf past the lat­est incar­na­tion of the pri­mal vote-the-jerk-off-the-island epic, Golding’s book always comes to mind.
Then a friend rec­om­mended Koushun Takami’s Bat­tle Royale as recre­ational read­ing. Bat­tle Royale is, as Tom Waits says, ‘big in Japan’ — it being a Japan­ese treat­ment of some of the same themes that drive Lord of the Flies.
The edi­to­r­ial review from Ama­zon reads:
“As part of a ruth­less pro­gram by the total­i­tar­ian gov­ern­ment, ninth-grade stu­dents are taken to a small iso­lated island with a map, food, and var­i­ous weapons. Forced to wear spe­cial col­lars that explode when they break a rule, they must fight each other for three days until only one “win­ner” remains. The elim­i­na­tion con­test becomes the ulti­mate in must-see real­ity tele­vi­sion.“
And so the cir­cle closes…