Small, stylized girls with disproportionately large busts and eyes gaze vulnerably at the reader on almost every page. Proponents of “Lolita fashion” delight in tea parties, parasols, and lace, while moë, or “budding,” a term that refers especially to the fresh, nubile quality of pre-adolescent girls, crops up again and again in manga and anime. Since the 1980s, kawaii, a cult of cuteness, has overtaken the nation, interring waify girls in layer-cakes of frills. Why has this particular brand of violence, half cupcake and half decapitation, so thoroughly captured the Japanese imagination? In part it is because there are so many delectable Japanese cupcakes to corrupt. A load of laundry, a batch of cupcakes-followed by a child murder, a matricide, and an attempted school bombing, all with a cherry on top. Readers of Battle Royale occupy a parallel position, simultaneously savoring and shuddering at the work’s brutality. And in Battle Royale, Koushun Takami’s wildly popular 1996 prototype of The Hunger Games, school children are forced to participate in a morbid game in which they kill each other off while fascinated spectators watch the proceedings on television. It recalls “Toddler Hunting,” Taeko Kono’s celebrated 1962 story, in which the female protagonist showers affection on little boys-and fantasizes in private about beating them until their innards spill out. Confessions ’ origins are also more straightforwardly literary.
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