Fukasaku's film adapts Koushun Takami's novel, published the year before, and keeps its premise without softening: a class of junior high school students is taken to an island, collared, given a weapon each and told that only one may leave. The novel's roll call of students with their own interior lives is what the film compresses hardest, and it compensates with the on-screen death counter. The film was debated in the Diet on release, which is part of why the title is known outside Japan at all.