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バッテリー #2
배터리 2
「育ててもらわなくてもいい。誰かの力を借りなくても、おれは最高のピッチャーになる。信じているのは自分の力だ――」中学生になり野球部に入部した巧と豪。２人を待っていたのは監督の徹底管理の下、流れ作業のように部活をこなす先輩部員達だった。監督に歯向かう巧に対し、周囲は不満を募らせていく。そしてついに、ある事件が起きて……！ 各メディアが絶賛！ 大人も子どもも夢中になる大人気作品！
200 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
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November 1, 2024
Though not the S-tier perfection that the first book was, Battery II is still pretty good. Seiha is still an angel. (He brings a cup of tea to his brother so that he can finish drinking it while talking on the phone. My little boy!) There's a couple of side characters from the first book that are slowly becoming the comic-relief characters--think Merry and Pippin from The Hobbit. Most importantly, as an adult caught in the hyperreality of the symbolics, I can't help but be jealous of how the characters talk about the real stuff in life.
part 1: synopsis
Takumi and Go have become first years at Nitta Higashi Middle School. They enroll in the school's baseball team headed by Tomura Makoto, known to students by the monicker, Otomurai. Otomurai has led the team to the prefectural semi-finals last year and runs the team like a drill sergeant through discipline and control. Takumi, confident in his pitching talent, doesn't bend his knee to Otomurai's superfluous rules like shaving his hair short or which first person pronoun to use. This causes a rift in his friendship with Gō who wants him to see things more pragmatically. If following Otomurai means they get to be on the team roster, what's to lose? Takumi argues back that there is actually a lot to lose by playing baseball according to Otomurai's dictatorship: his sense of dignity.
Fortunately, Otomurai has ambitions to take his team further and knows talent when he sees one. He puts Takumi on the team roster as well as Gō because the third-year catcher can't catch Takumi's pitch and Gō can. This move catches the ire of the senior team members, who ambush Takumi in the dark and lynches him. The students are discovered while they were trying to silence a first year witness. The whole incident escalates with Otomurai getting a cut on his forehead. The school administrators puts the team on hiatus to keep things quiet. The book ends with Takumi and Go practicing on the school field even as the school tells them to go home.
part 2: what keeps you from being who you are?
Like a lot of pieces of YA media, this series is about being true to yourself in the face of evil.
The evil comes in the form of the adults like Otomurai who want to discipline and control the students to the point of robbing them of their sense of self-sovereignty. (The whole scene where Takumi is brought in for questioning after he's caught with a personal item--a baseball--by the public moral committee at the school gate, made me feel more uncomfortable than the lynching scene.)
But the other, more pernicious kind of evil is the complacency to status and appearance. This is most embodied by the character Nobunishi, the third-year co-captain of the baseball team. He's part of the school's public moral committee, which Otomurai oversees. (He's the one who frisked Takumi at the school gate and found his He's third in the batting order and plays catcher, but he's not good enough to catch Takumi's fast balls. He's the one who led the third years into lynching Takumi.
The real enemy of book II is not Otomurai, it's Nobunishi. Nobunishi is not driven by jealousy because if he were, he would be lynching Gō, who shares the same position. Nobunishi doesn't even like baseball; sports is merely an extracurricular credit. He repeatedly says that he had always been good ("I've always put up with things") and even tries to negotiate with Otomurai to keep the whole incident quiet ("Surely, you won't betray us for something like this?"). The school administration, unsurprisingly, protects the third years. They let go them go out of concern for their high school prospects while the baseball club is banned for the rest of the school semester to give the adults the appearance of conflict resolution. Nobunishi is protected by adults who are all too indifferent to the truth.
part 3: what does it take to stay true to who you are?
So what can Takumi do in the face of adults who want to control him and want him to be somebody else? Of course, one is to believe in himself, but a thread that I hope will be picked up in the next book is Takumi's budding desire for language and words.
The first time this desire manifests is during his argument with Go. When Go asks him why Takumi's being childish and struggles to see where he's coming from, Takumi has to put into words things he had only until then vaguely thought about. The internal transformation is confirmed later when Takumi says to himself, "I want richer vocabulary. I want a way to articulate what I feel inside."
The two instances are barely a sentence or two, but they strike me as significant. The author could have removed this character arc by rewriting the first scene like "Takumi couldn't help the words pour out of him," but she doesn't. She adds an internal dimension to the moment of confrontation. Takumi can't just rely on his talent and dedication to baseball to win allies. My hope is that his desire for language will evolve into a discipline on how to think and care about others because, to use David Foster Wallace's words from his "This is Water" speech, "the alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."
part 1: synopsis
Takumi and Go have become first years at Nitta Higashi Middle School. They enroll in the school's baseball team headed by Tomura Makoto, known to students by the monicker, Otomurai. Otomurai has led the team to the prefectural semi-finals last year and runs the team like a drill sergeant through discipline and control. Takumi, confident in his pitching talent, doesn't bend his knee to Otomurai's superfluous rules like shaving his hair short or which first person pronoun to use. This causes a rift in his friendship with Gō who wants him to see things more pragmatically. If following Otomurai means they get to be on the team roster, what's to lose? Takumi argues back that there is actually a lot to lose by playing baseball according to Otomurai's dictatorship: his sense of dignity.
Fortunately, Otomurai has ambitions to take his team further and knows talent when he sees one. He puts Takumi on the team roster as well as Gō because the third-year catcher can't catch Takumi's pitch and Gō can. This move catches the ire of the senior team members, who ambush Takumi in the dark and lynches him. The students are discovered while they were trying to silence a first year witness. The whole incident escalates with Otomurai getting a cut on his forehead. The school administrators puts the team on hiatus to keep things quiet. The book ends with Takumi and Go practicing on the school field even as the school tells them to go home.
part 2: what keeps you from being who you are?
Like a lot of pieces of YA media, this series is about being true to yourself in the face of evil.
The evil comes in the form of the adults like Otomurai who want to discipline and control the students to the point of robbing them of their sense of self-sovereignty. (The whole scene where Takumi is brought in for questioning after he's caught with a personal item--a baseball--by the public moral committee at the school gate, made me feel more uncomfortable than the lynching scene.)
But the other, more pernicious kind of evil is the complacency to status and appearance. This is most embodied by the character Nobunishi, the third-year co-captain of the baseball team. He's part of the school's public moral committee, which Otomurai oversees. (He's the one who frisked Takumi at the school gate and found his He's third in the batting order and plays catcher, but he's not good enough to catch Takumi's fast balls. He's the one who led the third years into lynching Takumi.
The real enemy of book II is not Otomurai, it's Nobunishi. Nobunishi is not driven by jealousy because if he were, he would be lynching Gō, who shares the same position. Nobunishi doesn't even like baseball; sports is merely an extracurricular credit. He repeatedly says that he had always been good ("I've always put up with things") and even tries to negotiate with Otomurai to keep the whole incident quiet ("Surely, you won't betray us for something like this?"). The school administration, unsurprisingly, protects the third years. They let go them go out of concern for their high school prospects while the baseball club is banned for the rest of the school semester to give the adults the appearance of conflict resolution. Nobunishi is protected by adults who are all too indifferent to the truth.
part 3: what does it take to stay true to who you are?
So what can Takumi do in the face of adults who want to control him and want him to be somebody else? Of course, one is to believe in himself, but a thread that I hope will be picked up in the next book is Takumi's budding desire for language and words.
The first time this desire manifests is during his argument with Go. When Go asks him why Takumi's being childish and struggles to see where he's coming from, Takumi has to put into words things he had only until then vaguely thought about. The internal transformation is confirmed later when Takumi says to himself, "I want richer vocabulary. I want a way to articulate what I feel inside."
The two instances are barely a sentence or two, but they strike me as significant. The author could have removed this character arc by rewriting the first scene like "Takumi couldn't help the words pour out of him," but she doesn't. She adds an internal dimension to the moment of confrontation. Takumi can't just rely on his talent and dedication to baseball to win allies. My hope is that his desire for language will evolve into a discipline on how to think and care about others because, to use David Foster Wallace's words from his "This is Water" speech, "the alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."
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