Mitsuko Souma

Mitsuko Souma is a character appearing in the Japanese 2000 Thriller film Battle Royale. She was portrayed by Kou Shibasaki.

She is beautiful and seductive on the outside yet inside, she's a hollow shell, having been left damaged after suffering years of physical and sexual abuse from her stepfather; she serves as the secondary antagonist during the Program. She is said to be one of the most beautiful girls in school with her angelic face, shapely body, and seductive smile which is referred to in the novel as her "fallen angel's smile." She uses her sexuality to her advantage throughout the series. Similar to Kazuo Kiriyama, Mitsuko suffers from childhood trauma, and she is the leader of her own gang, which consists of Hirono Shimizu and Yoshimi Yahagi. She manages to kill a total of six (seven in the novel) students, becoming the second most dangerous opponent in the Program, before being killed by Kazuo Kiriyama.

In the novel, Mitsuko is abused by several individuals. When she was nine years old, her mother was paid to let three men rape and videotape her. Next, she was raped by her trusted elementary school teacher when she told him of her previous rape. A friend of hers witnesses the rape and spreads a rumor which leads to the teacher's resignation. Later, Mitsuko's mother again accepted payment to let Mitsuko be raped but Mitsuko resisted, accidentally killing her mother in the process. She is sent to live with relatives, only to be molested once again by the father of the household.

In the manga, it was revealed that as a child, Mitsuko's real father divorced his wife and eventually fled the country altogether, intending to protect her and young Mitsuko from the government. This left Mitsuko completely heartbroken and in tears. Before he left, her father gave her a Magical Emily Ring because he knew that she wanted to have one and also so that she could have something to remember him by. Mitsuko would later treasure the Ring and use it as a possible source of comfort even during the Program.

Some time later, and when Mitsuko was nine years old, she then met her stepfather who ended up giving her a doll which was the only time he'd ever really shown her kindness along with the promise that they would be a family. Shortly after that, things changed as he then began subjecting both Mitsuko and her mother to all forms of abuse. In time, the damage was too much for even Mitsuko's mother to take and she too began abusing her own young daughter.

Eventually, the horrific abuse Mitsuko had endured during her childhood ended up leaving her physically, emotionally and psychologically damaged for life and she went from being a once happy, innocent child to a manipulative young woman who used her good looks and body to seduce her male targets while also giving her the delusion that touching seemingly makes it better, something that her stepfather regularly told her while abusing her. The resulting trauma also caused her to develop two completely separate personalities: the cold, ruthless Mitsuko who is extremely manipulative and deprived of mercy whenever it comes to killing her classmates or ruining the lives of others to get what she wants and the young childlike Mitsuko who still believes that she's Daddy's girl and begs for him not to leave because he promised that he'd stay with her.

Growing tired of her stepfather, Mitsuko later made a deal with a local criminal, arranging for her stepfather's murder, but he ended up killing her mother as well. Mitsuko then betrayed the criminal by calling the police on him. In the English manga, she's nicknamed "Hardcore Souma" presumably due to her good looks. She uses much of her sexuality in the manga and often seduces men before having sex with them and later ends up either drugging them and stealing their money or just killing them which she began doing during her tenure on the Program.

She developed a reputation in school, including when she stabbed a boy, causing him to get thirteen stitches. In the manga, Souma is head of a gang at school, where she participates in theft, murder, and prostitution. Many of the girls fear Mitsuko in the manga. Almost immediately upon being released onto the island for the Program, Mitsuko wastes no time in finding and killing her classmates one by one as she wants to win the game. Her designated weapon is a sickle or a scythe which she wields with incredibly lethal skill and she also uses her good looks and body to seduce her male classmates so that she can catch them off-guard.

Due to her emotional abuse, she has a twisted idea of sex, thinking that it is the solution to everything, which led her to rape a wounded Yuichiro Takiguchi, thinking it would make him feel better. She became upset when he said that it hurt him, and thinking that he was rejecting her, she killed him. She later came across Kazuo Kiriyama, another student who similarly to Mitsuko had been responsible for the majority of the deaths during the Program and almost immediately, the two engaged in a gunfight. Having been shot in her right arm, Mitsuko then attempted to seduce him by stripping completely naked, a tactic she had used on other men in the past. However due to his sociopathic behavior, Kiriyama did not fall for her act and proceeded to injure Mitsuko by shooting her in random parts of her body which left her in agony and caused her to remember various moments of her life. Her childlike personality seizing control, Mitsuko began calling for her father while saying that she was Daddy's girl. Kiriyama then proceeded to end Mitsuko's life by shooting her through the face which destroyed her nose and eventually resulted in her death. It should also be noted that due to the sexual abuse she was subjected to as a child, Mitsuko is shown to have misandry, a hatred of boys and men.

In the extended version of the film, a flashback portrayed a young Mitsuko returning home from school. At home she found her mother severely drunk, along with an unknown man who had paid Ms. Souma to molest her daughter. Mitsuko, in self-defense, quickly pushed him down the stairs - the act happened to break his neck, instantly killing him.

In both the extended and standard versions of the film, she is depicted more to have been a socially awkward, anxiously vain outcast and loner with no friends who, upon provision of a lethal weapon and one very lucky encounter with a bitter classmate, broke down to desperation, madness and highly potentiated, wanton homicidality under the pressure of both the Program and her own mental disorders than the hyper-criminal, deeply feared school bully of the novel or manga (on the bus, a schoolgirl loudly and repeatedly, though not maliciously, disturbs her nap - Mitsuko says and does nothing; a scene depicting another female character being harassed by three female classmates at Shiroiwa High School does not see Souma as a perpetrator; additionally, she is herself terrorized at gunpoint by another female student, having "always pissed [the student] off". She is also invariably referred to by classmates in the film simply as "Mitsuko", her given name, and never "Souma", her familial Japanese "first" name; this likely reflects a class-wide attitude of disrespect and dismissal toward her). She is gunned down with her own firearm by Kazuo Kiriyama in a particularly violent sequence, dying completely alone as a "loser" - which she "just didn't want to be... anymore." Her total of six killings made her by far the deadliest permanent classmate in 3-B. It was rumored that she slept with a few guys at school and stole Hirono Shimizu's boyfriend; in the manga and film Mitsuko is the last girl to die.