In this chapter, Tohno was actually getting the students to read passages from Akutagawa Ryuunosuke's Rashomon. It's a short story that's commonly studied in high school, and deals heavily with themes of death and righteousness. Anyone who attended a Japanese high school would likely recognise it, but the reference would be completely lost on a Western audience.
After a lot of deliberation, we decided it would be best to include excerpts from William Golding's Lord of the Flies instead. It shares a lot of very similar themes, and fills the same role of "book that gets studied in high school". It also helps to avoid any ambiguity about the origin of the text. We don't want to introduce room for theorycrafting that the author didn't intend. It's a real story, not something that Tohno wrote or anything. If you're curious though, I found an English translation you can read
here.