I discovered ‘Confessions‘ by Kanae Minato by accident. The plot was very appealing and so I picked it up.
The main character in the story is a teacher in middle school. One day her young daughter is found dead in the swimming pool behind the school. The verdict of the police is that she had drowned. But the teacher discovers that two of the students killed her daughter. She plans her revenge. What happens after that forms the rest of the story.
When I started reading the book, I thought it would be a revenge thriller. I love a good old-fashioned revenge thriller, in which the good character plans a long, deep revenge on the bad guys and pulls it off. Who doesn’t love this kind of revenge thriller? But after I read the first part of the book, which stretches to around 50 pages, I realized that the story was mostly done and dusted. I wondered what the author was going to do in the next 200 pages. There was only so much you can do, when things are mostly done and dusted. It looked like the author had written herself into a corner. But Kanae Minato is smart, of course. If a simple reader like me can see this, then as a writer, she can see this much in advance. When I was wondering what was going to happen next, Kanae Minato does the Rashomon thing, and tells the story from different points of view. She takes the story forward from where the teacher left off, and we are able to see what transpires from the perspective of different characters. We are also able to delve into their past. This makes the book more than a revenge thriller, more than a regular crime novel. Before long, we start questioning the nature of good and evil, and we ask ourselves whether we can really tell whether someone is good or bad, or whether there is even such a thing. This makes the book complex and fascinating! The ending is surprising and I didn’t see that coming!
‘Confessions’ is a fascinating crime novel and revenge thriller, but it is also much more than that. It was a gripping read from the beginning to the end. Japanese writers are famous for their dark thrillers, and this is one of the good ones.
I’ll leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.
“I suppose everybody wants to be recognized for what they’ve done; everybody wants to be praised. But doing something good or remarkable isn’t easy. It’s much easier to condemn people who do the wrong thing than it is to do the right thing yourself. But even then, it takes a certain amount of courage to be the first one to come out and blame someone else. What if no one else joins you? No one else stands up to condemn the wrongdoer? On the other hand, it’s easy to join in condemning someone once someone else has gotten the ball rolling. You don’t even have to put yourself out there; all you have to do is say, “Me, too!” It doesn’t end there: You also get the benefit of feeling that you’re doing good by picking on someone evil—it can even be a kind of stress release. Once you’ve done it, though, you may find that you want that feeling again—that you need someone else to accuse just to get the rush back. You may have started with real bad guys, but the second time around you may have to look further down the food chain, be more and more creative in your charges and accusations. And at that point you’re pretty much conducting a witch hunt—just like in the Middle Ages. I think we regular people may have forgotten a basic truth—we don’t really have the right to judge anyone else.”
“Weak people find even weaker people to be their victims. And the victimized often feel that they have only two choices : put up with the pain or end their suffering in death. But they’re wrong. The world you live in is much bigger than that. If the place in which you find yourself is too painful, I say you should be free to seek another, less painful place of refuge. There is no shame in seeking a safe place. I want you to believe that somewhere in this wide world there is a place for you, a safe haven.”
“My father remarried the following year. I had turned eleven. His new wife, someone he had known in middle school, was pretty enough but she was also impossibly dumb. Here she was marrying the owner of an electronics store, and she couldn’t even tell the difference between AA and AAA batteries. Still, I found I didn’t really hate her. Mostly because she didn’t pretend: She was fully aware how stupid she was. When she didn’t know something, she just said so. If a customer asked her a difficult question, she would make a careful note of it and then ask my father before calling back with the answer. There was something admirable in this kind of stupidity. I took to calling her Miyuki-san, and the respect was genuine. I never once talked back to her or treated her like an evil stepmother, the way kids on those cheesy TV shows do. On the contrary, I was the model stepchild, finding a designer bag for her cheap on the Internet or going along with her to carry the grocery bags when she went shopping for dinner. I didn’t even mind when she showed up for Parents’ Day at school. I hadn’t mentioned it to her, but she must have heard from one of the other shopkeepers. Anyway, there she was, all dolled up and right in the middle of the front row. When I was at the blackboard solving some arithmetic problem that was too hard for the other kids, she took my picture with her phone, and then she showed it to my father when we got home—but I didn’t mind. To be honest, it made me kind of happy. Sometimes the three of us would go out bowling or to karaoke, and I began to realize that I was slowly becoming as stupid as they were—and that there was actually something unusually pleasant about being stupid. I had even begun to think that I could be happy being nothing more than a member of this family of dummies.”
Have you read ‘Confessions‘? What do you think? Have you read other Kanae Minato books?
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