There are books that stay with you for a few days after you finish them. And then there are books like Confessions, which burrow into your mind and refuse to leave. This is one of those books.
This review may contain spoilers, read at your own risk.
Confessions opens with a middle school teacher, Yuko Moriguchi, addressing her class. The tone is calm, almost mundane. You think you know where this is going. And then, gradually, she starts talking about the death of her four years old daughter. And how she knows exactly which two students in that room killed her.
By the end of the first chapter, your jaw is on the floor. Minato delivers a plot twist before you even realise a plot has been set in motion. It is one of the most brilliantly constructed opening chapters I have ever read.
What makes Confessions so remarkable is not just the story but the way it is told. Each chapter that follows is narrated by a different character connected to the case: a classmate or a mother. Each voice adds a new layer, a new perspective, until by the end you have the complete, devastating picture assembled piece by piece. The structure is stunning. You think you understand what happened, and then the next narrator shifts everything slightly, and you realise you only had part of the truth.
I genuinely could not put it down.
What makes this book truly unsettling is all of this happens in a middle school. These are children. And yet Minato writes them with a psychological complexity and a capacity for cruelty that is deeply uncomfortable, in the best possible way. The setting amplifies everything. The closed world of a classroom, the social hierarchies of adolescence, the particular kind of casual brutality that teenagers can inflict on each other, Minato uses all of it.
This book belongs to a Japanese subgenre called iyamisu, which translates roughly to “ew mystery”. It’s a fitting name, This is not a cosy mystery. It is the kind of story that leaves you with a lingering unease, a discomfort you can’t quite shake. Minato is described in Japan as the queen of iyamisu, and after reading Confessions, it is very easy to see why.
Beneath the psychological thriller surface, Confessions carries a sharp and quietly furious message about the failures of the adults and institutions that are supposed to protect children. The school system, the parents, the teachers – all of them, in different ways, have let these children down. Minato never states this directly, but it runs through every chapter like a current. The cruelties of adolescence don’t emerge from nowhere. They are grown in neglect.
It is a message that lands hard, and it lingers.
One flaw for me is the bomb. If you’ve read it, you know what I mean. It is a moment that feels slightly out of place. Almost too dramatic for a book that has been so controlled and precise up until that point. And yet, oddly it is also unforgettable. It is the kind of flaw that somehow becomes part of what makes the book stick in your memory. I can’t quite explain it, but I think Minato earns it.
Rating: 5 Muse points. One of the most brilliantly structured pscyhological crime novels I have ever read. Don’t start if you have things to do, you won’t stop.
About the Author
Kanae Minato was born in 1973 and started writing in her thirties. Confessions was her debut novel, and it became a bestseller in Japan, winning the Japanese Booksellers Award. It was also adopted into a 2010 film directed by Tetsuya Nakashima, which was nominated for the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film. The English translation, by Stephen Snyder, was published in 2014 and named one of the Wall Street Journal’s ten best mysteries of that year.
