The Japanese Literature Trend That's Half Cupcake, Half Decapitation

August 5, 2014 - By Becca Rothfeld - New Republic

Confessions, a 2008 Japanese thriller that will appear in English translation for the first time this August, has the captivating quality of a gruesome car crash: As the murders grow bloodier and bloodier, the characters more and more twisted, we find ourselves fascinated and repulsed, unable to look away. The book was a resounding success in Japan, partially, it seems, because it treats us to a deliciously appalling matricide—and partially because its author is such an unlikely suspect. 

According to the biographical blurb, Kanae Minato is a “housewife” and “former home economics teacher” who dreamt up her tangled web of violence and vengeance “between household chores.” A load of laundry, a batch of cupcakes—followed by a child murder, a matricide, and an attempted school bombing, all with a cherry on top.

 

Minato’s characters are as unexpectedly brutal as their creator seems to be. In the first few sentences of the novel, the narrator, a female middle-school teacher named Moriguchi, establishes herself as a kindly maternal figure and instructs her students to finish their lunchtime milk. Moments later, we learn that Moriguchi’s four-year-old daughter, Manami, was murdered by two of the students in Moriguchi’s class. Moriguchi believes the authorities will be too lenient toward the culprits, so she spends the rest of the novel avenging Manami’s death herself, first by slipping what she believes to be HIV-positive blood into the killers’ milk, then by torturing them psychologically.
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