With my Japanese still very much in an in-progress phase, and having read this book in the original text, this review ought to be taken with a suitable handful of salt.

Great premise and story, and a brutal ending. However, agreeing with some other reviewers, I enjoyed getting the different perspectives in the first half, yet somewhere along the way they started to feel rather uninteresting; the same events are told several times, and while it's nice to get the motivations of each actor, some of the perspectives don't add very much to the tale. The first two chapters also yielded the expectation that the story would move farther along time-wise. I was somewhat disappointed, as a result, by all the retelling. ( )

this book was such a slog. i dnfed it like 4 times before bc i just couldn't get into the story and writing but everyone gives it 5 stars and raves about the ending. i should've just let it go coz it was not worth it in my opinion. the first and last chapter were good, the rest was awful and felt like it was 500 pages long. i would love it if the first chapter was just a short story tbh ( )

4.5/5 ( )

http://turnthepage.travel.blog/2019/05/11/confessions-by-kanae-minato/

This book is written by the same author behind Penance. The format of this novel is similar to Penance in the way that each chapter is told from a different persons point of view. Despite this book being published first, I actually found it better and more well written than Penance.

A quick summary of the plot is that the four year old daughter of a teacher is murdered by two students who are taught by that teacher. The daughter is actually killed on school grounds while her mother is participating in her weekly staff meeting. The first chapter is from the teachers perspective where she is announcing her retirement and swearing that she will have revenge on the killers. Then the chapters are from the point of view of a girl in the class who is the class president, the sister of one of the killers (this chapter also shows diary entries from their mother), each of the two killers, and finally back to the teacher.

At first I disliked this book for one reason, the way in which the first half of the first is written really grated on me. Because it is a first person account of a teacher speaking to her class the only way in which the author showed character interaction was to have the teacher answering questions from the students. The issue with this is that she constantly repeating the questions so that the readers know what she has been asked. For example, “Is he that famous? Do I know him?”, “What’s that? You don’t know the story?”, and “What’s that? You heard all that on TV last week?” This type of dialogue happens every few sentences over the first half of her chapter, and it was annoying as it just didn’t feel organic. It actually reminded me of episodes of Scooby-Doo, where Scooby would say something and to ensure that the viewer understood his ramblings one of his colleagues would respond with “What’s that Scooby? Shaggy’s in trouble in the dining room?” or something to that effect. It’s annoying, but acceptable in Scooby-Doo, not in a novel. I must clarify however, that this style of writing does not return after a certain point, so if you do decide to read this novel then please persevere past the first chapter, it will be worth it!

I really enjoyed how each chapter of this book gives the reader more insight into the crime committed, the reason as to why it was committed, and the aftermath of the event. It is full of twists and turns and I did not find it to be predictable at all. With each page that I read my opinions of the characters changed. I went from feeling pity for a character, to hating them, to liking them, and back to pitying them in less than a chapter.

A lot of the time I find that books that have a great story have a disappointing ending, that was not the case with this story. I loved the ending so much! Of course this book has some ridiculous parts where someone in a real situation would not have done the same thing as one of the antagonists, but if it was written like that then the book would have been about ten pages long.

I would thoroughly recommend this book to fans of thrillers, or anyone looking for a short book that will keep them guessing right up to the end. A final note, if you read Penance and enjoyed it but found it slightly disappointing for whatever reason, please do not let that dissuade you from reading this. I enjoyed Penance but this book is really on a whole other level! ( )

Japanese story starts out great, with a teacher on her last day telling the students how her recently deceased daughter actually died--and pinning the blame on two unnamed students, although everyone can figure out who they are. Then in John D. MacDonald (not Comus for gods sake) fashion, we hear the story retold or expanded from the view of the students, one other student's sister (with a long excerpt from her mother's diary), the class president who has her own take on things, and the teacher again. It all comes to a well-plotted conclusion, but there is something very overdone about the whole thing. While it is interesting (and frightening) to be let in on everyone's sicknesses and agendas, in the end, it doesn't add up to that much. Everyone in the story is sick in one way or another, even the "innocent" students, who persecute the two wrongdoers. I suppose that is supposed to send a message about Modern Japan--or maybe about Japan in general, but these days, is there any novelty in showing just how sick the world is?

The audiobook version is very well performed. ( )