From the very first pages, I knew I was about to embark on a rollercoaster of a ride. First of all, the book starts with ‘drinking milk’. And I know for a fact that there are no bad stories that have their characters drinking milk: A Clockwork Orange, No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski, to name but a few.
The 240-page-long book is divided into six chapters, each of which retells the main event through their own eyes.
In essence, Confessions is a revenge story, but it’s much, much more. It’s a social commentary on bullying, on prejudice (against people with HIV/single mothers/ sexual ‘deviants/ etc). But what I noticed the most was the recurring theme of ‘other people's expectations and their effects on self-value’. The author comments that societies in general (and the Japanese especially) put more stock in what other people think of them, that their sense of ‘worthiness’ is external to them. Every character in Confessions seems to clearly display this kind of awareness:
Moriguchi: when she says:
the teacher and the school were blamed—how could they expose impressionable young people to sexual deviants…or gays…or even single mothers.
Naoki’s mother: when she says:
If he just stays home without a diagnosis, the neighbors will start calling him a hikikomori (a dropout).
Shuya: who forges his own logic and self-esteem based on countering and belittling the logic of his peers of ‘middle school kids’.
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Summary: Confessions is a compelling page-turner of a novel. It's as satisfying as it's shocking. What prevents me from giving it five stars is the unusually long chunks of monologue-like paragraphs and the decision to present the order of the chapters as they are.
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