The milk reached my classroom before the teacher did. It came in a wire crate, set down by the door with a clatter of glass, and each small bottle wore a foil cap the colour of a sweet wrapper. I remember the sound of the crate far better than the taste. I also remember that nobody in that room ever looked at a cap before pushing a thumb through it. A child drinks what a school hands out, and the arrangement is so ordinary that it works as a form of trust. That trust is exactly what Kanae Minato seizes in her first novel, Confessions, where the milk comes in paper cartons and the habit of not looking is put to a use nobody intended.
Minato was a former home economics teacher and housewife when she wrote the book, according to the Los Angeles Times, and Futabasha published it in August 2008. In 2009 it won the Japan Booksellers’ Award, a prize voted by shop staff across the country. Japanese reports say that by October 2022 the paperback edition alone had passed three million copies, a remarkable figure for a first novel. Stephen Snyder’s English translation appeared from Mulholland Books in 2014. Tetsuya Nakashima’s film followed in Japan in June 2010, was put forward as the country’s entry for the foreign-language Oscar, and reached the shortlist of nine in January 2011.
The story opens in a classroom on the last day of the school year. The homeroom teacher, Yuko Moriguchi, tells her first-year middle-school pupils in an even voice that she is resigning. Her daughter Manami, aged four, was found in the school swimming pool, and the police called it an accident. Moriguchi says it was no such thing. Two members of this very class killed the child, and she refers to them only as A and B, in a way that leaves nobody in the room unsure of the names. She will not take the matter to the police, she explains, because she has already dealt with it herself. Here the milk comes in. She tells the class that she put blood from Manami’s father, a man living with HIV, into the milk of those two boys, and that they have drunk it. That sentence sets the other five chapters going, and they exist to count what it cost.
The book is built as six confessions, each in a different form, and the ingenuity lies in the relay. Moriguchi’s classroom speech comes first. The second is a letter to her from the class president, Mizuki, describing the weeks after she left: a young replacement teacher whom the pupils nickname Werther, a boy who is bullied, and another who has stopped coming to school. The third is a diary kept by the mother of that absent boy and read by his sister, and it shows a woman running out of ways to reach her son. The fourth belongs to Naoki himself, the boy known as B, in a feverish run of flashbacks that I take to be the recurring nightmare World Literature Today lists among the book’s forms. The fifth is Shuya’s, the boy known as A, posted online as a will addressed to his mother. Only the sixth returns to Moriguchi, by telephone, and on that call the novel finally explains what happened to the milk. The killers speak only in the fourth and fifth, and the class as a body is heard only through one pupil’s letter, which matters later.
Minato then does the cruellest thing available to her and lets the boys talk. Shuya is a clever boy with a talent for electronics and a hunger for the notice of the mother who left. Naoki is the follower, a boy of ordinary gifts and unspent anger. As the Los Angeles Times observed, even at their coldest the two earn a measure of pity. The effect is disagreeable by design. Each explanation is coherent and delivered in a reasonable voice, and the reader finds sympathy drifting towards two people who are responsible for a small child’s death. Minato does not excuse them, and she does not let the reader off the drifting either.
One American reviewer reached for a familiar shelf. Steph Cha, writing about the English edition in the Los Angeles Times on 8 August 2014, told readers to think of the book as the “Gone Girl” of Japan. I understand the impulse, and a label of that kind is useful to a publisher. But Gillian Flynn’s novel of 2012 is a marriage in which two narrators compete for belief, and its pleasure is not knowing who is lying. Minato withholds that pleasure. By the end of the first chapter the reader knows who killed Manami and what has been done in return. What remains is the structure crime writers call the inverted mystery, sometimes “howcatchem”, whose first examples R. Austin Freeman gathered in The Singing Bone in 1912, on the usual account. The question is no longer who did it. It is what the doing will cost, and who will be made to pay.
The device of many voices is older than Minato, and she is honest enough not to hide it. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s story In a Grove, published in January 1922, gives seven testimonies about a single death in a bamboo thicket, from a woodcutter to a bandit to the dead man himself, speaking through a medium, and no two of them agree. Akira Kurosawa built Rashomon on it in 1950, borrowing the title and the gate from a second Akutagawa story. Akutagawa’s witnesses disagree about what happened. Minato’s, as I read them, mostly agree about what happened and disagree about what it meant, which is a quieter quarrel and, in a classroom, a far more recognisable one. Every voice in her book is also a plea, addressed to the only jury available, the reader.
Moriguchi’s refusal to go to the police rests on a point of law that the Los Angeles Times reviewer thought worth explaining to American readers. Japan fixes the age of criminal responsibility at fourteen, and the two boys are thirteen. Offenders below that age, the reviewer noted, may go on to full lives after sentences tailored to their years, with their identities hidden, which cannot be said of their victims. That is the engine of the plot, and this autumn it is also a live subject in Korea.
The Korean term is chokbeop sonyeon, which means roughly a juvenile who has touched the law. Under the Criminal Act no child under fourteen can be held criminally responsible. Those aged ten to thirteen pass instead through the juvenile protection system, where, the Korea Times explained in July, the heaviest measure is up to two years in a youth correction institution. In February the president asked the government to gather public opinion on whether the line should move, according to the same paper. The proposal that emerged is narrower than many readers outside Korea would guess.
On 14 July the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family reported to the cabinet that the age might fall from fourteen to thirteen for violent, serious or repeat offences only. A panel of 212 citizens had favoured that conditional reduction at 46.7 per cent, while an earlier council of experts had urged caution about lowering the age at all. The Justice Minister told the same meeting, as YTN and Newspim reported, that a rule which fixes responsibility by age raises a legal difficulty once it is applied to some offences and not others, and the president wondered whether a single year was too slight. On 13 August the Korea JoongAng Daily reported that the Justice Ministry was drawing up a plan to gather further opinion, and on 25 August the president told the cabinet that the matter seemed to have dragged on too long. I can find no report since then of an amending bill, a cabinet decision or a vote in the National Assembly, so the line still stands at fourteen, on the evidence I can find, as I write in early October. I have no standing to say where it belongs, and neither, to its credit, does the novel.
Naoki answers the classroom speech very differently from the boy known as A. He stops going to school and shuts himself in his room, haunted by the thought that he is infected and by a sense of being dirty. Japanese readers would, I imagine, recognise at once the figure they call hikikomori, a word spread widely by the psychiatrist Tamaki Saitō’s 1998 book and used of people who stay at home, withdrawn from school or work, for six months or more. The Cabinet Office estimated in 2023 that about 1.46 million people between fifteen and sixty-four were living in this way. A Western reader tends to assume that guilt wants a witness, whether a priest, a magistrate or a friend in the next chair. Naoki’s guilt wants a locked door. I take that to be a different grammar of shame, one that turns inward and seals itself, and Minato has the sense to let the grammar do the explaining.
Beneath all this lies a much older shape, and in one respect Moriguchi is a Medea. Euripides’ play was first staged at Athens in 431 BCE, where, as I understand it, it took third place of three, a verdict its later career has made look faintly comic. Jason leaves Medea for a Corinthian princess, and Medea answers by destroying the princess, her father and her own two sons. Moriguchi turns on no child of her own, and her methods are quieter. Yet the transformation is the same one. A mother’s love, denied its object, does not vanish but converts into something precise, patient and merciless, and the horror lies in how reasonably the woman explains herself. The ancient play at least gives her an audience that can answer back. Medea states her case to the Corinthian women of the chorus, who listen, plead with her and fail, while the theatre watches them fail.
Moriguchi has no such listeners. Her class is made up of thirteen-year-olds, and the second confession shows what they do with a moral weight too heavy to lift: they bully the boy they have settled on and mistake cruelty for justice because it arrives in a group. In the Greek theatre the chorus tells the audience how far to let itself be horrified. Minato removes it. Her pupils model nothing so much as our own confusion, and it falls to the reader to serve as the chorus instead. It is an uncomfortable office, and the book makes sure that nobody can resign from it without noticing.
The last turn comes on the telephone. Moriguchi tells Shuya that his own plan has been turned against the person he most wanted to impress, and that his road to recovery begins there. The World Literature Today reviewer thought the ending somewhat rushed, and I half agree. Yet the haste serves the book, because a revenge that finishes tidily is what the genre promises, and Minato declines to let it feel like a prize. The reader who closes it satisfied has read a different book from the one she wrote. What she has built instead is a case with six statements and no verdict, and the sentencing is left, once again, to a chorus nobody asked to be.
The crate went from my classroom at some point, and I cannot say when, since nobody announced it. I know only that on all those mornings I never once looked at a foil cap before pushing my thumb through it, and that I would not have known what to look for.
Recommended Resources
☞ English Edition: Confessions, Kanae Minato (translated by Stephen Snyder), Amazon
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
※ Published under the author's editorial persona. See the About page for how this comes to be.
Sources
- Steph Cha, “Review: Kanae Minato’s ‘Confessions’ hits its jaw-dropping mark with a vengeance”, Los Angeles Times, 8 August 2014.
- The Korea Times, “Gov’t weighs lowering minimum age of criminal responsibility”, 14 July 2026.
- Erik R. Lofgren, review of Kanae Minato, Confessions, World Literature Today, May 2015.