A recipient of the Radio Drama Award, the Detective Novel Prize for New Writers, and the National Booksellers' Award, Minato lives in Japan. A Lord of the Flies for the modern world, Minato mines the dark specter of youth, while simultaneously demonstrating some of the deeper perils of our global culture. Kanae Minato was a housewife before her debut novel Confessions skyrocketed to the top of the Japanese charts and turned her into the year's bestselling novelist. Just when you think you know where this thriller is going, Kanae Minato throws back the curtain to reveal another face to the mystery. A pitch-perfect, riveting read.ĬONFESSIONS is a dark, disturbing tale that twists and turns on itself like an Escher print. As the characters in CONFESSIONS are stripped of their secrets, the novel reveals its audacious dark heart. Related books to read are 'The Plague', 'Hotel Iris: A Novel' and 'Im Thinking of Ending Things: A Novel'. I defy any fan of smart, unconventional crime writing to set this novel aside once they've started it.ĭon't be fooled by the hypnotic beauty of Kanae Minato's prose. If you liked Confessions you are looking for offbeat thriller type books. Taut, unsettling and relentlessly engaging, CONFESSIONS is a book with claws, in more sense than one. If Albert Camus had written Heathers, it would have looked a lot like this. If obtaining some sort of benefit for one being necessitates the elimination of another, then so be it.A dark, dystopic portrait of Japanese adolescence gone wrong. Human beings are just one among an infinite number of entities, living or otherwise, that exist on the earth. Paolo, my co-host, and also Martin join me to discuss how depressed we got, why Paolo is the depression specialist and how many thoughts of the day I managed to find in this book. 'But I don't necessarily understand why it's evil per se. Kanae Minato is a former home economics teacher and housewife who wrote Confessions, her first novel, between household chores. On the first episode of the Mind Duck Books podcast we delve into the highly acclaimed book Confessions by a Japanese writer Kanae Minato. 'I understand why murder is considered a crime,' the Nietschean-in-the-making Shuya explains, with cold theatricality, later in the tale. These include Shuya, a seemingly narcissistic boy with a knack for electronics and a masochistic mother fixation, and his more guilt-prone accomplice Naoki, a sort of Japanese Leopold and Loeb who, for reasons that become clear only slowly, murder the beloved 4-year-old daughter of their middle school teacher.

As its title suggests, 'Confessions' is a pulp-fiction tell-all of sorts: a collection of unburdenings by participants in a series of chillingly calculated crimes that come to seem less the work of psychopaths than of ordinary (if extraordinarily wounded) people, some of whom happen to be 13-year-olds.

Confessions by kanae