Confessions

Yuko Moriguchi is a middle-school teacher whose four-year-old daughter, Manami, was found dead in the school swimming pool. The authorities have ruled it an accident, but Yuko knows better: two of her own students killed her child. On the last day before she resigns, she stands before her class and calmly delivers one final lecture, revealing what she knows and setting in motion a quiet, meticulous revenge.

From there the novel unfolds through a series of confessions in different voices, the students, their families, and others drawn into the aftermath, each account revising and darkening what came before. Kanae Minato peels back layers of guilt, cruelty, bullying, and denial to expose how far ordinary people will go, and how thoroughly they can justify it.

Confessions was a runaway bestseller in Japan and the basis for an acclaimed film. Cold, precise, and relentlessly bleak, it is a psychological thriller about grief and vengeance that questions the very idea of justice, and refuses easy answers to the end.