Minato tells the story in alternating chapters, each related from the first-person perspective of a character, beginning and ending with the teacher, Moriguchi. The book’s deceptive qualities are rife throughout the plot nothing is quite as it first seems. Although she does not make her main characters likeable, Minato succeeds in making their lack of remorse both chilling and believable. Unfortunately, that lack of emotion resonates all too well in any post-mortem examination of school shootings or fired employee revenge plots.

The disturbing aspect of the novel concerns the characters’ motivations, their self-absorption and the ability of some of the students - as well as the teacher - to turn off any sense of compassion. As with all actions, particularly those carried out in anger, there are unintended and unanticipated consequences to the teacher’s plot against her students and they unfold swiftly. First deemed an accident, Moriguchi soon discovers two of her 13-year-old pupils were involved in her daughter Manami’s death that’s where the revenge comes in. Dark in subject matter: a four-year-old girl, the daughter of teacher Yuko Moriguchi, has been found dead in the swimming pool at the middle school where Moriguchi teaches.

This compulsively readable novel is dark, disturbing, and deceptive.

Now ably translated by Stephen Snyder, Confessions has been re-issued in English for the North American market. Revenge is not only the theme but the driving force behind the actions of almost every character in Confessions, a runaway bestseller when it was first published in Japan in 2008 and subsequently in Europe. When she wrote Confessions, the Japanese author might well have been channeling Friedrich Nietzsche: “It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it every complaint already contains revenge.” When it comes to crime, Kanae Minato’s characters are not the forgiving sort.

Confessions kanae minato español