Tag: school life

Author, Book review, Books in translation, crime/thriller, Fiction, Japan, Kanae Minato, Mulholland Books, Publisher, Setting

‘Confessions’ by Kanae Minato

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Confessions

Fiction – Kindle edition; Mulholland Books; 240 pages; 2014. Translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder.

The Japanese do a nice line in dark fiction, whether crime or otherwise — think Keigo Higashino, Shuichi Yoshida, Fuminori Nakamura, Natsuo Kirino and Yoko Ogawa, to name just a handful.

Kanae Minato’s debut novel, Confessions, is no exception. This revenge tale, set in a middle school in a small town, explores issues relating to morality, justice and child crime. It’s a cracking story about adolescence gone wrong, with lots of unexpected plot twists and horrifying outcomes, but it’s probably one of the darkest books I’ve read in quite awhile.

And having read it back-to-back with another dark story of vengeance — Harriet Lane’s Her — I think that’s my quota of malicious tales done for the year.

Teacher seeks vengeance

The book opens with a grief-stricken schoolteacher, Yuko Moriguchi, addressing the pupils in her class on the last day of her teaching career — she’s decided to retire following the untimely death of her beloved four-year-old daughter, who was found drowned in the school’s swimming pool.

What begins as a relatively pleasant farewell speech descends into a bitter diatribe in which she accuses two of her students of murdering her daughter. She doesn’t name them, but they can be clearly identified by the things she says.

Because the age of criminal responsibility in Japan is 14 and the accused are just 13, Moriguchi decides to take the law into her own hands and dishes out her own form of justice. It turns out to be a rather cruel and unusual punishment — in fact, it’s downright jaw-droppingly horrific.

From this one act of vengeance, things slowly spiral out of control and by the book’s end there is at least one other person dead and another locked away in an asylum — which begs the question: would the outcomes have been any better under the normal channels of justice?

Five different perspectives

The book is structured around six longish chapters, the first and last of which are told from the teacher’s perspective. The intervening chapters are told from other character’s points of view, so that we get to hear from each of the accused, student A and student B; the mother of student B; and the class president.

While this means some scenes are retold over and over again — how the body was discovered, for instance —  the new perspectives help deliver new insights into how others are affected by events. Their reactions and their motivations aren’t always predictable — sometimes they’re simply terrifying.

It’s written in a stripped back, flat, detached prose style typical of modern Japanese fiction, which only adds to the chilling nature of the storyline.

Big themes

And while it could be described as a quiet and understated novel, it deals with some surprisingly big themes — How do you teach children right from wrong? How should society deal with child criminals?  What barriers should there be between teachers and their students?

It depicts a society falling apart at the seams, where children either seek fame and glory by committing the most horrendous crimes or they drop out of society altogether by locking themselves away to become hikikomori (“shut-ins”). It paints a rather bleak picture of modern Japan. It’s not cheerful reading by any stretch of the imagination — the morality of many of the characters is dubious at best.

However, as a page turner that treads spine-chilling territory based on the twisted behaviour of a handful of deliciously dark characters, it’s rather superb. And I’m not the only one who thinks so: according to the “About the Author” page in my edition, Confessions has sold more than three million copies in Japan and has won several literary awards, including the Radio Drama Award, the Detective Novel Prize for New Writers and the National Booksellers’ Award. In 2009 it was adapted into a film directed by Tetsuya Nakashima.

Alissa Nutting, Author, Book review, Faber and Faber, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, USA

‘Tampa’ by Alissa Nutting

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Tampa
Fiction – Kindle edition; Faber and Faber; 272 pages; 2013.

I’ve read a lot of outrageous books in my time, but Alice Nutting’s Tampa is right up there with the best of them. (The title refers to the Florida suburb in which it is set, but it could also be a play on words, because the main character does “tamper” with people she shouldn’t.)

It’s confronting, disturbing and, well, icky, but there’s something about this novel which had me reading it at break-neck pace — I raced through it in just a day or two — and then wished I’d not galloped to the ending so quickly.

Taboo content

To be perfectly frank, this novel isn’t for everyone. Many will be put off by the subject matter and the explicit sex (page one opens with a masturbation scene, just to set the mood for the rest of the book). And that’s understandable — not everyone wants to read about a female teacher grooming young male students for her sexual pleasure.

But what makes this novel such a riveting read despite the unpalatable concept at its heart is the voice of the narrator, which is wondrous in its sheer bravado, wickedness, narcissism and wit. This is the voice of a 26-year-old woman who knows that what she is doing is illegal but doesn’t give two hoots about anything other than feeding her own insatiable appetite for 14-year-old boys.

I’ve not read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita but I rather suspect Celeste Price, eighth grade English teacher, with her blond hair, red corvette, ultra-handsome husband and unusual sexual obsessions, might give Humbert Humbert a run for his money.

Indeed, it’s hard to fathom a more loathsome character in fiction, but I was completely drawn in by Celeste in a disturbing I-don’t-wish-to-be-complicit-but-can’t-help-it kind of way. I found myself hanging on to every word she said, and even though I became more and more shocked by her outrageous behaviour — and the sheer kinkiness of her relationship with student Jack Patrick — I was kind of willing her on and hoping she’d get away with it — which is an unusual position to be in as a reader, particularly when you know that the narrator is not only abhorrent and immoral, her actions could have long-lasting and damaging psychological impacts on her victims.

Unanswered questions

Perhaps the greatest strength of Nutting’s titillating, often perverse, novel is the questions it throws up. If Celeste is every teenage boy’s fantasy, what’s so wrong about her hitting on them? Where are the lines drawn between teacher and pupil? If Celeste was not beautiful, would she get away with this kind of behaviour? Is her marriage to Ford, a policeman who works night shift, to blame?

Of course the storyline is preposterous — or is it?  We certainly know from news stories and the like that there are plenty of men out there who prey on teenage girls, but are there women, in the real world, preying on young teenage boys?

Tampa brings to mind Bonnie Nadzam’s Lamb, which features an equally perverse and deviant character — a man who develops an unhealthy relationship with a young girl — but is far more explicit and confronting, perhaps because it places us firmly in the head of the perpetrator.

While I would not describe this as a comfortable read, it’s certainly attention grabbing, fascinating and horrifying in equal measure, the literary equivalent of a car crash, and yet it’s one of the most entertaining novels I’ve read all year.