Confessions
Kanae Minato, 2008
告白
湊かなえ
240 pages
Read in 2026.03
Check the synopsis and details on amazon.com
✔ A teacher declares that her daughter was killed by someone in her class ✔ People then confess what they did and saw ✔ Japanese school life at extreme
★★★★★ A teacher confesses her daughter was killed by someone in her classroom, then in the form of confessions the twisted truth will be told. Irresistible power of storytelling.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
Irresistible power of storytelling.
I first thought it was a confession from the teacher that she knows someone in the classroom killed her daughter.
No it's more complicated as suggested by the English title this is about "confessions" plural.
There are numerous confessions, they tell us what they did, saw or think, but what if they actually don't know the truth, or maybe they're not saying the truth?
It doesn't only reveal the crime scene but reveals the truth about the people they thought they knew well, or their weakness.
Confidence, friendship, motherhood, and the crime itself.
You cannot put down the book until you are sure of what really happened.
★★★★★ In theory, sure the trick is possible but in reality it's not doable. Now that the team has become more dynamic, they face the undoable murder. A Detective Galileo series.
🔽 log 🔽 Salvation of a Saint Keigo Higashino, 2008 Read in 2018 check on amazon.com
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
A man was killed, the only possible suspect is the wife but she was miles away. In theory, sure the trick is possible but in reality it's not doable. This time Galileo faces the unrealistic mystery.
He and the detective Kusanagi have been mates since university, but now a young female detective Utsumi joins (this character was added to the TV series first and the author brought her to the novel) Now that the team has become more dynamic, they face the undoable murder. It's a good example of how the author also focuses on entertaining his readers not only with the fabulous strick but playing with other elements like its TV series.
It's refreshing to see the young Utsumi doing her job well despite the misogyny in the institution, and it emphasise Kusanagi's sense of justice. But, he fails at one thing, he starts to have tender feelings towards the suspect.
Of course the part of the solving is good, obviously, but it's fun to see the trio.
Here are 3 books picked by me, akapan, to pile up in your bookshelf to create an amazing tsundoku, or actually read them, of course.
"Women and Crimes" They got involved too much
1. Butter Asako Yuzuki, 2017 柚木麻子 Japan [my comment] Kajimana adores butter and hates feminism. From her prison cell, she has control over everything Rika does with her pale chubby arms. It questions Japan's expectations on women. [check on amazon.com]
2. The Paying Guests Sarah Waters, 2014 UK 595 pages [my comment] The woman who lives quietly with her mother falls in love with a beautiful young wife of the new tenant, their love led to a murder. Who's in control? [check on amazon.com]
3. The Talented Mr. Ripley Patricia Highsmith, 1955 US 252 pages [my comment] It focuses a lot on what's on Ripley's mind, how he's cold and nervous, contrary to the blue sky of Italy, but it's Merge who is involved and used to it a perfect crime. [check on amazon.com]
★★★★★ A deep affection of the "family" that is beyond "common sense". A complex mystery with scientific tricks, solved by a physics professor Yukawa, a.k.a. Galileo.
🔽 log 🔽 A Midsummer's Equation Keigo Higashino, 2011 368 pages Read in 2018 check on amazon.com
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
A Detective Galileo series, book 3. There is no mistake with this series. A complex mystery with scientific tricks, solved by a physics professor Yukawa, a.k.a. Galileo.
The series usually focuses on human relationship, this time a family, but not bound by blood. A man is killed in an old resort town where Yukawa was visiting. As he uncovers the mystery of the murder he also uncovers the town's tragic past. A deep affection of the "family" that is beyond "common sense"
Yukawa normally dislikes children, but here you see his affection towards one boy who is in the middle of everything, and I think that's represented by the beautiful sea the townpeople are trying to protect.
🔽 Related pages 🔽 『真夏の方程式』 東野圭吾, 2011年 感想 | "家族"の深い愛情
★★★★★ She was sent to pose as a maid, but their relationship becomes more than that, a lot more. It feels like many books in one; Victorian London, girls, crime, and love - girls in crime and in love.
🔽 log 🔽 Fingersmith Sarah Waters, 2002 582 pages Read in 2020.10 check on amazon.com
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
I actually watched the Korean film The Handmaiden first. I watched it when I was heavily pregnant so it's a bit blurry, but I was astonished to a point that I had to look for the original book.
A family of thieves sends their girl to a rich family, for her to be a maid of the naïve gentlewoman aiming for her eventual inheritance, but slowly their relationship becomes more than that - a lot more. In the film her uncle collects paintings, ukiyoe, which suits the film as it's set in Korea, but in the book in Victorian London he collects words.
So naturally I kept comparing it to the film, which is always an error because films tend to be more dramatic or exaggerated, but the madness is definitely there in the book. It feels like you're reading many books, because there are quite a few twists and everything builds up so well; the girls, the crime, and the love.
Also the historical background is intriguing, it depicts different lives in the backstreet in London, that's one reason it feels like you are different many books in one.
At first you think one is tricking another, but oh no you are wrong, but wait it's changing again, now what, oh what is going on NOW. I don't want to spoil it but you'll see what I mean by this - she's not just a pearl, she's what she's made herself to be but now with pride.
✔ China, Japan and the war
✔ Nostalgia and unreliable memories from childhoon
✔ Friendship between British and Japanese in China
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★☆ Nostalgia, it is the big theme in this book. Christopher and Akira playing innocently in their childhood in Shanghai. Full of fun and tender memories. But are they?
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
It's a book from Ishiguro, so the writing is beautiful, that's given.
Nostalgia, it is the big theme in this book, full of fun and tender memories.
Christopher and Akira playing innocently during their childhood in Shanghai. After growing up to become a detective in England, though through some slow confusions, Christopher finally decides to take on a mission, the reality, of the disappearance of his parents.
Ishiguro doesn't explain things in a chronological order.
How much is real, how much is carefully made up?
He goes wondering around the city of Shanghai blindly without a solid clue or valid understanding, as he is wondering around in his memories.
Beautifully written.
★★★★☆ Classic Seicho Matsumono, tangled up men and women, money, man's pride, all the good stuff in these 4 short stories. He always brings in new phenomenon that's happening in Japan. True. Like a posh trip to a remote island, so 60s.
🔽 log 🔽 The fire and the sea Seicho Matsumoto 火と汐 松本清張 Read 2024.1 Not available in English
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 Classic Seicho Matsumono, tangled up men and women, money, man's pride, all the good stuff in these 4 short stories.
He always brings in some new phenomenon that's happening in Japan to his stories. True. Like a posh trip to a remote island, so 60s. His stories takes you to "somewhere not here", like the trip, or a day out on a yacht. It might not as "fancy" as it was in the 1960s, but you can still feel that excitement. His books never miss.
🔽 Where to buy / Summary and more info 🔽 Not available in English
✔ Historical fiction based on the real unsolved case ✔ Post war Japan between domestic and US politics ✔ Mystery from a point of view of an American occupier Japan
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★☆ A fiction based on postwar Japan's most mysterious unsolved case from 1949. Nostalgic and mysterious like Japan and hardboiled-cool like America. You too will catch "Shimoyama disease".
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 What is “Shimoyama case”? It’s a fiction based on Japan’s most mysterious unresolved case from 1949.
It’s full of masculine romanticism, throughout Japan’s Showa era, basen in Tokyo that everyone fantacises.
Nostalgic and mysterious like Japan and hardboiled-cool like America.
As they say, you catch “Shimoyama disease”. The writer is not Japanese, but precisely because of that it is good and is such a page turner, I now need to find the other 2 of the trilogy.
一次元の挿し木
松下龍之介 2025
(Labyrinth of Hortensia and Minotaur)
Ryunosuke Matsushita
256 pages
Read in 2024.8
(Not available in English)
✔ Currently not available in English
✔ SF mystery
✔ Gripping
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★★ What's so fab about it is that you know it's impossible, but it's so good that it doesn't matter. Exciting and entertaining, definitely the most loved mystery of 2025 in Japan.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
The author is in his mid-20s and it was only his debut novel.
It's so entertaining that all bibliophiles have read it in Japan.
The DNA of an ancient bones found in India matches the DNA of his missing sister.
And there are evil organisations and scientific secrets that are bigger than life; so you know it's impossible, there is no reality to it, but, but! you let that go because the story is so good.
Who cares if it's the story is unlikely, but not even SF, if it's entertaining, people will read and get addicted to it.
The protagonist is a beautiful lone young man who never smiles, his younger sister is a quiet pretty girl, there are also a bored housewife and poor students and Greek mythology, Frankenstein's monster, then the sound of mysterious liquid splashing - all the good ingredients are there.
We're all waiting for his future books now.
(And I'm sure it will soon be available in English)
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida Shehan Karunatilaka, 2022 368 pages Read in 2024.09 check price on amazon.com
✔ Magical realism ✔ Society and struggles in Sri Lanka ✔ Life after death and the world of ghosts and monsters
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★★ Provocative and rock and roll. It’s a fantasy, a magical realism that really tells the reality of Sri Lanka, through the eyes of this dead unreliable photographer/lover/gambler. It’s a loud music in a book.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
The book I’ve been looking forward to read, though I tried not to know the plot in advance. So if you don’t want to know anything else, just know that you will love it, and don’t read further, even if you do, it’ll be beyond your imagination anyway though.
So, first you are dead, and you need to find out why and who did it. There are ghosts and monsters, it’s a mystery, in modern Sri Lanka, in a messy war – you can have these key words and still it’s way over what you might expect.
It’s difficult to get into the story without some knowledge of Sri Lanka but it slowly takes you to its world.
It addresses the protagonist as “you” so it feels like you’re discovering it all with him. Him being a lousy war photographer, gambler and a unfaithful lover who’s gay; he is an anti-hero who is rather hateful, but, somehow becomes not so hateful after you spend 7 moons with him.
It’s provocative, anything can happen here. It’s a fantasy as much as it’s the reality in Sri Lanka. Non stop greatness that you can’t pigeon hole it, a reading experience that’s similar to being in a room with loud rock music, or whatever your favourite music is.
✔ A fierce mixed race female fighter
✔ Yakuza family
✔ Non apologetic violence
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★★ Full of violence, full of actions, full of sisterhood. Yoriko is extremely violent, but she is unapologetically a woman. Very entertaining, yet it's stepping into the new, unknown world. An important book.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
Full of violence, full of actions, full of sisterhood.
Having a woman as the protagonist, with such detailed description of violence, of physical, sexual, verbal violence - this is unique.
These yakuza or mafia stories tend to have women who are usually weak, or bad, or traumatised (therefore an excuse of her violence) or too masculine.
So even though they have a woman as the main character it's full of (sometimes hidden) hatred towards the woman or women in general.
Not here.
Yoriko is extremely violent, but she's a woman, she is unapologetically a woman.
We don't need only these weak women, or bad women, just to please male readers.
We need strong bond, strong sisterhood.
We need stories where she want to be the happy kick ass monster.
I kind of worry about how it's sold in the West though, it's not a new Kill Bill (full of revenge and trauma) it's neither queer novel as they want to portrait it.
Ultimately it's a story of a women who finds a happy life.
It'd be a pity to read this only as a violent novel.
It's without a doubt very entertaining, yet it's stepping into the new, unknown world.
An important book.
The Karamazov Brothers
Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1880
ратья Карамазовы
Фёдор Достоевский
Russia
896 pages
Read in 2023.11
check price on amazon.com
Wordsworth Classics
Translated by Constance Garnett (1912)
✔ One of the greatest story in the history
✔ Struggle of a family
✔ Mystery
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★★+♥ I now want to re-read, speak with other readers and find out what I'll be finding out as I read again - it's a book that will follow you around for the rest of your life. Dostoevsky, a great story teller.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
One of the greatest books ever written, and I'm one of millions to agree it is.
It is long, it starts slow, it is difficult, but as the story evolves it actually gets exciting, new mysteries are introduced, some doubts are resolved, and you simply cannot help but be curious.
Dostoevsky, a great story teller.
It's been read, re-read and studied many times by people around the world ever since it was written, so not much for me to add but I'd just say, I encountered a grand book.
I now want to re-read, speak with other readers and find out what I'll be finding out as I read again - it's a book that will follow you around for the rest of your life.
So it's so magnificent that it's a piece of human heritage, if it was not a book that could be reprinted, it'd be in a museum.
It has the suspense and the mystery to keep you turning the page, while it always goes back to the simple idea of good and bad, poor and rich, fortunate and misfortune, love, family, friendship, pride, desire and pity and all in between.
Despite the whole dark damming story, it had an incredibly bright and hopeful note.
I'm also simply glad I completed it, it's an accomplishment itself, totally worth it, but now I am not sure if I get to read anything as good as this great story.
✔ Japan’s popular series, Galileo Series ✔ Comradeship of town people ✔ Murder mystery
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★★ A classic Galileo where it’s all about people, their lives and love and hatred, with tricks that’s seemingly impossible. This time the keyword is “silence”; if you stay silent, you cannot be guilty. Perfect entertainment.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
There are a few of Detective Galileo Series translated into English – and do read them all! Yukawa is a professor of Physics and he tackles “impossible’ mysteries with his friend, Inspector Kusanagi. This one, I’d say, is a classic Galileo where it’s all about people, their lives and love and hatred, with tricks that’s seemingly impossible.
This time the keyword is “silence”; if you stay silent, you cannot be guilty. And maybe “generation gap”, some are so patient for their own revenge, or can carry the burden for decades, while others might give up instantly, or couldn’t wait just a moment longer.
Though it’s always clever, Galileo series always insist on human drama, a perfect entertainment.
Confessions Kanae Minato, 2008 告白 湊かなえ 240 pages Read in 2026.03 Check the synopsis and details on amazon.com
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