Confessions (告白)
Decide its fate
The record
Time
An eveningA season240 pages, about 5 hours: three-quarters the length of a typical book on the shelf.
Getting in
Walk right inSteep climbTwo readers report pausing in the opening chapter.
What it gives
Plot and actionIdeas to live byIn 12 reviews from critics and book blogs, 9 credit the plot and 6 credit the ideas or a change in how they live.
One of a kind
Others do thisNothing else doesSteph Cha in the Los Angeles Times calls it the Gone Girl of Japan; Gone Girl is on the shelf at 475 pages.
The case for it
on the structure
“with clean, high-impact language and a structure that allows for several points of view”
Steph Cha · The Los Angeles Times, 2014 on the layered construction
“Where Confessions succeeds is in its layered construction”
Erik R. Lofgren · World Literature Today, 2015 on the characters
“the characters aren’t as two-dimensional as I thought they’d be”
a book blog on the tone
“Despite the grim subject matter, I’ve had a big grin on my face”
four stars · a book blog
The case against
on the child’s death
“the child’s death is described repeatedly; the variations don’t make it any more tolerable”
M.A. Orthofer · The Complete Review, 2014 on the translation
“the English at times read awkwardly due to it being a translated work”
a book blog on the first fifty pages
“It looked like the author had written herself into a corner”
a book blog on Yuko’s opening speech
“the one thing it misses is an understanding of why the murder happened”
a book blog
