Junko Takekawa is the Senior Arts Programme Officer at The Japan Foundation in London. One of five essential Japanese crime novels she tagged for the Waterstones blog:
Confessions - Kanae Minato
Minato is a sensational female crime writer. Without much bloodshed or many grotesque scenes, her books are true page-turners as she excels in digging up evil and guilt in our unconscious mind. Confessions is an early work that pushed her onto the main stage of the Japanese literature world in 2008. This book is about a confession by a female school teacher whose small child was killed at her school pool. Chillingly through her monologue, she reveals what she discovered about what had happened to her child and subtly accuses the murderer without pointing a finger until the end. Stories in “confession” style later became her trademark. If you do not like novels in a diary format or first person novels, it may not be for you but she is such a compelling story teller that it is guaranteed to grip your mind. Her Penance is also worth reading.
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the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
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