Penance

Fifteen years ago, Sae, Maki, Yujo and Akiko were separated from their friend by a stranger. Not long after, their friend, Emil, was found murdered. The girls were never able to give police a specific enough description to identify the stranger that was suspected of killing Emil, and her mother, Asako, blames the girls for her daughter’s death. She curses them all and promises they will pay. Now, all these years later, the killer still hasn’t been caught, but the four girls involved that day are living with the consequences of it, still. This is a character driven mystery, not unlike Tana French’s Into the Woods

After reading Confessions I knew that Kanae Minato was going to become one of my new favorite authors. So of course I jumped at that chance to read this when I saw it on Netgalley. This had that same dark and twisted feel that Confessions had.

This book follows four girls and the affect that a murder of their friend has on their lives. They were the last ones to see Emily alive and they even saw her murderer but we're unable to help police catch him. Emily's mother says something to the girls that will change their lives forever.

I was sucked in to this book from the beginning and never wanted to put it down. I would definitely recommend this book to others and I really hope that the publisher has plans to publish English translations of Kanae Minato's other work.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the galley.

Five friends go to play in their school playground one day during the vacations. By the end of that day, only four of them are still alive, with their best friend Emily murdered by a stranger who none of them seem to be able to recall, anonymised by his ordinariness. All four of them also have slightly different versions of what actually transpired on that fateful day, and the guilt they feel about their own part in the proceedings. From the child who didn't run fast enough to get help, to the child who inadvertently covered up some evidence as she tried to retain her dead friend's dignity.
Emily's death haunts them throughout their lives, with the deep-set trauma having a far-reaching effect on their fragile nascent psyches. Each of them ends up caught up and trapped in difficult lives, their own penance for their part in their Emily's untimely demise.
I won't share too much about their later lives, as this is the real meat of the story, and one well worth reading as it's a beautifully written tale of regret, self-blame and a shattering loss of innocence. Highly recommended.

The novel revolves around a group of friends in a small, rural town. The town is known for its fresh and clean air, which results in a company which makes precision instruments moving there. The workforce is not thrilled with the move, most come from Tokyo and don’t fit in well with the locals. One of the newcomers’ children, Emily, makes friends with a group of local girls – Sae, Maki, Akiko and Yuko. As the blurb states, one holiday the five schoolgirls, who were 10 at the time, are playing when they are approached by a man who chooses Emily to help him with a task. An hour or more later, Emily is found violated and murdered.

At the time of this book, there was a statute of limitations during which criminals could be charged and so there is fifteen years to find the murderer. When the girls are thirteen, Emily’s mother invites them to her house and informs them that they have a choice – they must either discover who the murderer is or she will expect a penance from them, otherwise she would get revenge on them.

As the statute of limitations draws near, each of the four survivors tells us her story, both how she saw the event then and how her life has turned out. No one is unscathed, but the mother’s curse is as damaging to the girls as the actual murder was. It’s an absorbing story, both fascinating and disturbing. It’s not just about the crime, but about culture and identity, about family relationships, about rural life versus city life. It’s also about secrets and how they can haunt us.

When I began reading I had expected a violent revenge story, but what I got was much darker and more insidious. Penance explores grief, guilt, and the different ways that people deal with trauma.

The story begins innocently enough, following a group of country girls living in a rural town where everyone knows each other. There is a lot of commentary on rural versus city life and the way that people from both walks of life view each other. The town is simple, ideal even, safe enough where residents felt comfortable leaving their doors unlocked and let their children play outside unattended. It reminded me of my own childhood and it really hit home how different life was back then compared to the present day. The horrible events that happen throughout each of the stories to me were very realistic scenarios, making them that much more horrifying in a visceral way.

The chapters tell the stories of each of the girls, now young women, and the way that they experienced the crime and their lives afterward. The stories are told in the first person and because of this, I felt fully immersed in the lives of these women and understood them emotionally. The scars left behind by the tragedy are clear, shaping and distorting each of the girls’ personalities as they are ripped away from childhood innocence and thrust into adulthood. Each of the girls finds themselves haunted by the past, dissecting the event, questioning their own culpability in the death of their friend, worrying over what they did and what they could’ve done, and dreading how close they were to a horrible fate themselves. Emily wasn’t the only victim that day.

To fully understand the tone of the narrative, it’s important to look at the title. Penance, to repent for one’s sins. The Japanese title is Shokuzai, which means atonement. It is only after repenting and learning from past mistakes that one can find absolution. Penance is about the messy path from suffering and agony to forgiveness, it is every bit as beautiful as it is disturbing.

A fair warning, some of the content is distressing and extremely difficult to handle. There were several times where, when I knew what was coming in the next scenes, I honestly had to put the book down to calm my nerves and wipe away tears before I could continue. I absolutely loved this book and cautiously recommend it for those that enjoy heart wrenching suspense stories.

I read Confessions from this author and loved it, a one sitting read and Penance was another one sitting read. It was strange and dark, occasionally heart breaking and beautifully done. Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel I was immediately hooked in to this tale of a group of children caught up in the horrific murder of one of their friends, a sinister threat from the girls mother and how that affected them growing up..

Penance is less a murder mystery and more a character drama – the murder, and the mothers emotionally charged “threat” setting off a chain of life events for the 4 girls and indeed for the mother herself. Each girl tells her tale, about that day and about their lives after, all of them in one way or another end up paying that “Penance” that was demanded of them at a young and impressionable age. Kenae Minato really delves into personality here, taking us on a twisted, atmospheric journey through the lives of these characters, whose realities differ so much but all are tied into a seemingly unbreakable bond to that one event.

The cultural aspects are equally involving, as I read I got a real sense of both the differences and the similarities between life in Japan and life here – there are different expectations, different society rules and hierarchy, but people are people everywhere. Grief, love, trauma, those things have no borders and I was struck by how beautifully the author managed to portray the feelings, the passion, the core heart of everyone we meet within the pages.

Utterly riveting, everything in Penance hovers underneath the surface, the decisions made, the actions taken, all informed by the past at differing levels. The plotting is taut and extraordinarily clever, its not until you come to the end of Penance and look back at it that you understand fully the complete tragedy. Because Penance is a tragedy, almost Shakespearean in nature, I devoured every word of it with a shivery intensity.

Absolutely Highly Recommended.

**Review also available on Goodreads and Amazon**

I burned through the last 75% of this in one extended sitting. I only stopped to eat, use the bathroom, and update my status on Goodreads when something remarkable happened, which was quite often, I must say.

Penance was the perfect book for me at this moment in my life. I've grown impatient with the same old, same old, and this book was anything but that. Oddest of all is, I should have hated this book. It does three things that usually annoy the fuck out of me:

#1. It has something I call the "Vantage Point Plot", wherein one dramatic scene is told from a bunch of different viewpoints. That normally gets old real quick, but here it was fresh because every chapter showed you the aftereffects of each individual, and each aftereffect was drastically different. Some were creepy as balls, others were tense, some were sad, but every single one of them was interesting. Thank fuck for that miracle.

#2. This is basically a mosaic novel. I've not had great success with mosaic novels. If you don't know what one is, I'll give you a brief explanation. A mosaic novel is a series of vignettes or short stories that are connected by one central event or theme. Here it works because we're so close to each character. The detailed explanations of each character's life at the beginning of their chapters might bore some of you. They bored me a bit. But by the end of each chapter I saw just how needed all that information was. Be patient with this one. Each section pays off.

#3. First-person POVs from multiple characters. This is a style I can't fucking stand. It rarely works well, especially when each character is speaking to someone off screen, as it were, like in novels based on an interview structure, but here it fits perfectly. In fact, any book I read from here on out that has chapters from different first-person POVs will be stacked and judged against this novel. It was so well done. I was never confused as to who's head I was in because each and every person got their own quarantined section. Beautiful.

Finally, this was just an easy read. Something I didn't have to think too hard about, but not so simple that I thought the author was speaking down to me. The translation is terrific. I don't feel that anything was lost in translation. I can't say that for certain, seeing as I don't speak Japanese and have not read the original text, but usually you can sit back and say, "Something about that doesn't sound right."

In summation: I am happy as hell that I snagged this one off NetGalley in return for the review you just read. I'll likely buy this in hardcover or paperback or whichever format it comes out in upon release in the States. It's rare that I buy books I've received ARCs of, but this will more than likely be one of them... as long as it's decently priced. You never know with this translated novels, seeing as how they have to essentially pay two authors. If you like your mysteries built with abnormal frames, give this one a look-see.

Final Judgment: Some of everything and not a thing bad.

Survivor guilt...

Five young girls sneak into their school playground on a holiday to practice volleyball. While there, a workman arrives and asks if one of them will help him do a small job in the changing room. It's a while before the other girls notice that Emily hasn't returned, and when they look for her, it's too late – all they find is her body. None of the girls is able to describe the man well – they are young, they weren't paying particular attention, they are suffering from shock. As time passes without an arrest, in her grief Emily's mother tells them they must either give the police enough information to catch the killer, or do something that she will accept as appropriate atonement. She gives them a deadline – the statute of limitations on the crime will run out in fifteen years...

In Minato's earlier excellent book, Confessions, she looked at the motivation for crime and at revenge. In this one, she takes a fascinating look at how a crime affects not only the direct victim, but the people touched by it in other ways. Each of the four surviving girls, now women, tells her tale in turn. We see how their immediate reactions to the crime were affected by their own personalities, and then Minato takes us into their families so that we can see how each of those personalities was formed. This provides a base for taking us forwards from the crime, seeing how it affected each child as she grew up – not just the horror of the day itself, but the guilt of knowing that they had neither protected Emily nor helped bring her killer to justice, and the fear of knowing that the killer is still at large knowing they are the only witnesses.

As the deadline for the statute of limitations approaches, we see how for each girl this leads indirectly to a kind of crisis. Minato doesn't forget the grieving mother in all this – years on, does she still feel the same? Does she still require the girls to do penance, or has time enabled her to see that the girls were victims too? And lastly, almost as a minor story, will time allow the girls to recognise small clues that they missed in their youth, in time for the murderer to be caught?

When reading Japanese fiction, I often find the society so different from our Western one that it's almost incomprehensible to me. I've commented in the past that there seems to be a huge disconnect between the generations, that young people seem to have rejected the values of their parents but haven't yet found anything to replace them with, leaving a dangerous moral vacuum. Intriguingly, that isn't the case with this one. Perhaps because it's set in a small town rather than in Tokyo, the family structures seem stronger and more traditional, though we see clearly how sons are still more valued than daughters. Some of these families have problems, indeed, but the kind of problems we would be familiar with in our own society. I also noted that Minato mentioned in passing that there seems to be a slight move away from driving the children quite so hard towards educational success at the expense of all else – a small recognition of the harm that can be caused by the excessive stress that was being put on young people. And this is one of the reasons I enjoy her books – she always provides intriguing insights into society, especially family life and education, in modern Japan.

But she also tells a great tale! I was completely caught up in each girl's story and, while there are moments that stretch credulity, it never goes past the breaking point. The characterisation is excellent, and though we see the murder again and again, each voice and perspective is original enough to stop it feeling repetitive. After the murder, the girls' lives go off in different directions, so Minato has room to cover a lot of ground with four very different stories, but all linked to the central event so that with each telling the reader learns a little more about the lead up to and aftermath of the crime. And in the final chapters she manages to bring it all together, so that there's a real feeling of resolution – not a slick happy ending, but a sense of closure for some of the characters at least. Another excellent novel from Minato – my tentative love affair with the strangeness of Japanese crime fiction continues...

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Mulholland Books.