Confessions

by Kanae Minato

I suppose you could say I became a teacher simply because I grew up in a very poor family.

Lots of people fritter away their lives complaining that they were never able to find their true calling. But the truth is that most of us probably don’t even have one. So what’s wrong, then, with deciding on the thing that’s right in front of you and doing it wholeheartedly? That’s what I did, and I have no regrets.

Then some serious student gathers the courage to ask about the meaning of life…and then the drivel continues. In the last scene, the serious student usually ends up apologizing to the troublemaker for having been insensitive…which might be fine for TV, but how about in real life? Have any of you ever had a personal issue that seemed so pressing that you wanted to interrupt class to talk about it? There’s too great an emphasis placed on the sheep gone astray. Personally, I have more respect for the serious student, the one who never got into trouble in the first place. But those kids never get the starring roles, either on TV or in real life. It’s enough to make the well-behaved student doubt the value of his efforts.

I’m sure when you text me saying you want to die, you truly believe on some level that “life has no meaning,” as you all seem to like to say. And I’m sure that from your own self-absorbed point of view, you feel as though you’re all alone in the great wide world. That your troubles are completely overwhelming. But I have to say that I’m less interested in catering to your adolescent whims and more concerned that you grow up someday to be people who are capable of considering the feelings of others—for example, the feelings of the person who receives such a thoughtless message in the middle of the night.

Manami died because I was supposed to be looking out for her and I wasn’t vigilant enough.

So why am I resigning? Because Manami’s death wasn’t an accident. She was murdered by some of the students in this very class.

The fact that society permits the consumption of alcohol at twenty doesn’t mean it actively recommends that its members drink—or get drunk. Nevertheless, the legal age limit for drinking no doubt plays an important role in promoting the notion that you’re somehow missing out on something if you don’t drink once you’re old enough to do so—even if you don’t particularly feel like drinking in the first place.

That case and others like it started a debate about the need to revise the Juvenile Law, and in April of 2001 a new version was passed that included lowering the age of criminal responsibility from sixteen to fourteen. But most of you are thirteen. What, then, does age mean, exactly?

All we had were exaggerated reports of her crime and vague conjectures about her dark mental state, and the whole thing faded away, with the truth completely unknown. But does that kind of reporting, that sort of public information, seem adequate? All it succeeded in doing was planting knowledge of the existence of this sort of utterly inhuman criminal in the minds of some of our young people—and encouraging that pathetic minority of their peers who already admire or even worship that sort of senseless criminal.

I do not want to be a saint. I am not being noble by keeping the identity of A and B a secret. I haven’t told the police because I simply don’t trust the law to punish them. A fully intended to kill Manami but didn’t actually cause her death; while B had no desire to kill her but brought about her death.

I wish I could electrocute A. Drown B like he did my daughter. But neither punishment would bring back Manami. Nor would they be able to repent for their crimes if they were already dead. I wanted them to understand the value, the terrible weight, of human life, and once they’d understood, I wanted them to fully realize the consequences of what they had done—and to live with that realization.

“Your predecessor is responsible for Naoki’s emotional difficulties,” she said. “If every teacher were as dedicated and enthusiastic as you clearly are, this would never have happened.” As I watched her, I knew Naoki hadn’t told her what you’d said and done to him that last day in class. If he had, she wouldn’t have been so full of herself, and she couldn’t have sat there bad-mouthing you. Since he hadn’t told her, that meant he was suffering up there all by himself.

Don’t worry! Imagine happiness! Everyone wins! Maybe you too? Unless you don’t? Remember everything! Don’t ever forget! Everyone knows! Really we do! Everyone knows! Remember!

It’s much easier to condemn people who do the wrong thing than it is to do the right thing yourself.

On the other hand, it’s easy to join in condemning someone once someone else has gotten the ball rolling. You don’t even have to put yourself out there; all you have to do is say, “Me, too!” It doesn’t end there: You also get the benefit of feeling that you’re doing good by picking on someone evil—it can even be a kind of stress release. Once you’ve done it, though, you may find that you want that feeling again—that you need someone else to accuse just to get the rush back. You may have started with real bad guys, but the second time around you may have to look further down the food chain, be more and more creative in your charges and accusations.

I’m not really sure how you feel about this, but I’ve been thinking about what it takes to admit you can’t do something when you really can’t do it. I know you don’t like kids to give up when they haven’t even tried—I know that’s wrong—but I think you also have to be really brave to admit you can’t do something when you really just can’t.

“It was almost like Yoshiteru-sensei was hunting him. But he isn’t ever thinking about what’s best for us anyway. We’re just a mirror he uses to stare at his own reflection. None of this would have happened if he wasn’t so self-absorbed.”

That made things a little complicated. If your mother is murdered, as a relative of the victim you should hate the murderer; but if the murderer is your brother, then you have to face the criticism that goes along with being a relative of a criminal while worrying about the chances for your brother’s rehabilitation and apologizing to the victims—of which you happen to be one! How do you do all this at once?

Murders aren’t as rare in Japan as they used to be. In fact, they’re so common that most people just yawn when they hear about one on the TV news. But they can still stir up interest when they offer a look inside the workings of a dysfunctional family—let you see how badly things can go wrong. Dysfunctional love, dysfunctional discipline, dysfunctional education, dysfunctional human relations. At first, everybody wonders how something like that could happen to such a nice family; but when you poke around a bit the dysfunction comes out, and then you see that it was bound to happen, that it was only a matter of time.

Why did this happen? If I can’t figure that out, I won’t be able to accept my mother’s death. If I can’t figure it out, I won’t be able to accept my brother’s guilt. If I can’t figure it out, my father and sister and I won’t be able to go on as a family.

I wonder whether the real problem isn’t the names themselves, the whole idea of giving titles to children who stop going to school or looking for work. I believe we find our sense of stability, our place in life, by participating in society, by coming to belong somewhere and taking on the title of that position—mother, teacher, doctor. Not belonging anywhere, not having a title of some sort, means, in effect, that you’re not really a member of society. So it seems to me that most normal people, if they found themselves in that situation—without a position or title—would feel terrible anxiety and do everything they could to secure a place in the world as quickly as they could. But the moment you start calling those young people by those names—hikikomori, NEET, or whatever—those names become their titles, their sense of belonging.

The school or society may have something to do with the problem, but a child’s personality first and foremost is molded in the home, and you’ve got to assume the root cause is there, too, on some level. A child becomes a hikikomori because of something in his home life. If that’s the case, then Naoki is definitely not a hikikomori.

I just didn’t connect. Ever since starting middle school, I just didn’t connect. With what? With other people—with the teachers especially.

As I relaxed from the terror I’d been feeling, Watanabe’s last words came back to me again. He had been looking down on me all along, using me. He wanted to be a murderer, and he had exploited me to do it. But the girl was still alive. It was Watanabe’s plan that was the failure. You’re a failure! You’re a failure and you don’t even know it! You stupid loser. I’m not sure which came first: Moriguchi’s little girl regaining consciousness and looking up at me…or my letting go and dropping her in the water. But once I’d done it, I left without looking back. My legs weren’t shaking anymore. I’d succeeded where Watanabe had failed.

The one person I loved in the whole world died, and then that night when I got in the bath there was no more shampoo. Life is pretty much like that. But when I put a little water in the empty bottle and shook it, it filled up with these tiny bubbles. That’s when it hit me: That was me. Water down the last dregs of happiness and turn them into bubbles to fill the void. It may be nothing more than an illusion, but it was still better than the emptiness.

Our values are determined by the environment we grow up in; and we learn to judge other people based on a standard that’s set for us by the first person we come in contact with—which in most cases is our mother.

She said she would have gone if she’d been single, but that she was a mother now and couldn’t leave her child to go back to her research. It was a shock to realize I was the reason she had to refuse. I was holding her back. It wasn’t just that I was a worthless kid; I was actually denying worth to the person I loved most.

“From Momma?” she said, and I could see that she had the smile of someone who had been well loved—the smile I had lost forever. That’s when I realized I wanted her to die. I wanted to escape this humiliation, and the murder that would allow me to do it seemed even more precious.

I’d underestimated him. A cornered rat will bite the cat, and there were idiots all over Japan doing unimaginable things simply because someone had pushed them too far.

No form of revenge could have made me hate you any less. If I had cut the two of you to shreds with a knife, I think I would have hated the little pieces of you just the same. I realized that revenge was never going to wash away what had happened, never going to make me stop hating you with every ounce of my being.

He said he knew I might never forgive him, but that it was wrong to repay evil with evil, and that revenge would never make me feel any better. Even more importantly, he was convinced that you boys could be rehabilitated, made whole again, and he wanted me to believe it, too. He said I had to believe if I was ever to be whole again myself.

You refuse to see value in any human being except your mother, and you’ll have to live with the person that has made you. You can’t blame your crimes on someone else; they’re your own responsibility.

You see, I didn’t just disarm your bomb, I reset it somewhere else. Then I prayed you wouldn’t press the switch to detonate it. But of course you did.

Funny—I think I’ve finally had my fill of revenge now. And with luck, I’ve at last started you out on the road to your own recovery.