Confessions

by Kanae Minato

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.

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 wonder what sort of image comes to mind when people try to imagine what the Lunacy girl looks like. Think about it for a moment. Would a beautiful young woman call herself a lunatic?

We found ourselves hoping in vain for an end to the tears, and bitterly regretting that we had never made time for the three of us to be together.

Can you feel it in the air? Do you sense it in the atmosphere? Whether it’s stale or fresh, stagnant or fluid? I’m convinced that the auras of all the people in any place get together to create the mood. I guess I’m supersensitive to this kind of stuff—probably because I never got comfortable with my own aura.

I’ve changed my mind. I’ve realized that you have to have a trial, no matter how terrible the crime is. Not for the criminal but for the average people, to make sure they understand what’s happened and to keep them from taking the law into their own hands.

But even then, it takes a certain amount of courage to be the first one to come out and blame someone else. What if no one else joins you? No one else stands up to condemn the wrongdoer? 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!”

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!

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.

The proof of life was the fear of death.

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.

I planted a bomb at school today, the thirty-first of August.

“Extraordinary people have the right to violate conventional morals in order to bring something new into the world.”

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.

When people talk about “overwhelming regret,” it’s usually just a figure of speech, but I believe that my mother experienced exactly that. All the feelings that she had suppressed came out, and they were directed solely at me.

“Will you really come?” Instead of answering, she stopped and folded me in her arms. That was the last moment of happiness for her empty boy.

There was something admirable in this kind of stupidity.

I was slowly becoming as stupid as they were—and that there was actually something unusually pleasant about being stupid. I had even begun to think that I could be happy being nothing more than a member of this family of dummies.

you’re going to commit a crime, it ought to be something that can get people talking, whip the media into a frenzy—which means there’s only one crime that will do, and that’s murder.

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.

“I’m sure your mother loved you, but she made a hard choice in order to pursue her dream and she left you. She must have had her reasons, but in the end that’s what it comes down to: You were left behind. But if you miss her that much, why don’t you just go see her? Tokyo’s not that far away, and you know where she works. The only reason you’re still waiting for her is that you’re a coward. You’re afraid she’ll send you away. You figured out long ago that she doesn’t want you anymore.”

Life may be as fragile and light as a bubble, but her body had turned into a lump of lead.

Are you a complete idiot? You use that word about everyone and everything in your love letter, but what do you think that makes you? What have you ever really created? What have you ever done for any of those people you looked down on? Any of your “idiots”?

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.

Those were his last words. That we should not seek revenge even though someone had murdered our child. That the children who had killed Manami could be rehabilitated. I suppose if anyone ever deserved to be called a saint, he did.