CY@CY Says Welcome to my dreamscape. Where a Lim is also a Ling.
I have been looking for thrillers by Japanese authors after getting hooked by Keigi Higashino’s books so when I saw Penance by Kanae Minato, I decided to add this novel to my book collection. Kanae Minato is known as the “Queen of Iyamisu” which is literally an “eww” mystery. This is a subgenre of mystery fiction, which deals with the grotesque and visceral and the dark side of human nature. Literally, when reading a ‘eww’ mystery, readers are expected to blurt out “Eww”.
Penance by Kanae Minato
Penance charts how a traumatic rape and murder impact four young women, Sae, Maki, Akiko, and Yuka, who were childhood friends of the victim, Emily. One summer day, when they’re all 10, they sneak into their school playground on a holiday to practice volleyball by the swimming pool. A man in workman attire approaches the girls. Claiming he has no ladder, he needs someone to help him reach a ventilating fan in a pool changing room. Emily goes with him. When she doesn’t return, the other girls go looking for her only to discover her dead.
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, Emily’s grief-stricken mother Asako tells them they must either give the police enough information to catch the killer, or atone for what they have done in a way that she finds acceptable, failing which she will exact her revenge. She gives them a deadline – before the statute of limitations on the crime that run out in fifteen years.
As the deadline for the statute of limitations approaches, Sae, Maki, Yuka, and Akiko give their accounts of the tragedy and describe how Emily’s death and Asako’s threat have impacted their lives. Asako reveals her side of the story as the mother of the victim.
I found Penance a beguiling, beautifully written novel and I finished it in one day. It is a dark unnerving tale of tragedy, guilt, penance, obsession, alienation and psychological trauma. Bring on Kanae Minato’s first novel Confessions!