Tag Archives: foreign language

Confessions by Kanae Minato (Translated by Stephen Snyder)

Book cover for Confessions by Kanae Minato

Her pupils killed her daughter. Now, she will have her revenge.

After an engagement that ended in tragedy, all Yuko Moriguchi had to live for was her four-year-old child, Manami. Now, after a heartbreaking accident on the grounds of the middle school where she teaches, Yuko has given up and tendered her resignation. 

But first, she has one last lecture to deliver. She tells a story that will upend everything her students ever thought they knew about two of their peers, and sets in motion a maniacal plot for revenge. 

As avid a reader as I am and with as much free time as I now have, it is still rare for me to finish a book in less than two days. Confessions I finished in one evening.

Confessions is a story about revenge. About having it and the repercussions it brings. Not just to those who are on the receiving end but also to those around them.

Told in a series of stories, each one is dedicated to a person involved with the events. The first one is told in manner of a lecture by Yuko Moriguchi, a teacher who is on the verge of retiring. Having lost her daughter she is naturally distraught and it is when she has pieced the pieces together of what happened that she plans (and executes) her revenge.

Confessions is a dark and twisted tale. Twisted in the way that just when you believe you know which way the story is going, Minato causes the story to shift and take a completely different direction. It is not a nice book, several reviews I have seen online call it “fucked up” and I completely concur. It is almost akin to a train wreck – horrifying and yet one cannot look away.

Horror fans are likely to be keen on this particular book. Especially if you are like me and enjoy the more psychological aspect of horror and less of the blood and gore aspect. Certainly not for the feint of heart but a good read nonetheless.

Provided for Review: The Plotters by Un-su Kim (Translated by Sora Kim-Russell)

This book was provided for review by the kind folks at Netgalley. Thank you!

The important thing is not who pulls the trigger but who’s behind the person who pulls the trigger—the plotters, the masterminds working in the shadows. Raised by Old Raccoon in The Library of Dogs, Reseng has always been surrounded by plots to kill—and by books that no one ever reads. In Seoul’s corrupt underworld, he was destined to be an assassin.

Until he breaks the rules. That’s when he meets a trio of young women—a convenience store worker, her wheelchair-bound sister, and a cross-eyed obsessive knitter—with an extraordinary plot of their own.

The Plotters is one of those novels that doesn’t quite fit in to any one genre. On the one hand you have a dark novel filled with violence and a game of cat and mouse that keeps one guessing up to the last pages. On the other hand, you have an almost slice-of-life type of story with the main character, Reseng, simply trying to get through another day. It is an interesting mixture and a dichotomy that shouldn’t work yet somehow does.

Now I will not lie to you dear reader, there is a good deal of violence in this book. Not surprising considering this is a book about assassins. People shoot at each other, have knife fights, so forth and so on; and while the fight scenes don’t go in to too much detail, there is still the potential that some readers could find it triggering.

While The Plotters was an enjoyable read, it did start at a kind of slow pace. For the majority of the first half of the book we are following Reseng as he goes about his business as an assassin. It isn’t until over halfway through the book that we meet the three women who challenge his views of the underworld in which he resides. Perhaps if he had met these women earlier, the book would have taken a different turn from what it did.

On the whole, I liked reading The Plotters. While I am quite sure some of the nuances were lost in the translation from Korean to English, it was still enough to keep me interested and reading. Readers who enjoy darker, film noir type stories will likely enjoy this one as well.