Penance

Crime And Retribution

The striking cover shows half the face of a beautiful woman, with a tear rolling down her cheek. Best-selling Japanese writer Kanae Minato’s 2012 hit Penance (already turned into an acclaimed mini-series) has just come out in Philip Gabriel’s English translation.

The story is dark and morbid, but absorbing enough to complete in a single marathon reading session.  Set in un unnamed town distinguished from other regular place by the purity of its air, Penance is the story of four friends, Sae, Akiko, Maki and Yuka, scarred by a childhood incident.

They are about ten years old when a new factory in their town brings an influx of city people, who look down on the unsophisticated residents.  Among them is their classmate Emily, who somehow joins the gang in spite of her superior ways.

Emily is raped and killed while the girls are playing by the school’s poolside. All four saw the killer, but when questioned by the cops, cannot recall his face.  Emily’s grief-stricken mother Asako accuses the children of abetting the crime, because the murderer is never caught.

The girls are shocked and traumatized by their friend’s murder, but are just about coming out of it when Asako, before returning to Tokyo, summons the four and tells them that they have to either catch the killer or perform a penance that would satisfy her, or she would find a way to take revenge against them.

The girls are too young to realise the rage and sorrow behind a mother’s words; their lives are marked by it, and affected in tragic ways. They all wreck their own happiness in the quest for atonement, because there is no way they can trace the killer.

The book follows the lives of each of them and examines how they engineer their own unhappiness—they are punished for a tragedy in which they played no part, and could not possibly have prevented.

The story may be a bit too schematic in the way the girls’ stories turn out, but Minato makes the reader care for them and also gives a sharp glimpse of contemporary Japanese society from the point-of-view of various mother-daughter relationships—fathers play little or no part in their childrens’ upbringing and seem not to interfere in household matters. When the horrific incident takes place, in the midst of the Obon (a Japanese festival to honour the spirits of ancestors), the mother rush to their daughters’ aid, the dads are supposedly enjoying their food and drinks with visiting relatives. Surprisingly, however, no mother understands her daughter’s plight, but a kindly policeman does.

For fan of crime novels, worth a read.

Penance

By Kanae Minato

Translated by Philip Gabriel

Publisher: Hachette

Pages: 240