Kokuhaku

At the start, I find myself thinking of King's Rage, except from the other side. A teacher tells her pupils on the last day of class that she's about to retire, but first she wants to tell them why she became a teacher, why she's acted the way she has, and ... that two of them killed her daughter and she's about to take her revenge.

But that's just the beginning of the novel, which then proceeds to go through one Rashomonism after another, handing the microphone to different players in the drama to let them give their take on what happened, what led up to it, and where they're going with it now. Minato goes through the same story again and again, not necessarily changing what happens but how and why, mixing in influences from Burgess to Dostoevsky to Murakami (not the jazz'n'cats one, the Audition one) to examine just how we justify our actions to ourselves.

There are bits about the novel that feel a little too written; since it consists of six monologues, there's the inevitable question of whether someone would actually say or write this, or whether they'd make this and that analysis at that point, or if that's just Minato wanting to set the scene. And anyway, part of her point is that all of the characters are various shades of fucked up and seeing as several of them are young teenagers who take themselves much too seriously, I absolutely buy it.

3? 4? 3? 4? In the end, I'm leaning upwards. Not a perfect novel, but a vicious twisty little slice of darkness anyway.