Unfortunately, I have not been able to read and review this book.

After losing and replacing my broken Kindle and getting a new phone I was unable to download the title again for review as it was no longer available on Netgalley.

I’m really sorry about this and hope that it won’t affect you allowing me to read and review your titles in the future.

Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity.
Natalie.

So Penance is one of those books that has a seriously intense initial plot that gradually fizzles out throughout the book until it's nothing but a failed plot device. And that's sad to say, as what happens is serious and terrifying, and reading it was like a smack in the face. But nothing meaningful really happens. It's a chain of events - terrible events - but they just happen because...fate? Consequence? Karma? Lord knows. What I do know is that I kept reading because I thought something significant was going to happen, and it never did. But it gets two stars for keeping me reading.

I was sucked in by this beautiful cover, but I found the book a little disappointing. The different narratives were compelling, but the ending felt a little anticlimactic. It's a bold choice to write a mystery novel without revealing the mystery, and I'm not sure it works here.

This book is really disturbing and intense. It deals with the aftermath of a murder in a small town in Japan, the four girls who witnessed the murder and the mother of the murdered child. What the author does so well is inhabit the very different personalities of the five women, each of whom tells their own story of the fifteen years following the incident. The writing is so sparse and matter of fact about truly horrific things that their brutality has a double impact upon the reader. The novel almost reads like five separate stories with a connecting theme, which allows for the great voices of each character. Being Japanese, the horror is very horrific and weird - the first girl's story was particularly disturbing for me. My only criticism is that I felt the mother's tale, which I think was supposed to be revelatory, was actually a little deflating. The author had done such a wonderful job of building tension and horror that the ending of the novel was a little bit of a let down. Having said that, this is a stunningly frightening book about the nature of survivor guilt and atonement.

Survivor guilt...

Five young girls sneak into their school playground on a holiday to practice volleyball. While there, a workman arrives and asks if one of them will help him do a small job in the changing room. It's a while before the other girls notice that Emily hasn't returned, and when they look for her, it's too late – all they find is her body. 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, in her grief Emily's mother tells them they must either give the police enough information to catch the killer, or do something that she will accept as appropriate atonement. She gives them a deadline – the statute of limitations on the crime will run out in fifteen years...

In Minato's earlier excellent book, Confessions, she looked at the motivation for crime and at revenge. In this one, she takes a fascinating look at how a crime affects not only the direct victim, but the people touched by it in other ways. Each of the four surviving girls, now women, tells her tale in turn. We see how their immediate reactions to the crime were affected by their own personalities, and then Minato takes us into their families so that we can see how each of those personalities was formed. This provides a base for taking us forwards from the crime, seeing how it affected each child as she grew up – not just the horror of the day itself, but the guilt of knowing that they had neither protected Emily nor helped bring her killer to justice, and the fear of knowing that the killer is still at large knowing they are the only witnesses.

As the deadline for the statute of limitations approaches, we see how for each girl this leads indirectly to a kind of crisis. Minato doesn't forget the grieving mother in all this – years on, does she still feel the same? Does she still require the girls to do penance, or has time enabled her to see that the girls were victims too? And lastly, almost as a minor story, will time allow the girls to recognise small clues that they missed in their youth, in time for the murderer to be caught?

When reading Japanese fiction, I often find the society so different from our Western one that it's almost incomprehensible to me. I've commented in the past that there seems to be a huge disconnect between the generations, that young people seem to have rejected the values of their parents but haven't yet found anything to replace them with, leaving a dangerous moral vacuum. Intriguingly, that isn't the case with this one. Perhaps because it's set in a small town rather than in Tokyo, the family structures seem stronger and more traditional, though we see clearly how sons are still more valued than daughters. Some of these families have problems, indeed, but the kind of problems we would be familiar with in our own society. I also noted that Minato mentioned in passing that there seems to be a slight move away from driving the children quite so hard towards educational success at the expense of all else – a small recognition of the harm that can be caused by the excessive stress that was being put on young people. And this is one of the reasons I enjoy her books – she always provides intriguing insights into society, especially family life and education, in modern Japan.

But she also tells a great tale! I was completely caught up in each girl's story and, while there are moments that stretch credulity, it never goes past the breaking point. The characterisation is excellent, and though we see the murder again and again, each voice and perspective is original enough to stop it feeling repetitive. After the murder, the girls' lives go off in different directions, so Minato has room to cover a lot of ground with four very different stories, but all linked to the central event so that with each telling the reader learns a little more about the lead up to and aftermath of the crime. And in the final chapters she manages to bring it all together, so that there's a real feeling of resolution – not a slick happy ending, but a sense of closure for some of the characters at least. Another excellent novel from Minato – my tentative love affair with the strangeness of Japanese crime fiction continues...

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Mulholland Books.

Five friends go to play in their school playground one day during the vacations. By the end of that day, only four of them are still alive, with their best friend Emily murdered by a stranger who none of them seem to be able to recall, anonymised by his ordinariness. All four of them also have slightly different versions of what actually transpired on that fateful day, and the guilt they feel about their own part in the proceedings. From the child who didn't run fast enough to get help, to the child who inadvertently covered up some evidence as she tried to retain her dead friend's dignity.
Emily's death haunts them throughout their lives, with the deep-set trauma having a far-reaching effect on their fragile nascent psyches. Each of them ends up caught up and trapped in difficult lives, their own penance for their part in their Emily's untimely demise.
I won't share too much about their later lives, as this is the real meat of the story, and one well worth reading as it's a beautifully written tale of regret, self-blame and a shattering loss of innocence. Highly recommended.

An intriguing novel, this kept me reading, but I found the ending a bit of a damp squib. I was disappointed that Penance didn't have the impact of Confessions by the same author. That said, it was still an entertaining and quite creepy read that I would recommend to those who enjoy more subtle psychological suspense.

Penance is a unique, compelling dark mystery. While relatively short and fast-paced, I flew through the story in less than a day. I was intrigued needing to find out what happened fifteen years earlier to these girls when five of them were together and one of them was found murdered. The mother of that girl vowed that the other girls will pay for her daughter's mother when no killer could be found. There are five separate first-person narratives throughout slowly revealing to us more information about the event fifteen years ago. Translated from Japanese, the format is a bit different. The mystery is engaging. I hope more of Kanae Minato's works get translated. I highly recommend to those who love character-driven mysteries.

Honestly, this is one of those books which I neither hated nor loved particularly much. It was a compelling mystery story, but it lacked something that meant I didn't connect with it as much as I might have.

Penance is the story of four women, 15 years on from the murder of their friend, Emily, in the village they grew up in. It's told as five separate accounts - letters or speeches or conversations - each of which provides a little bit more information about the killer. The final account is from Emily's mother, and draws the entire mystery to a close.

It's an easy and quick enough read, and the mystery itself is compelling, but there were parts which threw me, like when it turned out that Takahiro married Sae because he saw her as a human doll and he wanted to treat her as such and when it turned out Akiko's brother was sexually abusing his stepdaughter because his wife didn't want him to touch her so instead offered up her daughter and he accepted. It also felt a bit too short for me to entirely connect and sympathise with the characters (besides Yuka) . But then again, they probably weren't supposed to be entirely sympathetic.

So overall, it was a good mystery and kept me engaged enough to finish it in one night, but I never really fully connected with it.

Creepy and slightly disturbing. A story about the lives of four girls following the murder of one of their school mates. A quick and entertaining read.

I loved “Confessions,” by Japanese author, Kanae Minato, so I was delighted to be given her latest novel, which has appeared in translation, for review. This is not a typical ‘crime’ novel, so I suppose my best description of it would be ‘literary crime;’ although in Japan, Minato is known as, “the queen of iyamisu,” (literally, a ‘eww’ mystery – where readers blurt out, “Eww” while reading her books. I am not sure I agree with this, but certainly much of the substance of this novel lies beneath the surface and it is a dark and disturbing plot.

The novel revolves around a group of friends in a small, rural town. The town is known for its fresh and clean air, which results in a company which makes precision instruments moving there; much to the consternation of the workforce, who come largely from Tokyo. While they bemoan the lack of ‘cram’ schools and good shops, and the locals view them as exotic and unusual, one of the newcomers, Emily, makes friends with a group of local girls – Sae, Maki, Akiko and Yuko. One day the five schoolgirls are playing when they are approached by a man and, some hours later, Emily is found murdered.

It is worth pointing out that, at the time of this book, there was a statute of limitations during which criminals could be charged and so there is fifteen years to find the murderer. Emily’s mother informs the girls that they have a choice – they must either discover who the murderer is or she will expect a penance from them… As the statute of limitations draws near, we are introduced to the girls as women and discover what implications those childhood events had on their lives.

I found this a beguiling, beautifully written novel. As we hear what has happened to Sae, Maki, Akiko, Yuko and Emily’s mother, secrets are unearthed and tragedies unfold. The author allows the characters to speak to us directly and so we learn a lot about Japanese culture, expectations and behaviour along the way. It was interesting to see how rural Japanese communities are viewed by those in the big cities and of the way that so many newcomers in the town allowed the crime to be committed – respect for adults, combined with no longer expecting to know everyone in a rural community, allowed a stranger to commit a crime virtually unchallenged.

However, this novel is not really about the crime; although central to the storyline, this is far more about the aftermath of events and of how the words of Emily’s mother resonates through the girls lives. I am a great admirer of Kanae Minato’s writing and I hope more of her books appear in translation soon. A wonderful read and this would be a great book group choice, with so much to discuss. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, to review.

I haven't read Japanese fiction before and I think I had to get used to it a bit. It was okay, but I had to put more effort into following the story then I normally do. Enjoyable nonetheless