Confession Review
Asai and Ishikura are two longterm friends and regular mountain climbers, but one hike up Mount Obari changes their friendship forever. When the weather on the mountain turns dire, and Ishikura gravely injures himself, he decides to unburden his soul and confesses to a murder he committed several years ago. A miracle however leads the two men to a local cabin, where they can take shelter until a rescue team comes. They now just have to wait out the blizzard…and the growing sense of dread between the two of them, as the confession weighs heavily on them both. Can they both survive the night with this horrific secret kept between them?
Confession is a psychological thriller released in omnibus form, so you’ll get the full story and impact in this one release (thankfully, no dragging out the impending dread!) The manga was originally released in Japan in 1998, but re-released in a new edition in April 2024, which is the version that Kodansha have published in English, giving us the first experience of this story. If you’re wondering why it’s taken us this long to get this manga, its probably because Confession got a live action movie adaption, released in Japan earlier this year. I hope we get an opportunity to see this in live action too one day, because the manga is really good and I would like to see how it translated into another medium, and if it has the same impact.
This psychological thriller is structured like a three-act movie. You have the first act with the inciting incident (the confession), then finding the cabin for safety. The second act follows the two men as their friendship deteriorates and the horror of the situation sets in, with the third act being them coming to blows, with a final twist at the end for good measure. The sense of dread and isolation is effective in this book, making this thriller story so impactful that I ended up reading all the whole book in one sitting, because I needed to know what would happen next. The story happens over a 48-hour period but feels much longer for the characters, due to the horror creeping up on them, and the horrific situation of being completely trapped in a snowed-in cabin being enough to drive anyone crazy, notwithstanding the fact that you’re sharing it with a murderer.
We almost exclusively follow Asai and his internal monologue, but author Noboyuki Fukumoto’s choice works as we get a front-row seat to his mental decline. It’s not just his best friend’s confession of murdering someone that rocks him and his perception of his friend, but the fact that they’re both trapped in a cabin, with a blizzard right outside so there’s no way out and no one to contact for help. At first Asai innocently assumes that his friend is just uncomfortable with the confession, and is almost on the edge of reassuring his friend that he won’t tell anyone…but he never does. Instead his silence adds to the pressure of dread, as his mind starts to spiral and overanalyse every act his friend makes, and assumes it’s to serve as a way for him to later murder Asai and hide the confession.
Ishikura is an effective antagonist too. Artist Kaiji Kawaguchi frames and paints Ishikura in an imposing darkness, usually in shadow so you just can’t make out his facial expressions or what he’s really doing – or framing him to feel like he’s constantly watching Asai and also us. When we eventually see his decent into madness via Asai’s eyes, a lot of his dialogue is that of a madman, but you can also see where his train of thought comes from and how he’s been going through the same mental decline as Asai; we just weren’t as privy to it. Like a lot of these stories, there is a final story twist, which I obviously won’t spoil, but I will say it works and it made re-reading it again interesting within the new context, as there’s a lot that’s left unsaid. I also really like that the opening and closing pages have the same text, but now the context has changed, effective stuff overall.
There are two small things that I want to flag up however. One is that outside the pair, there’s also a ‘narrator’ style text that pops in only a handful of times across the book. Whilst the voice is fine for adding to the horror, or context to a certain plot development, the text style for the narrator is the same font used for the rest of the book. It easily goes from Asai talking/thinking to himself to the narrator explaining something in the same page and style font. At first I thought he randomly started talking in the third person. A simple text box or change in font, would have solved this issue, but never mind. The translation by Emily Balistrieri is overall very good.
Also, I know this is a weird criticism, but I don’t like the omnibus cover. Its a good picture of the cabin, isolated in the darkness and snow, however the awful white text covers most of it up and you can’t even really read what it’s saying as it’s in a slanted font and part of the text is going off the front cover. In fact it’s so hard to read, that they copied the same information in the black text in the bottom left corner, so you get the manga title, author and artist TWICE, for no reason. I think if you were to delete the white text, it would give the cover image more room to breathe and you could read the title clearly at the bottom. But that’s just me – rant over!
Confession is a really good psychological thriller that keeps its focus on an effective premise and delivers on the horrors too. A chilling tale to add to your manga collection.
Read a free preview on Kodansha’s website.
Our review copy from Kodansha (Vertical Books) was supplied by Turnaround Comics (Turnaround Publisher Services).
