Confession

Kō Machida · 2005 CE · Novel · Japanese · Contemporary

In rural Kawachi in 1893, a young hired hand drifts into a feud and into a drunken friendship that ends in a mass killing in his village. The narration is a long monologue in the idiom of the local ballad, which makes the killer's reasoning part of the language itself. Based on an actual incident, it won the Tanizaki Prize and is Machida's best-known novel.

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