Safe Return Doubtful

translated by Stephen Snyder
Though this comes over at times as quite contrived, it is highly entertaining.
On the first page, Moriguchi, a middle-school teacher passes out poisoned milk to her students in a gesture coldly calculating; a traditionally nurturing action taking on grotesque dimensions. It gradually dawns on you that this is no commonplace crime novel, and that what you’re reading is far deeper and larger. It is immediately thrilling. As with Nip The Buds Shoot The Kids this is a twist on a manga culture of cuteness; small, conventionalised girls with disproportionately large busts and eyes (nicknamed kawaii), as if a surfeit of saccharin has made the country sick, and the remedy is the opposite, random violence interestingly bound up with the phenomena it brutalises.
Just a few pages later, we learn that Moriguchi’s four-year-old daughter, Manami, was murdered by two of the students in Moriguchi’s class.
This nasty little book is that rare creature in fiction; an ambitious investigation into the darkest corners of human nature that is a thoroughly good read. Turning the pages with a growing sense of horror the ‘confessions’ of the participants reveal a series of chillingly calculated crimes that come to seem less the work of psychopaths than of ordinary (if not damaged) 13 year olds. It is about about the damage inflicted by adults upon children, and the ways in which the young sometimes respond, but more twisted and amplified.
This is a debut novel written by a former home economics teacher and housewife, between chores – what works so well is her blending of extremes, brutality and eroticism, innocence and depravity, love and hate, good and evil, life and death.