The award-winning 1950 Akira Kurosawa film classic “Rashomon,” based on two short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, used different and contradictory accounts of a samurai’s death to explore humanity’s self-serving behavior. Kanae Minato’s first novel, “Confessions,” adopts a somewhat similar approach, with its six chapters providing first-person accounts of a crime in the words of different characters.
The story’s central figure is Yuko Moriguchi, a middle-school teacher and single mother. The father of her child refused to marry her when he learned he was HIV positive.