Confessions

Content Warning: Confessions depicts extreme bullying, child abuse, murder, mental health crises, a bombing, and murder-suicide. The text contains some stigmatizing language surrounding HIV/AIDS and the misgendering of a character; this guide reproduces such language only through quotations.

Shūya’s inventions represent his connection (or desire for connection) with his mother, an electrical engineer. These inventions represent the science and engineering that formed their bond—she used scientific laws as bedtime stories instead of fairy tales. She also left Shūya for an electrical engineering professorship at a prestigious university, so Shūya hopes that science will bring her back to him, first through the science fair—which in fact connects him unwittingly with his stepfather, his mother’s second husband— and then, by forced association, through increasingly dangerous contraptions: the shocking coin purse and the bomb. Both of these inventions are ironic in their intended purposes because they eliminate female family members, rather than draw them closer. The coin purse distances Shūya first from Moriguchi (a surrogate mother of sorts as his homeroom/science teacher) and then from Manami, thereby separating a child from her mother as Shūya was once separated from his. Shūya’s bomb—ironically triggered by a phone, another device meant to connect rather than separate—eventually kills Shūya’s mother, rather than reuniting them, and Moriguchi stresses the finality of Shūya’s actions by withholding his mother’s final words from him.