FILM

MURDER IS EASY: LIFE IS FRAGILE

the strange confessions of Tetsuya Nakashima's Confessions

By Ruoxuan Wang

A teacher and her students

It all begins with noisy students: They’re laughing, drinking boxed milk, sending text messages to each other, ignoring their teacher. It’s essentially a basic Japanese middle school scene. The laughter gradually stops when the teacher talks about her daughter’s death, and her boyfriend, the girl’s father who had HIV and died. Then she adds: “Manami is dead, but it was not an accident…She was murdered by two students from our class.” Finishing up, she says, “I will teach you something important” and writes the word “LIFE” on the blackboard. This is the beginning of her revenge and the opening of Tetsuya Nakashima’s Confessions. The Japanese pictograph for life is the key to the film. For all its nuttiness, crazed characters, and improbable events, Confessions is essentially a realistic depiction of how fragile life is and how joyfully people go about destroying it. Nakashima structures the movie around a series of confessions that prove the same point over and over again: it’s easy to kill and destroy.

The movie begins with the teacher’s confession, the story of her child’s death and the beginning of her revenge. She does two things at once: she tells a story about how fragile life is and then she demonstrates how easy it is to hurt another person. She terrorizes many of her students with the HIV-in-the-milk trick. If you’re sharp, you know that that’s not how HIV is transmitted, but how many middle school students are sharp in that way. She certainly gets a reaction and we know that right from the beginning Nakashima is pushing the boundaries of guilt and innocence.

What does the teacher stand for?

It’s important to point out that this is not a mystery. She gives enough hints to the class that we know and they know who the two student murderers are and then kind of, sort of, urges them to psychologically destroy the boys. At the same time, this is her way of leading her students to understand their culpability and understand the preciousness of life—“I want them to get a clear understanding of the grave crime they have committed, and live with the burden of guilt.” Her confession is both a confession and an attack and proves the same thing: it’s easy to hurt another person. She certainly mentally destroys Naoki, one of the killers.

Naoki can’t take the mental stress of the HIV ruse and decides not to go to school anymore. The new teacher, a wonderfully overserious idiot, urges and gets the other students to write him encouraging letters to coax him back. However, the naive teacher is the only one who does not know the true reason why Naoki isn’t returning. He and we think that the kids in the class are sending sweet messages, but we find out that the letters have secret messages, calling Naoki a murderer and telling him to go to hell! Even in a shocking movie, this is shocking. Again, Nakashima is demonstrating the level of cruelty normal people will go to destroy another person and this confession cuts more deeply because they are children. In this movie, no one is innocent.

How could Naoki? Apparently, it's easy

Another crucial confession in the movie comes from Naoki’s Mother. When the new teacher comes to visit Naoki in another vain attempt to coax him back to school, she complains that Mrs. Yuko only cares about her daughter and not her students. We should stop and think about how anyone would think this is a real criticism. Her son’s teacher cares more about the murder of her daughter than her students. The moment breezes by, but her logic is breathtakingly callous. The answer is why wouldn’t she care more about her daughter? And this comes from one of the most sympathique characters in the movie. She blames her son’s condition on Mrs. Yuko -- he yells and screams and incessantly washes everything he touches for fear of contaminating himself -- but only glancingly refers to her son’s culpability in the murder.

The mother is a sympathetic character, but she also seems to have no feelings for Mrs. Yuko’s loss and her confession is a clear depiction of how care only goes one way—towards one’s own feelings and not others. It’s as if Nakashima is telling us that the idea of care doesn’t matter unless it extends to those we don’t know and love.

Later on, we find out that Naoki was the one who suggested that Shuya use Manami—the teacher’s daughter—as an experiment for his anti-theft purse design. Shuya designed the purse and thought it was harmful enough to kill someone, or at least he hoped that it was. However, it was not strong enough, and in the end, it is Naoki who kills Manami, throwing her body into a pool and allowing her to drown. The boys’ confessions around Manami’s murder are chilling. Shuya wants to kill Manami because he craves his mother’s attention and that irritates Naoki who finds Shuya weak. So, even though Naoki never intended to kill Manami, he does it to prove that he is better than Shuya. With both boys, there is no concern for the lives they destroy, which, of course, is Nakashima’s point.

These two were meant for each other

Another interesting confession in the movie is Mizuki’s, a classmate of Shuya and Naoki’s and eventually Shuya’s girlfriend. She is the only student who does not participate in bullying Shuya and because of that she becomes a target. She tells Shuya that someone like Mrs. Yuko, who tells people how important life is, would never try to get revenge on people by injecting HIV blood into school kids’ milk. She was also asked to visit Naoki every week with the new teacher and she eventually informs the teacher and the school about how he’s being tortured. She finally asks, “Is life really important? Is everybody’s life the same?” Mizuki’s question is crucial to the movie and how Nakashima challenges our sense of morality and ethics.

Towards the end of the movie Shuya makes a different type of confession. He was born into a family in which his mother was an electronic engineer who married a mediocre man. It’s an incredibly funny phrase, “a mediocre man,” as if that could explain a murder. She never let him read fairy tales or cartoons, instead, she explains the laws of physics to him. She takes apart toys and asks Shuya to understand how they’re assembled and to put them back together. However, she doesn’t give up on her career and eventually abandons him. His father married another woman and they, too, didn’t pay much attention to him. Though the mother’s abandonment hurts more, because she’s a lot smarter than his father, which is another one of Nakashima’s mordant jokes.

Mizuki essentially retells Shuya’s life story to him in another kind of confession, accusing him of suffering from an Oedipus complex and being a slave to his own inferiority. And for that he kills her in a fit of rage. It is ironic that even though he claims that Mizuki’s life is important, in the end he is the one who kills her. And all because she is the only one who understands him. It’s certainly one of Nakashima’s biggest ironies, that at the moment that he kills Shuya for accusing him of having an Oedipus complex, he gets a message on his website from his mother saying that she wants to meet him.

What sort of society is this?

Shuya thinks that his mother is going to give him a big hug and tell him how much she misses him. In gratitude, he decides not to go because he wants to amaze her with his next big move: he plans to detonate a bomb while giving a speech to the whole school, killing both himself and everyone else. At the end of the movie, Mrs. Yuko is back to make one final confession and the film goes full circle: it starts with her confession and it ends with her confession. She tells Shuya that she pretended to be his mother and found out about his plot to blow up the school from a video he posted. She then removed the bomb from the school and reinstalled it in his mother’s office. So that when he tried to blow up the school, he really blew up his beloved mother. Or at least that’s what she tells him.

Did she really do that? We do not know, but the teacher who advocates the importance of life is destroying life in a different way. She ruins Shuya and Naoki mentally, crushing their hearts and souls and everything else about them. In the end, Confessions isn’t about a confession but is about multiple confessions and each one tells us the same thing over and over again. It is easy to destroy and that lives are very, very fragile.

©Ruoxuan Wang and the CCA Arts Review