Opening
Two final confessions collide to end the story in a blaze of cold clarity. Shūya Watanabe writes a grandiose “last will” and prepares to bomb his school, only for Yūko Moriguchi to hijack his plan mid-detonation. Her call strips away his mythology, redirects his violence, and completes a punishment built with surgical precision.
What Happens
Chapter 5: The Believer
Shūya uploads his “Last Will and Testament” to his website, “The Genius Professor’s Laboratory,” and announces he has planted a bomb beneath the school gym podium—timed with an assembly where he is slated to receive an award. In a sprawling, narcissistic manifesto, he insists murder is not inherently immoral and contrasts “hollow” social ethics with the scientific rationality taught by his mother, Jun Yasaka. He recounts idolizing her brilliance as an electrical engineer, excusing her abuse as the byproduct of thwarted genius. After the divorce, she leaves him with a conditional promise—she will return if he ever needs her—and that promise becomes his lifelong obsession.
Pushed aside in his father’s reconstituted household, Shūya turns his exile into a laboratory and begins inventing to win his mother’s gaze. His “Shocking Coin Purse” earns a science-fair prize judged by a professor from her university, but the moment passes unnoticed and is eclipsed by the sensational “Lunacy Incident.” Concluding that only a spectacular crime will force the world—and his mother—to see him, he plots the murder of Manami Moriguchi, using the pliable Naoki Shitamura as his unwitting witness.
Shūya narrates Manami’s death as the triumph of his invention, then blames Naoki for tossing her body into the pool and turning a perfect crime into a supposed accident. When Yūko Moriguchi delivers her classroom confession, he reels at her claim that his device failed—but is then ecstatic at the possibility he has contracted AIDS, believing the tragedy will summon his mother back. A negative test shatters that fantasy. He starts seeing Mizuki Kitahara, who tells him Moriguchi’s story was a bluff. When she calls out his “mother complex” and says his mother has abandoned him, he strangles her. The final blow lands at his mother’s university: he discovers she has remarried—ironically, to the science-fair judge—and is pregnant. Feeling betrayed beyond repair, he reframes the bomb as ultimate Revenge against her. At the assembly, he presses the detonator—and nothing happens. His phone rings.
Chapter 6: The Evangelist
The chapter unfolds as that phone call. Moriguchi says she disarmed the bomb after finding his “love letter to Momma” online and calls him an “idiot” for blaming everyone but himself. She reveals the truth about her earlier plot: her husband, Sakuranomi, knew she had drawn his blood and secretly followed her to school, swapping the HIV-tainted milk with fresh cartons because he believed the boys could be rehabilitated. His dying wish was that she let go of hatred. She admits she could not.
Moriguchi then confesses how her revenge continued. She manipulated the new homeroom teacher, Mr. Terada, by feigning guidance in the spirit of Sakuranomi, pushing him to hound Naoki—knowing it would crush both him and his mother. She regrets the collateral bullying of Mizuki but still places responsibility at Shūya and Naoki’s feet. With Naoki having killed his mother and spiraled into madness, she considers that side of her revenge complete.
Shūya’s online will hands Moriguchi the key to the rest: his absolute worship of his mother. After disarming the school bomb, she visits Jun Yasaka, shows her Shūya’s website, and lays out everything he has done. As sirens wail behind Moriguchi’s voice, she reveals the final twist: she relocated Shūya’s explosive to Laboratory Three in the Electrical Engineering Department at K University—his mother’s lab. By pressing the button, Shūya has destroyed the center of his mother’s life. Moriguchi ends the call by declaring this destruction the beginning of his “recovery” and the end of her revenge.
Character Development
Both narrators strip themselves bare: one through self-mythologizing confession, the other through pitiless cross-examination. Identity, for each, collapses into the choices they refuse to disown.
- Shūya Watanabe: A brilliant but emotionally stunted narcissist who recasts abuse as destiny and cruelty as logic. He murders to be seen, then is forced to annihilate the thing his identity worships—his mother’s genius—rather than die a martyr.
- Yūko Moriguchi: No longer a righteous victim, she becomes a calculating architect of punishment. She rejects legal justice for personal, precise retribution that exploits her enemy’s deepest wound.
- Mizuki Kitahara: A lonely, perceptive truth-teller who punctures Shūya’s delusion and pays with her life.
- Naoki Shitamura: A malleable accomplice whose persecution and collapse complete one half of Moriguchi’s vengeance.
- Jun Yasaka: Demythologized as a woman who simply moves on—remarried and pregnant—she exposes Shūya’s grand narrative as self-serving fantasy.
Themes & Symbols
Moriguchi perfects Revenge as intimate warfare. She refuses to kill Shūya; instead, she scripts a fate in which his own hand destroys his mother’s world. The punishment fits not the scale of his crime but the architecture of his ego, ensuring a lifelong sentence of knowledge and guilt rather than a clean ending.
The chapters also crystallize Perception vs. Reality. Shūya’s manifesto builds a tragic-hero myth, only for Moriguchi’s call to detonate each illusion: the HIV blood is a decoy, his mother’s devotion a fantasy, his final act already repurposed. Underneath, Motherhood and Family Dysfunction drives every choice—Shūya commits crimes to resurrect a mother’s gaze; Moriguchi avenges the child she lost by weaponizing someone else’s maternal bond.
- The Bomb: A portable shrine to Shūya’s ego and grievance. Moriguchi transforms it from indiscriminate spectacle to precision instrument, turning his need to be noticed into the instrument of his own ruin.
Key Quotes
“Last Will and Testament.”
Shūya frames his confession as legacy, not apology. The phrase signals his desire for immortality through spectacle and primes the reader for the narcissism that follows.
“The Genius Professor’s Laboratory.”
Even his website title advertises a self-bestowed genius. The branding fuses intellect with self-worship, foreshadowing how he weaponizes “science” to justify cruelty.
Moriguchi calls Shūya an “idiot.”
The blunt insult punctures his grand theory of himself. Her language refuses his metaphysics and redirects the conversation to responsibility.
Moriguchi mocks his “love letter to Momma.”
Her phrasing exposes the true audience of his crimes: not society, not the school, but his mother. It reframes every act as a plea for attention.
The beginning of his “recovery.”
By naming the catastrophe a recovery, Moriguchi inverts therapeutic language into punishment. Healing, here, means living with the truth he can no longer outrun.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters fuse structure and revelation into the novel’s decisive blow. Shūya’s monologue immerses us in a meticulously crafted delusion; Moriguchi’s call dismantles it point by point, reassigning agency and consequences. The twist—relocating the bomb to Jun Yasaka’s lab—resolves every lingering thread: it clarifies Manami’s death, exposes the HIV bluff, confirms Naoki’s engineered collapse, and delivers a punishment tailored to Shūya’s core obsession. The result is a bleak meditation on justice and evil in which truth does not set anyone free—it binds them to what they chose.