Manami Moriguchi

Quick Facts

• Role: Four-year-old daughter of the protagonist; the novel’s inciting victim
• Status: Deceased before the main narrative; appears through memories and confessions
• First appearance: In her mother’s classroom confession
• Key relationships: Mother (Yūko), father (Masayoshi Sakuranomi), babysitter (Mrs. Takenaka), killers (Shūya Watanabe, Naoki Shitamura)
• Emblem: “Snuggly Bunny” pouch and a pink sweatshirt, symbols of innocence

Who They Are

Manami Moriguchi is the absent center of Confessions: a child whose death shapes every voice and choice that follows. Through her mother, Yūko Moriguchi, Manami’s memory becomes the fuse for methodical Revenge. The contested stories of her final afternoon ask what we owe the dead and what the living will do in their names, pulling the novel into an uneasy debate over Justice and the Law, how grief distorts Perception vs. Reality, and the costs of love within Motherhood and Family Dysfunction.

Personality & Traits

Although she never speaks for herself, Manami’s presence is textured through sensory detail and small routines: softness, warmth, a child’s fixations. These details aren’t incidental; they’re the moral baseline the novel keeps returning to—what innocence looks like before others instrumentalize it.

• Innocent and childlike: Her devotion to the “Snuggly Bunny” character and soft, plush things marks her as an ordinary preschooler—and tragically supplies the bait used against her (the Snuggly Bunny pouch).
• Loving and affectionate: She needs to fall asleep touching her mother, a nightly ritual that dramatizes the intimacy of their bond and the depth of Yūko’s loss.
• Kindhearted initiative: She sneaks to the school pool to feed Mrs. Takenaka’s dog, Muku—compassion that exposes how a child’s empathy can be exploited by colder wills.
• Prone to tantrums: Her public meltdown over a chocolate pouch at a shopping center is quintessential four-year-old behavior—and later becomes damning data for her killers.
• Physicality as memory: “Downy cheeks” and “soft hair” recur as tactile anchors of grief, making her body’s absence painfully concrete.

Character Journey

Manami does not grow on the page; instead, the reader’s understanding of her is dismantled and rebuilt with each confession. At first, the police call the pool death a tragic accident. Yūko reframes it as murder orchestrated by an invention built by Shūya Watanabe. Later, the boys’ own accounts drag us closer to the truth’s most harrowing edge: Manami survived the initial shock, only to be deliberately drowned by Naoki Shitamura. This arc—less a development than a peeling back—turns her from a symbol into a touchstone for the novel’s moral calculus: every new “fact” repositions guilt, tests the limits of legal versus personal justice, and shows how narratives can be weaponized.

Key Relationships

• Yūko Moriguchi: Manami is the axis of Yūko’s life and the engine of her plan. Yūko’s fierce love transfigures into meticulous cruelty, suggesting a form of devotion that blurs the boundary between justice and vengeance—and uses Manami’s memory as both shield and sword.

• Masayoshi Sakuranomi: As a father who relinquishes legal ties due to his HIV diagnosis, his love is defined by absence and sacrifice. Manami’s single, fence-separated meeting with him encapsulates the novel’s theme of protection that still wounds.

• Shūya Watanabe: To Shūya, Manami is a proving ground for his device and his thirst for notoriety. His cold, experimental gaze erases her personhood, revealing how ego and alienation can rationalize atrocity.

• Naoki Shitamura: Naoki’s resentment of Yūko curdles into violence against the most vulnerable person available. His final act—drowning Manami after she revives—exposes malice born from panic, envy, and a craving to undo a mistake by compounding it.

• Mrs. Takenaka: The “Grannie” figure who cares for Manami anchors a gentler domestic world. Manami’s loyalty to Muku, the dog, shows how love can be sincere yet perilous when a child navigates adult spaces alone.

Defining Moments

Manami’s life is glimpsed in brief, intimate vignettes; her death is relitigated across the book. Each moment matters not for her development, but for how it reorients everyone else around her.

• The shopping center tantrum

  • What happens: A week before her death, Manami throws herself on the floor over a Snuggly Bunny chocolate pouch; Naoki witnesses it.
  • Why it matters: A mundane parenting dilemma becomes forensic data in a murder plot. Yūko’s lingering guilt underscores how ordinary maternal choices can be twisted into fatal opportunities.

• The pool “accident” becomes murder

  • What happens: The initial report calls it accidental. Yūko later reveals the boys’ involvement, Shūya describes his electrified pouch, and Naoki admits he drowned her after she briefly regained consciousness.
  • Why it matters: Each confession escalates culpability and strips away the comfort of randomness, forcing the reader to confront intentionality, cruelty, and the limits of institutional justice.

Symbolism & Significance

Manami embodies innocence and its annihilation. The Snuggly Bunny motif—a gentle, comforting icon—becomes a macabre instrument, mirroring how the novel inverts safety into threat. Her tactile markers (soft hair, downy cheeks) keep grief sensorial and present, while her absence becomes a presence that governs the living. In Yūko’s hands, memory is not just memorial but armament: love that refuses to fade, sharpened into a strategy. Through Manami, the book interrogates how systems fail the vulnerable, how narratives bend truth, and how private pain seeks public redress.

Essential Quotes

She loved those afternoons. She told me that you girls said she looked like her favorite cartoon character, Snuggly Bunny. She couldn’t have been more delighted. This line captures Manami’s easy joy and her need for belonging. The very symbol of her delight becomes the vector of harm, foreshadowing how innocence is appropriated by those seeking control or acclaim.

I find myself crying now each morning when I reach out and realize that I will never again feel her downy cheeks or her soft hair. By grounding grief in touch, the novel makes loss brutally material. The language of texture (“downy,” “soft”) transforms absence into a daily encounter with nothingness, explaining why memory becomes Yūko’s motive and method.

Because Manami’s death wasn’t an accident. She was murdered by some of the students in this very class. The shift from accident to accusation collapses the distance between victim and perpetrators. It also reframes the classroom—an ostensibly safe, regulated space—into a crime scene, indicting both individuals and institutions.

At the instant her hand touched the zipper, Manami collapsed to the ground and lay motionless. The clinical syntax mirrors Shūya’s detached gaze, reducing a child to an outcome in an experiment. The zipper—a trivial detail of childhood—becomes the trigger, showing how banality can cloak lethal intent.

He could make it look as though she’d fallen into the pool. He picked up Manami’s body and threw it into the cold, dark water. Then he ran away as fast as his legs could carry him. Naoki’s staged accident exposes a terror-driven calculation: hide the act by faking randomness. The image of “cold, dark water” seals Manami’s fate while revealing how fear and malice merge into irrevocable violence.