What This Theme Explores
Revenge in Confessions is not a single act but a consuming mindset that claims moral authority while bypassing the law. The novel probes unsettling questions: What counts as justice when institutions fail? How does the desire to make others suffer corrode the self and blur the line between victim and perpetrator? And once violence is justified as deserved, how quickly does it spread, mutating grief into cruelty and cruelty into identity?
How It Develops
The engine of revenge starts with Yūko Moriguchi, whose opening lecture in Chapter 1-2 Summary reframes a classroom into a courtroom and her students into defendants. Disillusioned with the state’s response to her daughter’s death, she claims to have laced the milk of Shūya Watanabe and Naoki Shitamura with HIV-positive blood—an act intended less to kill than to instill mortal terror. From the start, revenge is psychological, carefully staged, and designed to make pain feel earned.
That pain multiplies. By Chapter 3-4 Summary, the class translates Yūko’s personal vendetta into mob justice, “gamifying” violence against Shūya until pranks harden into beatings. Meanwhile, Naoki's Mother funnels terror and shame into a protective rage that turns homicidal, her maternal devotion collapsing into a warped retaliation against a world she believes has broken her son.
The spiral reaches its apex when, in Chapter 5-6 Summary, Shūya authors his own manifesto and plots a school bombing to wound the one person whose abandonment defines him: his mother. Yūko then intercepts this vengeance, relocating the bomb so that his “grand statement” annihilates his mother instead. The cycle closes with a brutal symmetry—each act of vengeance birthing its opposite—until punishment becomes indistinguishable from the original crime.
Key Examples
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Yūko’s initial act of retaliation reframes justice as pedagogy: she does not seek death but comprehension through fear, a lesson written on the body.
I haven’t told the police because I simply don’t trust the law to punish them... I wanted them to understand the value, the terrible weight, of human life, and once they’d understood, I wanted them to fully realize the consequences of what they had done—and to live with that realization. Her words make suffering a curriculum and her students the captive audience; revenge here claims moral purpose even as it inflicts lasting psychological harm.
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The class’s “game” converts outrage into entertainment, revealing how easily vengeance becomes communal and contagious.
“You be the Judge! Collect points for every blow you strike against Shūya the Killer!” By turning punishment into points, the students erase empathy and outsource responsibility to the crowd, proving how righteous anger can be manipulated into cruelty.
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Shūya’s planned bombing is revenge as performance—violence staged to force acknowledgment from the mother who will not see him.
So you can think of the mass murder I’m about to commit as my revenge against my mother—and this last will and testament as the only way I have to tell her what I’ve done. His manifesto confuses confession with spectacle, equating visibility with vindication and revealing revenge as a plea for recognition twisted into atrocity.
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Yūko’s final phone call turns Shūya’s weapon back on him, demanding he live with the knowledge of what he has caused.
Funny—I think I’ve finally had my fill of revenge now. And with luck, I’ve at last started you out on the road to your own recovery. The irony is surgical: “recovery” here means perpetual guilt, crystallizing the novel’s bleak logic that vengeance teaches nothing but more vengeance.
Character Connections
Yūko Moriguchi channels grief into method. The loss of her daughter, Manami Moriguchi, becomes the rationale for a morally immaculate plan that inflicts fear rather than immediate death. In seeking to awaken conscience, she cultivates cruelty; her poise and precision render her a mirror image of the callousness she condemns, revealing how revenge can adopt the aesthetics of justice while discarding its ethics.
Shūya Watanabe seeks revenge to be seen. His inventions, crimes, and manifesto all aim to compel his mother’s attention; when love fails, he repurposes intellect into spectacle. His escalation from gadgetry to mass murder shows how the hunger for recognition can curdle into a drive to punish, and how public violence can masquerade as private dialogue.
Naoki Shitamura expresses vengeance as collapse rather than calculation. Paralyzed by fear and shame, he lashes out at the closest source of pressure—his mother—transforming dependency into destruction. His trajectory demonstrates how revenge can be the desperate language of the powerless, a final attempt to regain control by annihilating the bonds that bind.
The classmates embody revenge as social contagion. Figures like Ayako and Yūsuke do not retaliate from personal injury but from borrowed outrage, finding belonging in collective punishment. Their cruelty suggests how communities can launder vengeance through moral consensus, letting individuals harm with a clean conscience.
Symbolic Elements
Milk, a symbol of nurture, is weaponized into terror. By poisoning what should sustain, Yūko literalizes the corruption of care and the inversion of motherhood into menace, making every sip a lesson in the fragility of life.
The shocking coin purse, Shūya’s prize-winning invention, converts creativity into coercion. It stands for intellect estranged from empathy, showing how ingenuity starved of love can be engineered to humiliate and harm.
The bomb is revenge’s endgame: immediate, spectacular, annihilating. In Shūya’s hands, it is a scream for attention; in Yūko’s, a mirror held up to that scream. Its relocation reveals revenge as circular energy—what you send out returns transformed and more terrible.
Contemporary Relevance
Confessions resonates in an era of frayed trust in institutions, when private grievance often seeks public redress outside the law. The classroom’s mob justice mirrors online pile-ons that gamify outrage and call cruelty righteousness, while Shūya’s spectacle of harm reads like the darkest edge of attention economies that equate visibility with worth. Above all, the novel’s closed loop of retaliation—hurt breeding hurt—echoes cycles of political and interpersonal vengeance today, warning that without mechanisms for accountability and repair, violence will always find a moral vocabulary to justify itself.
Essential Quote
I haven’t told the police because I simply don’t trust the law to punish them...
This line crystallizes revenge’s seductive claim: when justice seems inadequate, harm feels justified. It marks the moral pivot from seeking repair to inflicting pain, and it seeds the contagion that follows—once one person sanctifies retaliation, others will imitate, escalate, and call it right.