CHARACTER
Confessionsby Kanae Minato

Shūya Watanabe

Shūya Watanabe

Quick Facts

Shūya Watanabe (“Student A”)—a 13-year-old prodigy and co-narrator—engineers the crime at the center of Confessions.

Who They Are

Shūya is the novel’s most chilling study of brilliance stripped of empathy. He wears the mask of an exemplary, quiet honor student—another face in the classroom, always reading and never disruptive—yet behind that ordinary exterior lies a methodical need to be seen. His “genius” is less about curiosity than control: he wants his mother’s gaze fixed on him, and he will turn invention into weaponry if that is what it takes.

The book deliberately withholds a concrete physical image, emphasizing how easily Shūya blends in while plotting. That gap between how he appears and who he is deepens the story’s obsession with perception—how a model student can be the most dangerous person in the room—and sets up his descent from arrogant experimenter to self-anointed terrorist.

Personality & Traits

Shūya’s personality fuses precocious intelligence with a hollowed-out moral core. He measures human worth by usefulness to his plans and sees violence as a rational shortcut to recognition. The center of gravity is his mother: her abandonment curdles admiration into narcissism, and his talent becomes a megaphone for grievance rather than a tool for connection.

  • Genius-engineer: Builds a “Theft-Prevention Shocking Coin Purse,” masters circuitry, and choreographs complex mechanisms for both petty shocks and large-scale bombs—proof that his intellect is real, even as its aim is corrupt.
  • Grandiose and contemptuous: Habitually calls classmates “idiots,” imagines himself the only serious mind among children and teachers, and frames crimes as demonstrations of superiority rather than moral choices.
  • Emotionally detached: Treats people as components—Naoki as a witness-part, teachers as obstacles, victims as conduits to attention—reducing relationships to circuitry he can flip on and off.
  • Maternal fixation: Every escalation is a louder bid for Jun Yasaka’s attention; he scripts entire scenarios where his confession earns maternal embrace.
  • Calculating manipulator: Identifies Naoki’s insecurities and recruits him with surgical precision; rehearses outcomes as if reality were a lab bench whose results he can guarantee.

Character Journey

Shūya begins as a lonely inventor building devices in a makeshift “laboratory,” confident that visible achievement will summon his mother back. When an award brings him no spotlight—overshadowed by unrelated news—he pivots from creation to spectacle: a crime, he decides, will be louder than a prize. He rigs his shocking purse, enlists Naoki, and believes he has executed the perfect murder by the school pool.

Moriguchi’s confession explodes that narrative: the purse only knocked Manami unconscious; Naoki delivered the fatal blow. Shūya’s identity as mastermind collapses. Her further deception—that he has contracted HIV—briefly offers him a tragic, self-flattering script in which suffering will finally earn maternal love. When that too proves false, the humiliation curdles into boredom and nihilism. He kills Mizuki after she names his “mother complex,” eliminating the only person approaching genuine intimacy, and then designs a mass-casualty bombing to force the world—and especially his mother—to see him. Moriguchi redirects his bomb to Jun Yasaka’s lab and lets him press the button, ensuring his ultimate project destroys the very person he worships. The arc ends not in enlightenment but in a ruinous inversion of control: the engineer is engineered, the avenger made the instrument of a greater revenge.

Key Relationships

  • Jun Yasaka (Mother): Shūya’s entire life is a loudspeaker aimed at an absent audience of one. He idealizes her brilliance and interprets indifference as a challenge to stage a spectacular demonstration; every invention, confession, and crime is an audition for her regard, culminating in the ultimate, devastating “recognition.”

  • Naoki Shitamura: Shūya chooses Naoki precisely because he is needy and suggestible, a “worthless” pawn primed to validate Shūya’s genius. He never grants Naoki personhood—only function—so the revelation that Naoki caused the actual death punctures Shūya’s fantasy of sole authorship.

  • Yūko Moriguchi: The only adult who truly reads Shūya’s narcissism, she dismantles him step by step: first by revising his “perfect crime” into a partial failure, then by staging a revenge that weaponizes his own methods. Where Shūya treats people as tools, Moriguchi turns his entire worldview into a trap.

  • Mizuki Kitahara: Briefly, he lets Mizuki close enough to mirror him—and she names what he cannot bear: his mother-obsession. His murder of Mizuki is both an act of rage and a confession that authentic intimacy threatens his scripted identity.

Defining Moments

Shūya’s story is a sequence of self-authored performances that keep failing to get the reaction he demands, each failure forcing an escalation.

  • The Science Fair slight: He earns recognition for his shocking purse, but the achievement is eclipsed by the “Lunacy Incident.”
    Why it matters: Convinces him that positive accomplishment is inaudible; only transgression will cut through the noise.

  • The poolside attack on Manami Moriguchi: He deploys his device and choreographs Naoki’s presence to witness his “genius.”
    Why it matters: Marks his shift from inventor to perpetrator, turning intellect into a weapon in service of attention.

  • Moriguchi’s classroom confession: She reveals the purse only rendered Manami unconscious and that Naoki delivered the fatal blow.
    Why it matters: Shatters his “mastermind” myth; public humiliation seeds the fury and nihilism that follow.

  • Murder of Mizuki Kitahara: After she articulates his “mother complex,” he kills her.
    Why it matters: The last bridge to genuine connection is burned, proving he will destroy intimacy to protect grandiosity.

  • The final phone call: Moriguchi informs him that his school bomb has been moved to his mother’s lab and detonated by his own hand.
    Why it matters: His ultimate bid for control becomes the instrument of someone else’s Revenge; the would-be engineer of fate is engineered into irrevocable guilt, a bleak echo of Guilt and Atonement without the “atonement.”

Essential Quotes

Our values are determined by the environment we grow up in; and we learn to judge other people based on a standard that’s set for us by the first person we come in contact with—which in most cases is our mother. So, for example, a person who has been raised by a cruel mother might find another person—let’s call him A—might find A to be a kind person; but another person who was raised by a very kind mother might find A to be cruel. At any rate, my mother has always served as my basis for judging other people, and I have never yet met anyone who was as extraordinary as she is. This is Shūya’s credo. He reduces morality to maternal calibration, absolving himself of responsibility by making his mother the metric. It explains both his disdain for others and the grandiose lengths he will go to secure her gaze.

I could imagine the outcry that would follow my confession. But what would my mother have to say? She’d tell me she was sorry, as she had all those times before, and then hold me in her arms. I was sure of it. He scripts not only the crime but the reaction, rehearsing a reunion that validates his genius and pain. The certainty—“I was sure of it”—reveals the delusional wish-fulfillment beneath his “rational” plotting.

Compared to a genius like me, you’re pretty much a complete failure. Shūya’s contempt compresses his worldview into a single insult: he exists above, others below. The line exposes how his self-worth requires constant comparison—and why Naoki, in particular, is useful as a foil.

The bomb went off in Laboratory Three in the Electrical Engineering Department at K University. Your bomb, detonated by your own hand. 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. Moriguchi inverts Shūya’s logic: the device meant to prove his dominance becomes proof of his helplessness. Her cool announcement reframes his grand project as self-destruction—an ending that offers no absolution, only the possibility of reckoning.