CHARACTER
Confessionsby Kanae Minato

Yūko Moriguchi

Yūko Moriguchi

Quick Facts

  • Role: Narrator of the opening and final chapters; the novel’s driving force
  • Occupation: Middle school science teacher; single mother
  • First appearance: Chapter 1 (the classroom monologue)
  • Key relationships: Daughter Manami; students Shūya Watanabe and Naoki Shitamura; former fiancé Masayoshi Sakuranomi
  • Central conflict: Her private campaign of revenge against the students who killed her daughter, in defiance of institutional justice

Who She Is

Yūko Moriguchi is the calm, precise voice that frames Confessions—an educator who turns her scientific clarity into a weapon. After her four-year-old daughter, Manami, is murdered by two of her students, Yūko abandons faith in courts and teachers’ bromides and designs a cold, exacting retribution. She becomes the novel’s catalyst: an anti-hero whose meticulous plan exposes how legal ideals of justice can be outmaneuvered by a private ethic of revenge, and how a soft-spoken teacher can orchestrate catastrophe with a steady hand.

Personality & Traits

Yūko’s defining feature is control—of her words, her emotions, and the pace of her plan. The book gives no physical description; her presence is built from voice, logic, and timing. That restraint makes her terrifying. She moves like a scientist running a long-range experiment, turning grief into method.

  • Methodical experimenter: She stages her opening monologue as a step-by-step demonstration, revealing evidence only when it will have maximum psychological impact. Even after resigning, she continues to manipulate events from a distance, tracking her former students’ responses as if recording data.
  • Grief-weaponized: Manami’s death doesn’t shatter her into chaos; it crystallizes her purpose. Her love condenses into a plan to make the culprits “understand the value” of a life—an ethical goal that masks cruelty.
  • Forensic intelligence: Small details steer her thinking—the Snuggly Bunny pouch she once refused to buy, returned with a concealed device; the incongruities in the “accident” story; the patterns in each student’s behavior. She identifies Shūya’s narcissism and Naoki’s suggestibility and tailors punishments to each weakness.
  • Systemic cynic: She ridicules TV-friendly “buddy teachers,” distrusts the Juvenile Law, and sees school culture as a shield for cruelty. Her disillusionment becomes the rationale for becoming judge, jury, and executioner.
  • Chilling composure: Even while describing contaminated milk and bomb plots, she sounds courteous, almost tender. That politeness signals a self who has walled off empathy in order to complete the experiment.

Character Journey

Yūko’s arc is a descent that has largely happened before the reader meets her. Once a pragmatic teacher who kept professional distance, the murder of her child hardens detachment into doctrine. She resigns not to escape pain, but to move freely outside institutional ethics. From the first chapter’s composed confession to the final chapter’s reveal, we learn she has been orchestrating outcomes all along—guiding a narcissist toward self-destruction and a weak follower toward collapse—until the last pivot turns: her phone call that converts a school bombing into matricide. The book frames her transformation with religious irony: students once nickname an idealized teacher “Saint,” but Yūko emerges as an “Evangelist” for retribution, preaching through terror rather than grace.

Key Relationships

  • Manami Moriguchi: Yūko’s love for her daughter is absolute and shaping. It anchors the novel’s exploration of Motherhood and Family Dysfunction: the tenderness of bedtime routines and small refusals (the Snuggly Bunny pouch) is re-read, after the murder, as the origin of a vow. Manami remains the standard against which Yūko measures every act; love becomes a metric for harm.

  • Shūya Watanabe: Yūko recognizes Shūya’s core need to be extraordinary and admired. Rather than punish him with pain alone, she crafts a result that destroys his narrative about himself—exposing his grandstanding, isolating him, and finally turning his desire for spectacle back on him.

  • Naoki Shitamura: With Naoki, Yūko targets fragility and guilt. She understands his dependence on stronger personalities and the way fear can curdle into denial. Her strategy is to make silence intolerable, pushing him toward a psychological breaking point that becomes its own sentence.

  • Masayoshi Sakuranomi: His HIV diagnosis prevented marriage and later becomes a tool in Yūko’s first move—weaponized not biologically, but psychologically. Masayoshi represents an ethic of forgiveness and rehabilitation Yūko explicitly rejects; her use of his blood shows how she has repurposed love’s remnants into instruments of fear.

Defining Moments

Yūko’s major actions unfold like stages in a lab protocol—hypothesis, evidence, applied outcome—with each step designed to leave an indelible mark on her targets.

  • The opening confession to Class 1-4 (see Chapter 1): In a controlled monologue, she disproves the “accident,” names the killers, and announces she has laced their milk with HIV-positive blood. Why it matters: It establishes tone and method—punishment as pedagogy—and demonstrates how her authority, even post-resignation, will govern the narrative.
  • Discovering the Snuggly Bunny pouch: When Manami’s belongings are returned, the pouch conceals an electrical device, revealing deliberate malice. Why it matters: This is the hinge from mourning to investigation—the moment her grief gains direction and proof.
  • Resignation from teaching: She leaves the institution that failed her by design, not defeat. Why it matters: It frees her to enact a private system of consequences, declaring the classroom too small—and too compromised—for the justice she intends.
  • The final phone call and bomb reveal: As Shūya moves to detonate a school bomb, Yūko calls to reveal she has already relocated it to his mother Jun Yasaka’s lab. Why it matters: It collapses Shūya’s grand spectacle into intimate ruin, forcing him to confront the human cost he refused to see—and completing Yūko’s transformation into executioner of meaning, not just of bodies.

Essential Quotes

Because Manami’s death wasn’t an accident. She was murdered by some of the students in this very class.
This is the thesis of Yūko’s entire project: she rejects the comfort of accident and insists on intent. Stated in a classroom, it reframes education as revelation and judgment.

I haven’t told the police because I simply don’t trust the law to punish them. A fully intended to kill Manami but didn’t actually cause her death; while B had no desire to kill her but brought about her death. If I did hand them over to the police, they probably wouldn’t even be sentenced to a juvenile institution; they’d be let out on probation and the whole thing would be forgotten.
Yūko maps motive against outcome to expose the law’s blind spots. Her refusal to report isn’t impulsive; it’s a philosophical indictment of systems that misread culpability—her mandate to build her own.

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.
She frames cruelty as pedagogy: enlightenment as punishment. The goal is not death but comprehension that hurts—an educator’s vocabulary twisted to inflict permanent learning.

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 cuts: she claims closure while detonating another’s life. Her “recovery” language reveals the final turn of the knife—she congratulates herself for healing her target by breaking him completely.