The Aosawa Murders: what a witness remembers

A room that will not become an address

The prologue has the apparent practicality of a police interview. Someone asks Hisako about a room; an adult held her hand and led her there. She remembers blue walls, with reddish-purple in them, but cannot identify the person or place. The questions try to attach a vivid impression to a usable location. Her answers keep those kinds of knowledge apart.

I like the friction between the interview's orderly exchanges and the image they fail to settle. A remembered colour feels exact, almost available to inspection. Yet it cannot tell the questioner where to go. Onda makes the reader share that desire to locate things while showing how little a convincing picture may prove.

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The beauty that frightens Hisako

A white crêpe-myrtle flower remains in Hisako's account. Its beauty frightened her, and she cannot supply the explanation her questioner wants. The detail is disturbing because the feeling is so definite while its cause escapes her. We can hear the pressure placed on someone who knows she was afraid but cannot make that fear satisfy another person's reasoning.

The scene also leaves the boundary of the room uncertain: Hisako speaks of looking from outside and cannot firmly recall entering. Her uncertainty about the threshold keeps the image unsettled. The opening rewards attention to hesitations, to what the interviewer asks and to what the answer actually grants. Its strangeness survives where a tidy reconstruction would fill in the gaps.

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The sea interrupts the story

The first section of From the Sea moves to a conversation with Makiko Saiga thirty years after the murders. She begins with rain and the changing seasons, correcting a word as she speaks: a season is coming next, rather than being new. Childhood heat, cold barley tea and the oppressive nearness of the sea occupy her attention before the case can become an orderly account.

Makiko keeps addressing her listener. The pauses and questions make recollection feel socially situated: someone is speaking to someone else, choosing what the other person needs to understand. Her memories of wet snow and swollen paper doors are hard to summon in the present humidity. Weather affects the telling as well as supplying its setting; the past resists the circumstances in which it is recalled.

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A survivor becomes the object of suspicion

The wider premise is devastating. Seventeen people die after poisoned drinks are served at a celebration held by a prominent medical family. Hisako, the physician's blind daughter, escapes injury. An apparent suspect later dies by suicide, leaving motives uncertain; suspicion continues to gather around her. These are the circumstances described by Bitter Lemon Press, whose English edition is translated by Alison Watts.

Survival creates an uncomfortable imbalance: Hisako is available to be questioned while so many others cannot speak. In that setup, the wish for an explanation can make a survivor's presence seem like evidence. The prologue gives her an answering voice before the publisher's outline places her under the town's gaze. Her uncertainty deserves to be heard without automatically becoming a confession.

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Who gets to assemble the accounts?

Onda told Rakuten Books that Hillary Waugh's interview-based mystery inspired the form. Because her own story looks back on an old event, she worried that successive first-person accounts would become flat and allowed the structure to grow more complicated. Her explanation places the labour of assembling a past at the centre of the book's design.

The premise includes a childhood acquaintance of Hisako who later writes a successful book about the murders. An account can therefore acquire authority through publication while remaining one person's arrangement of other people's lives. This interests me as much as identifying a culprit: a persuasive narrative may become the version others must answer, even when its materials began as uncertain recollections.

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Reading without hurrying the witness

In that interview, Onda describes wanting moral uncertainty and persistent unease; she also recalls writing at an unusually slow, crawling tempo. Those are her intentions and experience of composition. The prologue gives a concrete reason to welcome such patience: its pauses let us notice the distance between a question and the reply a witness can actually give.

This opening suits a reader who enjoys weighing the authority of a voice and living with an image before its significance becomes clear. The premise involves mass death and suicide, and its suspicions promise little comfort. Someone seeking a brisk investigation with one dependable guide may find the competing accounts demanding. What draws me onwards is the small resistance of Hisako's answers to the shape an explanation is expected to take.

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Three directions to read next

Questions readers ask

Sources and editorial approach

Direct reading covers the complete prologue, subsection I of From the Sea and the opening paragraphs of subsection II in the lawful OverDrive English sample linked by Toronto Public Library's TTC Reads. We have not read the full chapter or novel. Onda's direct Rakuten Books interview supports the discussion of form and intention; Bitter Lemon Press supplies the wider premise and translation details, and KADOKAWA the Japanese-title record. Interpretations and comparisons are FolioRoam's; the linked publishers support the comparison premises.

1. OverDrive · Lawful English opening sample, prologue and bounded From the Sea portions
2. Toronto Public Library · TTC Reads, public Aosawa sample provenance
3. Bitter Lemon Press · The Aosawa Murders, official premise and Alison Watts translation details
4. Rakuten Books · Direct Riku Onda interview about ユージニア, form and intention
5. KADOKAWA · ユージニア Japanese electronic-edition title record (June 25, 2013)
6. Pushkin Press · The Honjin Murders, official premise
7. Macmillan Academic / Minotaur Books · The Devotion of Suspect X, official premise
8. New York Review Books · The Door, official premise