Seiichi Osabe is just a normal if not insular 14-year-old boy with a beautiful, loving mother and a hardworking father. The bond between him and his mother is iron-clad, but when an accident involving his cousin sows the seeds of doubt in his head, Seiichi begins to question whether his mother’s doting nature is normal, or something more sinister and abnormal. Where do you draw the line between motherly love and unhealthy adoration? And how can you tell where that line is when your mother’s love is all you’ve ever known?
I’m gonna say it now because i honestly was fearful the entire time: mom does not rape son. she kisses him and shames him for an emission and being into a girl and its clear she sees as a comfort object to control and abuse as she sees fit. there is no physical rape.
this series is trauma. it’s not a drip feed of trauma. it’s not a slow spoon feed of trauma. it is trauma. it is raw trauma stuffed into the reader’s mouth, scooped directly from the writer’s psyche and into you. the accuracy of this kind of hot and cold abuse is insane. there are things that felt like being back in my own mother’s house, burying my nails into my skin as i shut myself up, trying to figure out what to do. the dissociation. the mental fatigue. the not knowing what to do. desperately picking what is most familiar. what seems most right. and being wrong. being horribly wrong. trying to get away. not ever being able to get away. always having that “mother” part inside of you.
the author wrote it was supposed to be revenge against his own mother and cooked up the murder part and it didn’t feel like a real revenge. it feels like it’s trauma relived. the sheer realism is bloody on the brain. the strange poison of self blame. the way we empathize with our abusers. blame ourselves. make it our fault. that is huge as well. the toll it takes is enormous. it muddles the brain. and yet the writer wrote a bittersweet ending filled with empathy and forgiveness. not the sort that begets a familial understanding and love, no, but one that releases a burden. like watching a place disappear beyond the horizon. like watching someone die and knowing it’s done. knowing this person was human. they can’t hurt you anymore. they can’t rule your life anymore. they were once your everything and they were your everything again, but this time on your terms, and through this you watched them shrivel and die and let go and they are gone and it’s done and somehow the world is more beautiful.
the best line is:
I couldn’t remember
What my mother looked like anymore.
