Riho’s father ran a real estate agency, and her mother was an affluent homemaker. To Yumika’s eyes, her best friend Riho suffered from a toxic mother as well, though of a different style. She failed the employment test for a teaching position, however, and was working as a temp in the tourism office at city hall when she was scouted to be an actress and returned to Tokyo eight years ago. Although Yumika suffered constant headaches from the stress, she nevertheless continued to do as her mother wished. She allowed Yumika to go away from home to Tokyo for college, but only on condition that it be a women’s school with dormitories, that she major in education, and that she return home to teach locally once she graduated. She banned both manga and boys for her daughter, and screened all her friends. Yumika wanted to become a writer, but Yoshika was determined that she would follow in her father’s footsteps as a language-arts teacher, and steered her in that direction from a young age.

After that, her mother Yoshika took a job as a clerical worker at a high school to support herself and her daughter. When she was three, her father died in an automobile accident.

Yumika relates how she was treated by her mother. The main theme is that of toxic parenting, in which the mother maintains such absolute and oppressive control over her child that the child cannot develop his or her own identity. “Poison Daughter” is told from the perspective of Yumika, a 33-year-old actress, while “Holy Mother” is told from that of Riho, a stay-at-home mother Yumika has known since her school days. As shown here once again, author Kanae Minato especially shines when giving voice to “bad women” recounting their stories in the first person. The last two stories in the volume, titled “Poison Daughter” and “Holy Mother,” center on the same incident from the respective viewpoints of two women who were classmates in secondary school, and they can be read together as a single novella. A novel in eight short stories involving incidents of murder, injurious assault, and such by a writer regarded as the originator and queen of the genre known as iyamisu in Japan-literally, “eww mysteries.” The term refers to mystery fiction in which the darker impulses rooted deep in human nature-jealousy, vainglory, narcissism, malice, cruelty, etc.-figure to eww-inducing effect.

Minato kanae novel