In Rio Shimamoto’s prize-winning novel First Love, a young woman kills her father. Her legal defence team must comb through the past and present, exploring her platonic, sexual, and romantic relationships to find a motive for murder. Though the novel begins as a crime thriller, it’s a genre-bending story that transforms into a romance, murder mystery, and, finally, a courtroom drama. First published in Japanese to critical and commercial acclaim—spawning a film adaptation—the novel is now available to the wider world through Louise Heal Kawai’s translation.
Kanna Hijiriyama, an exceptionally beautiful and seemingly ordinary college girl, makes national headlines when she is accused of stabbing her father. In a show of misogyny and click-bait headlines, tabloids describe Kanna as “too beautiful to be a murderer”, propelling the case to the attention of Yuki Makabe, a clinical psychologist who works with “hikikomori—socially withdrawn children.” Yuki, who is writing a book on the murder, anchors the story as it twists through various characters, timelines, and potential motives. Together with Kanna’s lawyer, who is also Yuki’s brother-in-law, the two try to piece together the motives of the murder. The increasing blurring of their interpersonal dynamics creates a sense of discomfort throughout the story, while the question of Kanna’s innocence (and the limitations of the word “innocent”) looms in the background.
As the title suggests, the novel’s primary concerns are the effects of love through childhood to better understand how these experiences shape—and distort—adulthood. At one point, psychologist Yuki explains, “Everyone believes that love is something that you have to show your children constantly. But in fact, sometimes that can be the root of the problem.”
For example, Kanna’s father was an artist and university lecturer. He ruled her home with an iron fist; meanwhile, her mother was distant at best and emotionally manipulative at worst. For Yuki, secrets about her father’s sexual proclivities and her mother’s blatant awareness of it created a claustrophobic veil of pretence within their home.
First loves, by their very definition, usually take place within the kingdom of childhood—mystical and unnamable. Yet these loves, because of their place in childhood, assume blurring definitions of consent. As Yuki says, “Distinguishing between loneliness, sexual desire, and love was challenging, especially when you were young.”
Yuki’s first love was, by nature, platonic. However, because of the social structures that surround a relationship between a man and woman, the two found themselves sexually involved with each other, despite individually holding unspoken reservations about whether or not they wanted to explore their relationship physically. The physical love, potentially socially forced, sabotaged the basis of emotional love: Yuki later reflects, “But it felt wrong. It was as if just because we were a man and a woman and alone, the only option was to have sex.”
Conversely, Kanna’s first idea of love was built around physical safety and attention, the antithesis of her relationship with her parents. Compelled by her parents, Kanna would endure live drawing sessions with her father and his university students, where Kanna, a child, would pose for hours. Influenced by an environment of lecherous older men, with an absent mother and a cruel father, Kanna grew to understand obedience as the solution for discomfort. If she agreed with her father’s modelling wishes, she would be spared his rage and her mother’s disappointment. Nevertheless, as Kanna grew older and the live drawing sessions began to feature nude male models alongside her, obedience as an escape failed. Instead, she resorted to taking a knife to her arm, slashing lines that, in her mother’s words, were “disgusting”, allowing her respite from the classes until her wounds healed. When they did, the process would be repeated.
Yuki and Kanna’s past, physically unconnected but somehow shared, form the basis of questioning for Kanna’s legal defence team. Through a series of journeys into the past, of themselves, their mothers, and all the men who have loved and refused to love them, patterns of behaviour begin to emerge that chip at the closely held beliefs of a sacred first love. Relentlessly dark and unsettling, First Love is a powerful glimpse into the minds of women who have watched, faced, and recovered from abuse disguised as affection.