Confession

It’s been over two decades since a manga from Kaiji Kawaguchi was published in America.  I’m bringing this up because that manga was the excellent “Eagle:  The Making of an Asian American President.”  Even if its depiction of American politics of the time comes off as quaint in relation to our current political hellscape, it still remains a compelling read with some of the best, “How’s he going to get out of this?” moments I’ve read in comics.  While Kawaguchi has continued to make manga after that series, the fact that we never saw anything else he did before or since likely stems from how “Eagle” sold as well as you’d expect a real-world political thriller would in a marketplace dominated by “Pokemon” and the like at the time.

That finally changed late in 2024 when Kodansha published “Confession,” a manga even older than “Eagle” that was written by Nobuyuki Fukamoto and illustrated by Kawaguchi.  This release flew so far under my radar that it’s taken me until now to realize it existed, buy it, read it, and finally write about it.  As for whether it was worth seeking out, it’s best to realize that this is more of an art showcase for Kawaguchi given that he’s only illustrating it.  Doing that will also help set your expectations when it comes to this story’s more over-the-top and occasionally schlocky thriller elements.

The story starts off with two men stuck on a mountain in a blizzard with one of them, Ishikura, injured and unable to move on his own.  That has left his friend Asai debating what to do as he struggles to find shelter for both of them.  It’s at this time that Ishikura makes a startling confession about an incident that has haunted him for years.  By doing this, the wounded mountaineer believes that he can pass away in peace and let his friend go on without him.

However, the weather lets up not long after and Asai finds that there’s a cabin nearby that they can wait out the rest of the storm in.  Better still is the fact that they’re able to contact rescue services who let them know that they won’t be able to make it up to them until the morning.  Everything sounds like it’s going great, until the realization sinks in that Asai now knows Ishikura’s deepest, darkest secret.  Whether or not they’ll both be alive when rescue comes in the morning, well… what do YOU think?

“Confession” does take a little while to get going, to its detriment.  It’s clear where the conflict between Ishikura and Asai is going from the jump, but Fukamoto decides to play with the idea that maybe everything is all right and any paranoia is just that on the part of the latter climber.  This is also when the volume is at its most tediously melodramatic as we get things like a double-page spread of text spelling out exactly why things are so tense between the men at the moment.  As if it wasn’t completely obvious from seeing things like Ishikura stab his wounded and frostbitten appendage, angry that he can’t feel anything there anymore.

Things do pick up once the conflict between the men flares up into kill-or-be-killed territory.  Though Asai would seem to have the advantage here, there’s some convenient though reasonable-sounding climbing-related circumstances used to even the playing field between them.  It also helps that Kawaguchi is able to lean into the characters’ heightened emotional states during  this time.  Sure, some of their expressions may come off as a bit overdramatic, but they still feel appropriate to the high-intensity story of two guys trying to outwit and kill each other in an enclosed space.

While it looks like Fukumoto does get some mileage out of  upping the stakes with each encounter, he winds up overplaying his hand at the very end.  Rather than let Ishikura’s confession be the truth of the story, we find out that there’s more to it than was initially revealed.  It wants to be a moment that flips everything you know about the story, as well as your own sympathies, on its head and it doesn’t quite work.  Mainly because there’s a lack of setup, but also because it also doesn’t feel like the story plays fair with the reveal given all of the time we spend in Asai’s head and it never comes up.

As a result, “Confession” becomes a manga that I wanted to like more than I actually did.  While it’s great that we’ve finally got another title from Kawaguchi in English after all of these years, it’s a half-baked thriller that has its moments and comes off as more silly than it should most of the time.  It’s still a good showcase for the man’s artistic skills, though between this and “Eagle” it would appear he’s at his best when he’s illustrating his own work.  To that end, I can only hope an adventurous publisher decides to take a chance on “The Silent Service,” “Zipang,” or “A Spirit of the Sun” in the future.