WHAT’S LEFT OF ME IS YOURS
By Stephanie Scott
In Japanese, there are two words for “love” and several gradations, including “miren” (lingering attachment), “kataomoi” (one-sided longing), “aishiau” (mutual love) and “fukai aijo” (deep love). When a crime of passion is committed in Stephanie Scott’s debut novel, “What’s Left of Me Is Yours,” it is up to three Japanese judges to reach a verdict by determining the kind and depth of love that bound murderer to victim.
Scott, a Singaporean-British writer who was born and raised in Southeast Asia, drew inspiration from a real-life murder trial that took place in Tokyo in 2010. It was much remarked upon at the time for involving a “wakaresaseya,” or professional “breaker-upper,” who was hired by a husband to seduce his wife in order to gain leverage in divorce proceedings.
Scott’s way into her narrative is to meditate on the fate of the young daughter whose family is ripped apart by the tragedy. In the novel Sumiko is 7 when her mother, Rina, is killed in 1994. Looking back as a young adult, she realizes she was a footnote to the main event. “Lives to be rebuilt are always less interesting than lives destroyed,” she muses. “Even in Japan, I disappeared from the page.”
But in Scott’s rich imagining, Sumiko emerges as a vivacious law student whose journey of self-discovery begins when she fields a phone call meant for her grandfather; he has brought her up to believe her mother died in a car accident. Here, Scott deftly exposes how life-limiting even the most well-intentioned lies can be, especially for women in a society that remains as patriarchal as Japan’s.
“What fascinated me about the real case was the humanity of the original story,” Scott writes in her acknowledgments, “how we love, and what we are capable of doing to each other for love, and this is where the novel began.”
Scott, who gave up a career in finance to become a writer, spent several years researching the intricacies of the Japanese legal system. For the outsider, “What’s Left of Me Is Yours” is an extraordinary window onto a culture where the death penalty is still in place, joint custody of a child is illegal and “each year 99.9 percent of those brought to trial are convicted and sentenced.”
The novel’s documentary feel is further enhanced by the way Scott punctuates her narrative with “official” documents — an autopsy report, an incident report, a crime-scene report and witness statements. This clinical effect is offset by the sensual sweep of Rina’s budding romance with Kaitaro, the “wakaresaseya” who falls in love in spite of himself.
“He nuzzled her in rebuke,” Scott writes, “until he realized that she had reached under the shirt to her bikini bottoms, had tugged them off and dropped them, so now they lay on the floor.”
Rina and Kaitaro share a passion for photography, and it is in photolike images that Sumiko’s childhood memories come swimming to the surface. “There are moments of clarity, liquid scenes,” she recalls. “I see a yacht on the waves, its sails stretched taut; I feel strong arms lifting me into the air; I turn away from the bright sun glinting off a camera lens; a man’s hand offers me a cone of red bean ice cream, a man with long elegant fingers, that do not belong to my father.”
Each chapter of this enrapturing novel is elegantly brief and charged with barely contained emotion. Yet Scott’s subject remains vast: the idea that the law itself does not protect the innocent, and “that what matters most is knowledge — of ourselves and others.”
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Paid to Seduce Another Man’s Wife, He Fell Violently in Love With Her - The New York Times
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