u/Original_Leader24

​

Silent Parade by Keigo Higashino - 3/5 , took me one working week to complete.

After finishing "A murder in Tokyo" and "Confessions", I wanted to stay within the same genre and explore more Japanese literature, which led me to pick up "Silent Parade".

The first part didn't grip me immediately - the murder, the suspect, but no resolution - and I found myself a little bored. The gross miscarriage of justice on display also felt uncomfortably familiar, echoing flaws I've seen in the Indian judicial system too. That said, watching the culprit draw on his father's old wisdom - that confession is the king of evidence - and turn it to his own advantage, even while guilty, was genuinely heartbreaking.

The second part is where the book truly hooked me. I found myself suspecting everyone, with every regular visitor visiting Namiki-ya seeming like a plausible culprit. It wasn't until the final two chapters that the real explanation of who killed Saoki and Hasunuma became clear - and until then, every competing theory felt equally convincing.

What I didn't enjoy was how the police were portrayed: constantly hitting dead ends and needing a civilian to guide them forward. It left me questioning just how capable - or incapable - the police are made out to be in these stories.

Overall, this was a 3/5 read for me, and it took me about a working week to finish.

Used chatgpt for putting my thoughts in better words

Thanks to this sub for recommending Confessions.

I picked it up last weekend and finished it last night, and I'm still sitting with it.

Among all the books I've read, Confessions will always stand apart for the audacity of its opening. It doesn't ease you into the story with elaborate character arcs or pages of exposition. Instead, it drops you into the heart of the tragedy from the very first chapter, trusting the reader to keep up.

When the incident unfolded, I was stunned. But it was the revenge that followed that truly unsettled me. I had to put the book down for a while and simply sit with what I had just read before I could turn the next page.

What follows is a series of confessions, each peeling away another layer of the truth. With every voice, the novel reveals how people are rarely shaped by a single moment. They are the sum of inherited wounds, quiet neglect, unspoken loneliness, and the choices of those who came before them. It is a haunting reminder that children absorb far more than we imagine—they inherit our fears, our failures, and sometimes even the consequences of them.

What lingered with me long after I turned the final page was not the question of who was right or wrong. Actions may invite moral certainty, but the journeys that give birth to them seldom do. In Confessions, every act can be judged, yet every person remains suspended in shades of grey.

Few books have left me this unsettled, and fewer still have left me thinking long after they ended.