VivaSync

Stephanie Scott’s assured debut retells the true story of a Japanese man paid to seduce a married woman

Can you truly love someone and kill them? This was the question that spurred the Singaporean-British author Stephanie Scott to write her debut novel. She was inspired by a real case in Japan, where a man employed to break up a marriage – a wakaresaseya – was convicted of murdering the woman he had been paid to seduce. He insisted he loved her.

It’s a truism – as well as a truth – that fiction helps us feel empathy, as an imaginative act of understanding. And Scott’s book, which opens as a crime drama before elegantly turning into a love story, is generous in its attempts to excavate the humanity in a pretty grim premise. The storytelling shifts smoothly back and forth, from the blossoming, genuinely loving relationship in the mid-1990s between the unhappy Rina and Kaitaro – the man employed to seduce Rina by her husband so he can more easily get a divorce – and the investigation 20 years later by Rina’s daughter, Sumiko, discovering the truth about her mother’s murder.

Sumiko, a trainee lawyer, remains remarkably calm and rational when exploring the legal documents and tapes that reveal her mother was strangled by her lover – remarkably lacking in rage, in fact. There is a niggling sense that Scott is so busy making sure the he-loved-her-yet-he-killed-her premise is convincing that she overlooks how unforgivable such violence is. That’s not to say there aren’t some very grim moments, but I found myself pulling away from the amount we’re expected to invest in Kaitaro and his love. There’s no real psychological exploration of where the final act of violence came from; rather, he’s portrayed as a good guy who messed up.

Scott spent many years researching the novel in Japan and it shows: she weaves in explanations of the legal system in a way that’s genuinely fascinating, although an earlier, more in-depth clarification of Japanese custody battles might have helped establish why the stakes are so high for all the characters. And the world she creates in What’s Left of Me Is Yours feels very sure under foot: deeply researched, but delicately described. Scott gives a clear sense of place and time, from contemporary Tokyo to evocations of seaside holiday cabins and shrines in forests.

I’m sure many readers will find the elegiac tone touching; I found it slipped into sentimentality. The narrative voice feels somewhat staid and old-fashioned, especially for a young writer’s debut.

Scott is more assured when it comes to structure: she braids her different characters’ timelines together with sophistication, her storytelling harmoniously well-constructed. The big questions over whether it’s better to lie or to tell a difficult truth, and what might constitute a betrayal, are layered across generations and decades and there is strength in the subtlety with which Scott slowly unpacks them.

What’s Left of Me Is Yours by Stephanie Scott is published by W&N (£14.99)

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