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[ESSAY] “The Violence of Being Understood: Rio Shimamoto’s First Love” by Tyran Grillo
Rio Shimamoto (author), Louise Heal Kawai (translator). First Love. Honford Star, 2024. 280 pgs.
In Narratage (2005), Rio Shimamoto follows a young woman drawn back towards a relationship whose intimacy has never freed her from its power. In Red (2014), desire strains against the life a woman has been expected to inhabit. Across these novels, Shimamoto traces the private bargains concealed within devotion: her characters learn to call an obligation love, then struggle to hear their own wishes beneath that name.
First Love (2018), translated with bittersweet acuity by Louise Heal Kawai and so far the only one of her books available in English, carries this concern into a murder trial. A daughter has killed her father, and the public wants a motive. The deeper mystery is what happens when a woman’s experience passes through the hands of people convinced they can explain it. Every inquiry promises clarity, yet each risks polishing away what refuses its frame.
“The whiteness of the long corridor to the studio was intense.” This opening line offers no crime, only a brightness so complete that it feels hostile. Clinical psychologist Yuki Makabe is preparing for a television interview about hikikomori, the result, she says, of helicopter parenting that leaves children little room to become their own individuals. After the taping, the host asks about Kanna Hijiriyama, a university student who stabbed her father to death after an interview, ironically enough, for a broadcasting job. Yuki, it turns out, is in the process of writing a book about Kanna, making her the natural expert to turn to for insight into the ongoing case. Before the women meet, Kanna has already become a public question, her interior life a vacancy strangers are eager to fill. The bright corridor resembles the space prepared for her, fiercely illuminated and almost entirely emptied of consent. Yuki has walked through it first, though her professional composure makes her own exposure harder to see.
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At home, Yuki rejoins her husband, Gamon, and their son. Her theories of childrearing are tested daily in motherhood, while her relationship with her own mother remains unresolved. Gamon tells her that Kasho, his cousin and a lawyer with a complicated history with Yuki, wants her opinion on Kanna’s case. When Yuki first sees the 22-year-old, she observes, “Rather than a college girl with a baby face, she seemed more like a young girl with a prematurely adult face.” It is a painful reminder that some children are praised for growing up quickly when they have merely learned to anticipate danger. Kasho sees a resemblance between Kanna and Yuki almost immediately. She receives the suggestion as a wound, as his recognition threatens to take possession of a history she has chosen to keep obscure.
Kanna cannot articulate the motive everyone expects because she wants, just as much as everyone around her, to shed light on what it might have been. Instead, she implores Yuki, “Help me become someone with a proper sense of guilt.” Culpability seems to her a state of mind with an approved shape, something she must learn to display before she can be believed. Yuki has undertaken the book project partly to understand how Kanna reached this point, but the arrangement binds care to authorship from the beginning. Kanna is a defendant whose life may furnish a compelling narrative. After one interview, she suffers a panic attack, and Kasho accuses Yuki of pressing too hard. Does this shutting down mark the edge of what she can bear to say, or a gap Yuki has yet to fill? The psychologist sincerely wants to help. That sincerity cannot guarantee that her methods leave Kanna free.
Yuki’s work elsewhere makes the danger of easy explanations clearer. A patient in her own practice, for example, describes a dreary office routine and a side job at a hostess bar, where a doting boss has made another future sound possible. Still, Yuki warns her against trusting someone’s apparent interest too quickly, since other aspects of a person may emerge only with time. The advice travels back towards its giver. Yuki sees the limits of other people’s accounts while remaining reluctant to examine her own. After a conversation with Gamon, she notes, “Even crying requires both youth and physical strength,” revealing her ability to turn emotion into an aphorism before allowing herself to feel it.
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To reach Kanna, Yuki begins with the people who claim to know her. Yoichi, an ex-boyfriend, has reportedly supplied the tabloids with an account of their relationship. He says his comments were distorted, but then goes on to describe Kanna as volatile, dishonest, and inclined towards self-harm. His correction hardly makes him a neutral witness, given that he knew only one portion of her life yet has language ready to explain all of it. Kyoko, an old friend, describes a stifling home, while Kanna’s mother offers evasions of her own. Each account illuminates something, if only by throwing into relief the shadows it ignores. When Yuki asks about Kanna’s eponymous first love, the inquiry reaches Yuji, a man Kanna encountered when she was only twelve. At that age, the terms of affection can be taught by someone with a terrible interest in keeping them confused. With that, the title’s promise of tenderness acquires a subliminal coercion.
Yuki describes her own childhood through a similar confusion: “Since I was a little girl, I’d always felt as if I were wandering lost in what felt like a deep, dark drainage ditch.” Childhood here is a place built to carry away what a household does not wish to see. Kanna says her parents threatened to remove her from the family registry if she overstepped her boundaries. She also claims that she was not her father’s daughter, but that her lies made her mother feel safe. These statements resist a convenient division between truth and fabrication. A lie may shelter a child for a night, then become the walls of her captivity. The threatened removal from the registry gives the family’s power a chilling administrative form. Erasure need not mean forgetting someone. It can begin with a document that tells her she belongs only while she remains silent.
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Without revealing too much about the plot, it is important to recognise that Kanna’s exposure to sexual attention gathers force through accumulation, through the gradual education of a girl into an object of other people’s scrutiny. After all, her father’s death occurs in a women’s lavatory at the art school, where questions of access and safety converge. Yuki emerges from this line of inquiry struck once again by an intensely white landscape. Brightness seems to have scraped the world down to a surface fit for official marks, while Kanna’s memories arrive in fragments that will not remain within the outlines prepared for them.
It takes time for that light to fall fully on Yuki. Like Kanna, she can appear clear to others precisely where her history has been washed from view. She keeps her mother at a distance, and signs of her father’s wrongdoing bring her past into troubling proximity with Kanna’s. Kasho calls the women “birds of a feather,” a phrase whose casual ease denies how much each has survived separately. Yuki resists it with good reason: shared injury cannot make two lives interchangeable or become the foundation of some token “sisterhood”. Yet her resistance may also protect her from recognising what she has carried into Kanna’s interview room. In one quiet interval, she admits, “For a moment, it was so peaceful that I couldn’t tell whether I was the doctor or the patient.” The boundaries of her role dissolve without any dramatic confession. Her insight into Kanna is real, but it offers no exemption from the habits by which she sidesteps herself.
That conflict sharpens when Yuki questions Kanna’s mother. On television, she warned against smothering a child through anxious care; now she reproaches a mother who failed to protect her daughter. Both judgements have weight. Children need freedom to become who they were meant to be, but they also need adults willing to intervene when that freedom is violated. A parent can demand silence under the banner of love just as another can rename passivity respect for independence. Yuki’s anger grows from what she learns about Kanna, though it may also give her an indirect way of addressing the parents in her own past. Shimamoto allows moral perception to coexist with personal need. The most skilled clinician in the room can still mistake the direction of her own voice.
Kasho complicates that voice further. On their first date at university, he makes a tableful of objects disappear through an unexplained trick, an almost surreal interruption of the novel’s investigative realism. The episode gradually acquires the precision of a confession: things can vanish in full view while the witness remains certain that she has watched closely. He tells Yuki, “There are people who have matured faster on the inside. I think you and I are two of them.” The offer of kinship is intoxicating. Yet premature maturity can be the name given to a child forced to adapt before she is ready. Yuki envies the family life Kasho found, while sensing how deeply her words can hurt him. Her unease surfaces in a small admission: “I reflected on how my methods were getting more like Kasho’s.” She measures herself against him while recoiling when he does the same to her. Their intimacy makes each perceptive about the other; it grants neither the right to settle the other’s meaning.
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As the trial approaches, the social uses of guilt come fully into view. Kanna changes her plea and must speak within a setting that requires answers in a prescribed order. Legal judgement remains necessary after a killing, but the demand for a coherent motive meets a life shaped by secrecy and unstable meanings of affection. The novel’s feminist current has gathered force through small encounters before the courtroom makes it visible. Kanna’s appearance was available for public consumption before her testimony could be heard. Her sexual history could be interpreted by strangers; her uncertainty could count against her. To follow her story, the reader repeatedly encounters the experiences that injured her through accounts that once obscured the injury. Shimamoto makes the desire to know an uncomfortable one. Our curiosity may move faster than our willingness to consider what being known will cost its subject.
The plotting does not always match that psychological acuity. At least one crucial implication emerges early enough to make Yuki’s delay difficult to accept. Her history offers a plausible reason for hesitation: pressing Kanna would also bring her own life into focus. Still, the machinery of suspense can be felt behind that explanation. The book is strongest when her reluctance remains a human uncertainty rather than a device for withholding an answer. Its characters remain unfinished even after their secrets become legible, capable of wounding one another while reaching towards care. Yuki encounters the possibility that “People can be born again.” The sentence offers hope, but rebirth is an exacting proposition here. A second life cannot restore the first to innocence or require Kanna to become a tidier person for the comfort of those who watched her trial unfold in real time.
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For all the attention Kanna commands, Yuki is ultimately the novel’s main subject. Beyond the fact that she narrates it in the first person, the more revealing pattern is how often she pivots away from scrutiny: towards a clinical question when her own biographical wounds press close, towards Kasho’s presumptions when he recognises their resemblance, towards Kanna’s mother when her anger needs an object. These turns can be acts of care even as they keep her from standing still under the light she directs at others. The book she hopes to write will have a cover and an ending. Kanna’s life will continue beyond both. That difference gives First Love its ethical weight. Kanna has been entered into sketches, tabloids, clinical notes, and the family registry, each record preserving something while claiming more than it knows. Yuki’s task is to recognise when her own pen begins to move across someone else’s page. No account may be untouched by another voice, but a sentence can still change hands. Kanna may never recover the childhood others described for her. She may yet decide where her next sentence begins. The corridor’s whiteness has surrounded Yuki since the first page; the question is whether she can bear to look at herself without making her life another case to solve.
How to cite: Grillo, Tyran. “The Violence of Being Understood: Rio Shimamoto’s First Love.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 28 Sept. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/09/28/first-love.
Tyran Grillo holds a PhD in Japanese Literature from Cornell University and is an avid reader, translator, music critic, and photographer. His latest book, Fuzzy Traumas: Animals and Errors in Contemporary Japanese Literature (2024, Cornell East Asia Series), explores complex interspecies relationships through a posthumanist lens. Although he has left academia to pursue a full-time career as a professional editor, he remains deeply engaged with his fields of interest through lived experience and creative practice. [All contributions by Tyran Grillo.]