Customer Reviews

Confidential Confessions, Book 1

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Confidential Confessions is one of the greatest manga of all time because it deals with real issues. You wont find any magic, superheroes, or bishounen in this series. Instead you will read about girls who have to deal with tough issues such as bullying, rape, sexual harassment, drugs, prostitution, stalking, and suicide. I recommend that every teen read Confidential Confessions.

Vol. 1
A strong beginning to an amazing series. The first story in this volume deals with bulling, suicide, while the second story deals with prostitution.

Vol. 2
This entire volume deals sexual harassment and is an awesome follow up the first volume.

Vol. 3
The first story in this volume is great because it explores drugs and some of the reasons why kids take them, however the second story is forgettable and is overshadowed by its predecessors.

Vol. 4
The story in this volume deals with prostitution again but instead of having a protagonist go into prostitution because of bad circumstances, this girl goes into prostitution because she is very materialistic and wants money to buy brand name items. The next story revisits the issue of bullying but in more depth. Both of the stories are remarkable but the next story is (for lack of better terms) lame. It deals with lesbianism but the impact is not hard hitting because the main character seems like a stalker rather than someone who is hiding her true feelings for the same sex.

Vol. 5
This volume treads on the tender issues of rape and AIDS. This volume is magnificent and I believe it should have been the last because of the bittersweet ending.

Vol. 6
This is the weakest of all 6 volumes and is a pathetic and disappointing end to a great yet disturbing series. The first story is about stalking and the second story involves a girl who is transformed from a victim to a bully.

There you have it, the complete mini-guide to Confidential Confessions. Like I said before this is a great manga and should be read by all teens. My only complaint is that this story was meant for the Japanese and so some of the main characters actions wont make sense to Americans (you might say, "what the hell is the matter with them, why don't they speak up for themselves!?)" because the Japanese are much more reserved people who don't like to make trouble for their family of school.

When I first heard about this manga, I have to confess it didn't sound too appealing. One's first impression is of an extremely dark, angsty series, (the "rape" "drug abuse" "suicide" and so forth on the cover is testimony to that!) and if you don't like that sort of thing, you definitely wouldn't be interested- or so I thought. As it turned out, once I read it i realized how wrong I was. The stories are very true to life and compelling, making you want to read more and more. CC deals with characters that may start out screwed up, but they grow and learn and eventually are able to put it behind them- which is very different from the typical angsty stories I've read in the past, which usually involve melodramatic, whiny main characters who come to a sticky (and most often self-inflicted) end.

Anyway, this really is a great book. You don't have to be 18 to read it, just make sure you know what kind of content you're getting into, and that whatever your age, you're mature enough to deal with it. ^_^ ciao!

The way this book was advertised (including all the hype words on the cover) led me to think that it would be a soap-opera take on "troubled teens" much like the over-exaggerated "true story" magazines of another era. Overall, it's much better written than that.

While I find the endings of the two stories in the first book somehow unsatisfying, I think that the author creates a wealth of complex, dynamic characters worth caring about. She tackles tough topics, if a bit romantically, and I commend her for it. She writes to teens rather than down at them, which is a feat in and of itself. Her stories generally steer clear of preaching and instead try to find real motivations for the characters' internal struggles. Definitely for teens. Very young children aren't likely to understand stories about depression and prostitution.

I really liked this manga. It is very good, I just finished Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, both are amazingly great.! As this is a review page for Vol. 1. I will proceed to review that volume alone, and will save the Vol. 2 Review for another day.

First, Confidential Confessions is not all dark and horrible. Yes, it is dark, but its not dark to be dark. Its presenting real-life issues. Maybe some issues everyone has struggled with in one time or another(Suicide, depression, feeling unwanted, helplessness, ect.), and it does it in a way that's not preachy or phoney. The characters are very real, they may be going through hard times, but you understand their problems and you care about them. They are not presented as people in these situations are usually presented: As flat, and people whom are completely self-absorbed. Obviously these people are self-involved, but so are all of us, these people are in the skids of life, just like we all hit sooner or later, or maybe we're in our whole life. But in the first story of the first Vol. these girls are sick of the way the world is, they want to make a difference in it. And I know exactly how they feel. I've been going through the exact same stuff as them. hehe And the scene at Asparagus' funeral, that just made me so mad, the way the girls, and everyone else acted. She wanted to make a difference by dying, but it all remained exactly the same... And be insight is to be found.

The second story makes me really sad, it really made me think a lot. Yoshioka had a broken home life, she thought it would be better to live life on her own terms and do what she wants, so she left home at 13. So she turns to prostitution to make quick cash, the no-commitment sex gives her her fix without having to give them her name. And she is okay doing this until she meets Ryo, a guy who plays guitar on the streets, and takes her in without asking for anything in return. She changes the way she thinks more by what he doesn't do, then by what he does. But it is the decisions she makes after he has begun to change her that made me cry. :( The consequenses seemed all to real, as my friends mother is a counselor at JDH. :(

Don't let my descriptions turn you off, because these stories are really good. They will make you think, maybe even lend you a new perspective. So don't be shy, give Confidential Confessions a try today.! :D

God Bless & *Enjoy* ~Amy

(NOTE: as Amazon seems to consider all volumes the same for the purpose of reviews, I'll just keep adding on here.)

Reiko Momochi, Confidential Confessions, vol. 1 (Tokyopop, 2000)

Momochi's highly controversial series takes the form of diaries (or confessions, naturally) of people in crisis. The first volume in the series contains two stories: one about a girl and her friend who make a suicide pact, the second about a teen prostitute who finally finds love, but is blackmailed into turning one last trick. The storylines are pretty predictable, but the artwork is very well done and the characters' emotions come off as real, if a bit cardboard. Not a bad start. ***

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Reiko Momochi, Confidential Confessions, vol. 2 (Tokyopop, 2001)

It is with a mixture of horror, amusement, and offense that I note that of the hundreds of volumes of manga and graphic novels I have read from libraries all over the country, volume 2 of Confidential Confessions is the only one I have ever seen where librarians have been specifically instructed to shelve it with the adult books. Preacher? Teen. 100 Bullets? Teen. Deus Vitae? Teen. A book about a high-school girl being sexually harassed by her tennis coach, which (unlike the books mentioned previously) is obviously written with a high school audience in mind? Nope, we can't let the kiddies get their hands on that.

Shows progression from the first volume in that the characters are much better-developed and the situation (while still ultimately predictable and more than a little cheesy at the end) is more realistic than the stories in volume 1. Of course, this could have a good deal to do with the fact that this volume is one story, where the first volume split its length among two.

An excellent book. Gets the Goat Central recommendation for middle school and above, whatever your library has to say about it. ****


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Reiko Momochi, Confidential Confessions, vol. 3 (Tokyopop, 2001)

Momochi carries on with (arguably) the most controversial series in manga with volume 3, the bulk of which deals with a girl who, in an effort to get her grades up to her strict father's standards, starts taking meth. As usual with the series, the storyline is predictable as all get-out and the ending is sappy, but the characters are well-drawn and it's at least readable. Ends with an odd short about a boxer on the rise, an aspiring actress, and how their relationship gets in the way of their respective dreams. While I wasn't sold on that one, the main story in the volume makes it worth your time. ****

The first volume starts off with the shocking fact of how many people regardless of who they are, on an average large number of native Japanese commit suicide. It was very alarming and eye opening. It focuses on how easily young women are hazed while attending high school, and eventually cave in to their peers. Sometimes, when those impressionable or with little will power do something like this, it often times could have been prevented. It also highlights on prostitution in the second half and how at risk teens often get caught up in those things.

This series is comprised of just six volumes - rather short compared to countless other manga series - but the stories are powerful and gripping. Each manga is different, but I will concentrate on just this one. I myself was a teenager when this first came out, and found myself riveted by these stories. In this one, suicide and bullying along with prostitution are discussed (in two separate stories) and I can honestly say that I am glad that I wasn't driven to such choices.

This is a manga that very few seem to have read or even heard about. It's only got around 300 votes on MAL (which is low when popular stuff can get over 10,000) and only the contents of Vol. 1 have been put on the internet for e-pirates like myself. This isn't really that shocking when you consider what the series is about and the audience it's aimed at, but it's still a shame that it, a series Tokyopop have releashed in English, hasn't received more love when it's a very well-written, very realistic series.

Each of the 6 volumes of Confidential Confessions (CC) provide 1-4 stories that focus on a different set of characters and problems. The main character of each each story is always a junior-high school female. As the covers of each volume indicate with words such as "rape" and "suicide" being spread across them in large, faint letters, there's none of the joking or silliness that's often associated with manga/anime included - it's as close to reality as manga can get.

Vol. 1 opens with a story about a pair of suicidal high school girls who hate living meaningless, lonley existences. The female lead can't handle the emptiness of life as an adult, her mother making her problems worse by putting on front to the world; acting like her husband hasn't left her. The other girl suffers from bullying, and has done for years. Both end up coming together, drawn to each other by their feelings of depression, and what follows is an insightful look into the minds of people who wish for death and what it means to be truly suicidal.

The second story is about a girl who, having left home to live on the streets, selling her body for money, is changed forever by an encounter with somene who sees her as more than just an object to be used. Although it was really just there to fill the space the first story of Vol. 1 didn't fill, it was very good and the author got her message across.

The third story lasts fo the entire second volume (the longest story in CC), it being about a girl who has to decide if she should keep quiet about the sexual harrasment of the famous tennis coach that works at her school. Given the way Japanese men grope girls on trains in Japan, the story about a famous high school tennis coach molesting and talking dirty to his students, who feel forced to go along with his actions out of fear of losing their places on the tennis team, never came across as unbelievable.

Moving onto Vol. 3, the forth is a 150 page story that deals with a girl who, due to the pressure of her father, enters into the world of drugs and becomes addicted to the point of selling herself. The way an ordinary school girl slowly went from pressured but happy to selling herself for the money to buy more drugs made it one of the most emotional stories of the series, and the way the author detailed what happens when someone takes different drugs made it yet another highly informative story for people who want to know a little more but don't want to read lifeless text to find out. The final story of Vol. 3 was just there to fill the remaining 50 or so pages left by the first story... It was neither excellent or awful; somewhere in-between.

Vol. 4 is a collection of four short stories. All of them remained interesting until the end, but none of them were able to match up to the first 3 stories in Vol. 1-3, all of which had far more time to develop and were far more moving as a result. I prefer having 1 long story in each volume, with an extra story added to fill space if needed. Also, a few of the stories in Vol. 4 were a little hard to swallow, the most difficult to view as something that could happen in the land of the real being a story about a school teacher beating and dragging a school girl by her hair in public, and another involved a girl getting away with murder.

Vol. 5 was a big improvement and the best volume in the entire series, returning to the high quality shown in the first 3 volumes. As expected, the first story, involving the gang rape of a girl and how she had to continue living after that, was the most moving and best story of the lot. Everything was handled excellently by the author, with her going into detail to explain how, no matter how you think you'll act in any situation, you don't know if you'll be able to o the brave thing until fear has got ahold of your heart. I found the relationship between the female lead and her boyfriend touching: it was totally believable how he reacted initially and later tried to make amends. There was a rather dodgy piece of dialogue, though, an example of which being...

"Because it was made with the "knife" called a penis."

The other story included, which lasted the same length as the rape story, wasn't far off the quality of what came before. The story was about how a high school girl had to deal with having AIDs and slowly becoming weaker and weaker. It was both informative (no-one wants to read about deadly diseases until they need to!) and, like just about all the stories in CC, was very moving. It gave me a warm feeling to see someone with such a horrible illness fighting against it with the help of her best friend and boyfriend.

Vol. 6 was, sadly, the weakest of the collection. The first story was an unusually dull tale about stalking, it taking a lengthy period to reach a conclusion of no real interest. Reading the story made me dislike the weak and submissive main character. The last story was on improvement, it being about how a victom of bullying turned into a bully, but it was short and, like the stories in Vol. 4, lacked the detail of the more detailed stories that make up the series.

So, what do I think of it after finishing? I think it's one of the best out there. The quality goes up and down depending on the chapter since each chapter has a totally different story, but very few of the stories were poor. Only the long and boring stalker chapter in Vol. 6, which had a terrible lead character who kept fannying around over a nutjob ex-boyfriend, was disappointing. The other disappointing stories weren't so bad because they only lasted 50 or so pages, where as the stalker story dragged on for 150.

Confidential Confessions is the perfect manga for young women and/or manga readers who want to see realism after seeing one too many mecha series. The author doesn't force the rights and wrongs of the world down your throat like parents tend to: she tells totally belivable (for the most part anyway), non-preachy and hard-hitting stories from the perspective of young women who encounter many of the problems, varying from suicidal thoughts to dealing with rape, that people have in the land of the real. The author is able to tell interesting stories and, at the same time, provide information and help people with similar issues to those depicted in her stories.

Overall, my feelings are that, despite having the odd average story, CC is up there with the best manga has to offer. The only real flaw I spotted aside from the odd poor chapter was the similar character design of all the characters in the stories: there was too little variation between each character and that made it hard to remember the characters from each story. The only other 'flaw' would be how nearly every story ends on a semi-happy note, but there's no rule saying that realistic stories have to end in depressing fashion and it would've kinda defeated the purpose of the stories if they started and ended in unhappy manners. But, ignoring those issues, anyone who likes their manga realistic should seriously consider splashing the cash to get the full series - I promise you won't be disappointed!

So many different ways to describe this book, it is like no other manga that I have read. For a start, there is no magic of any kind, or any special circumstances. It is about normal teenagers, and therein lies the brilliance. It still maintains to be about normal teenagers, but delves right into the dark heart that exists in all of us, it takes us into a world filled with pain, a world that our main characters want to end. The first story in the book is the longer, and is about two girls trying to commit suicide. That is the book in a nutshell. It is brutal, there is no mincing of words or beating around the bush, it simply tells their story while they try to end their lives. It is a gripping, and harsh read. I didn't find myself thinking "What are they thinking?" during it, instead I understood their point of view. It is very well done. The second story is about a prostitute who falls in love, but is arrested and sent away from her love. It is not as gripping as the first story, but has a sad ending, like they promise on the cover "Life doesn't always have a happy ending". A great read.

I LOVED this manga it has an excellent premise, and even in the story dealing with suicide it also deals with teen prostitution, which I here is pritty bad right now in Japan. This story is NOT for those of you who like a happy ending. This is entirly the opposite. YOu don't have to be 16 to read this book just be ready to be blown away