What's Left of Me Is Yours - Stephanie Scott

 

I was intrigued by Stephanie Scott’s debut novel, What’s Left of Me Is Yours, as soon as I read a very brief synopsis of the book’s plot. One strange-looking word in the plot summary jumped out at me: “wakaresaseya.” That turns out to be a Japanese word whose English equivalent is something like “breaker-upper.” As it turns out, there were almost 300 wakaresaseya agencies operating in Japan in 2010 through which special agents could be hired to give advantage to one partner in divorce proceedings by providing evidence of having successfully seduced the unknowing party. The wakaresaseya industry took a hit in 2010 when one of the agents was convicted of murdering a woman he had seduced on behalf of her husband, but it is said to be doing rather well even today. What’s Left of Me Is Yours is based on that 2010 murder case.

 

“Lies, when they are told, have a shadow quality to them, a gossamer texture that can wrap around a life. They have that feather-light essence of childhood, and my childhood was built on lies.”  Page 12

 

What’s Left of Me Is Yours is divided into five distinct parts, each of them at least partially narrated through the eyes of Sumiko, a young woman who until very recently has believed that her mother had been killed in an automobile accident when Sumiko was just seven years old. Since her parents’ divorce and her mother’s death, Sumiko has been raised by her maternal grandfather, Yoshi, a man who has kept the truth of her mother’s murder from her for the last fifteen years. But it all begins to unravel for Yoshi on the morning that Sumiko hears something on the phone that makes her wonder about everything she thinks she knows about her mother’s death – and what happened afterward.

 

Scott skillfully uses a series of flashbacks to explain how the relationship between Rina (Sumiko’s mother) and Kaitaro (the wakaresaseya agent) began only when the little girl’s father hired Kaitaro to seduce his wife. Seeking an advantage in the divorce proceedings he planned, Sata would use the resulting evidence of her affair to coerce his wife into giving him everything he demanded rather than suffer the public humiliation of her affair. What Sata did not count on was the wakaresaseya agent falling totally and madly in love with his wife, and her with him.

 

And what Sumiko’s grandfather did not count on was his adult granddaughter using her recently acquired law license to investigate her mother’s death – and the actions of everyone involved in the case, including him- and where that investigation would ultimately lead her.

 

“That afternoon, alone on the floor of my grandfather’s study, looking at those  words, I realized that of all the lies we are told, the very best ones are close to the truth.” Page 58

Bottom Line: What’s Left of Me Is Yours is a complex thriller hinging on one woman’s quest to learn the “truth” about her mother’s death. It is also an excellent character study in which it soon becomes obvious that there is no single truth to be discovered, that each of the people who knew her mother best at the time of her death have their own versions of that truth. And now, what Sumiko chooses to do with all that she learns will set the course of the rest of her life. Her innocence is gone forever.