What Is in Zekka, What Does Its Title Mean, and How Much Were the Royalties?

Two questions about Zekka are often collapsed into one.

The first is whether a person who committed a crime still has a freedom to describe his own past.

The second is whether that freedom includes an unrestricted entitlement to profit from the description.

They are not identical. Nor are “the publication was legally possible” and “the way it was published was ethically defensible” identical claims.

Once these distinctions disappear, the argument rushes toward one of two extremes:

• freedom of expression supposedly settles the publication method and the money as well as the speech; or
• harm to the families supposedly requires society to suppress the account altogether.

We can protect a freedom to speak while still asking whose life supplies the material, who receives the revenue and who is made to bear the renewed cost.

The basic facts about Zekka

Zekka: The Kobe Serial Child Murders is a memoir written under the byline “Former Boy A” by the man who was fourteen when he committed the 1997 attacks and used the name Seito Sakakibara. Ohta Publishing released it on 11 June 2015.

The CiNii Books record describes a 294-page, 20-centimetre volume with ISBN 978-4-7783-1450-7, while the publisher’s book page gives a pre-tax price of ¥1,500. Its Japanese library classification is NDC 916, the category for records and personal accounts. It is therefore a memoir or testimony, not a novel, even though casual descriptions sometimes call it one.

Item	Documented information
Byline	Former Boy A
Publisher	Ohta Publishing
Release	11 June 2015
List price	¥1,500 before tax
Length	294 pages
Structure	Part One and Part Two
First printing	100,000 copies
Early additional printing	50,000 copies

The first-printing and additional-printing figures were recorded in a contemporary Fuji Television media review citing the publisher.

The form of the book matters. A memoir is neither a court record nor an independent investigation.

That does not mean that every recollection is false. There are experiences only the writer can report. But converting memory into a story necessarily involves selection, arrangement and retrospective meaning.

Zekka is one source about the case. It is not the case’s final and exclusive truth.

What the book contains

The following is a non-graphic summary based on public bibliographic descriptions and reporting. It does not reproduce the text.

Part One: childhood, death, sexuality and a retrospective path to the crimes

Part One begins with the author’s sense that arrest erased his individual identity and converted him into the public symbol “Boy A.” It then moves backward through family and school life, his relationship with his grandmother, the deaths of his grandmother and dog, isolation, cruelty to animals, the association of sexual impulses with death, and his account of the inner path toward the crimes.

The passages about his grandmother receive particular attention. The author positions the death of the grandmother he loved as an early turning point. He also interprets an experience involving her portrait and belongings as the moment in which sex, death and guilt became joined in his mind.

This is an author’s later explanation, not an independently established cause.

An event occurring before a psychological change does not prove that it produced the later crimes. Loss, development, fantasy, impulse, family relationships and many other factors cannot responsibly be compressed into one dramatic origin story. His grandmother is not a causal device, still less a person onto whom responsibility can be transferred.

Part Two: life after institutional treatment

Part Two concentrates on the period after his provisional release in 2004: a rehabilitation facility, employment, housing, relationships, fear of recognition and the effort to construct an ordinary life.

This raises a genuine institutional question. Reintegration is not exoneration. Establishing work, stability and conditions under which responsibility can continue is necessary both to prevent further harm and to make compensation possible.

At the same time, suffering, isolation and difficulty after release do not become a moral payment equivalent to the lives and security taken from others.

Understanding the obstacles facing an offender is not the same as relativising the victims’ loss.

What does the title Zekka mean?

“Zekka” is not an ordinary Japanese word with one settled everyday definition, and the publisher’s public materials do not supply an authoritative one-line explanation. Its meaning should therefore be presented as interpretation, not as a verified statement of authorial intent.

The character zetsu can suggest severance, isolation, exhaustion or death. Ka means song or verse. Together they may evoke at least three possibilities:

1. a song voiced from a life cut off from ordinary continuity;
2. a final song at the border of death; or
3. an effort to recover a human voice from the impersonal label “Boy A.”

The third interpretation exposes the title’s central ethical danger. When the writer seeks to become a human being rather than a public symbol, do the murdered children become symbols serving his recovery narrative?

The deepest question is not only lexical. It is whose voice is heard as a song, and whose enforced silence becomes its background.

How much were the royalties?

The figure repeated most often is ¥15 million from the first printing.

The arithmetic is straightforward:

¥1,500 × 100,000 copies × 10% = ¥15 million

But the ten-percent rate is an assumption used in press estimates. The agreement between the author and Ohta Publishing has not been disclosed. Public sources do not establish whether royalties were calculated on copies printed or sold, whether there was an advance, or how electronic and subsidiary rights were treated.

Using only the documented first printing of 100,000 copies and the early additional printing of 50,000 gives these simple scenarios:

Copies used in calculation	At an assumed 8%	At an assumed 10%
100,000	¥12 million	¥15 million
150,000	¥18 million	¥22.5 million

These are pre-tax mathematical estimates, not documented payments to the author. Copies printed are also not necessarily copies sold.

The accurate answer is therefore limited: the actual royalty payment is not established by the public record. ¥15 million and ¥22.5 million are scenarios produced by multiplying a known price and reported print run by an assumed rate.

Where did the royalty money go?

A 2015 parliamentary question on a Japanese “Son of Sam” law cited a contemporary newspaper report that the publisher had said the author wanted to use royalty income to compensate victims and their families.

That establishes a reported intention, not a completed transfer or an enforceable commitment.

• There is no public evidence that every yen of royalty income was contractually assigned to compensation.
• There is no evidence that payment occurred when the book appeared.
• The families were not obliged to accept money generated in that way.
• The use of the remainder has not been publicly established.

According to a May 2026 Kansai Television report, the author offered in the year after publication to make a compensation payment from the royalties. The father of Jun Hase declined. The report says that no further such offer followed for roughly a decade and that annual letters ceased to arrive in 2018.

Refusal did not mean that compensation was unnecessary. For the father, accepting money created by an unannounced publication risked forcing the family to participate in a mechanism that had converted their child’s death into sales.

The ethical issue was not simply the amount. It was that the offender’s side had selected the form of “reparation” after selecting the publication, without the family selecting either.

Compensation should answer another person’s loss and rights. If the sequence becomes “sell the story, then offer part of the proceeds,” profit has become the condition of reparation.

Why did the publisher proceed without the families’ agreement?

In its statement after publication, Ohta Publishing acknowledged criticism that the surprise release had disturbed the families. It nevertheless argued that a publisher must take responsibility for its own decision rather than transfer that decision to the people depicted. It continued publication on the ground that the account could contribute to understanding serious youth crime.

There is a legitimate principle here. Journalism and historical publishing cannot depend on permission from every affected person. If every participant possessed an absolute veto, investigations of state wrongdoing, institutional abuse and public history could be stopped by those with an interest in silence.

But “the publisher makes the final decision” does not entail “the families need not be told.”

Even without granting a veto, the publisher could have:

• notified the families before release;
• separated material communicated privately to them from the commercial manuscript;
• avoided promotional use of the case’s brutality;
• placed a defined share of proceeds in a transparent compensation mechanism; and
• allowed independent verification of sales and transfers.

Freedom to publish is not equivalent to freedom to enter another person’s trauma without warning.

What should bookstores and libraries have done?

Some bookstores and libraries declined to stock the book. Akashi City issued a formal request for consideration under its ordinance supporting crime victims, saying that the publication itself produced secondary harm and that public purchase could amplify the families’ suffering. The city decided not to acquire the book for its libraries.

This is not exhausted by the words “censorship” or “freedom.” A bookseller chooses inventory, and a library has a finite budget and a collection policy. Neither can acquire every book. Yet a public library that removes material solely because of public anger may also deprive later researchers of evidence needed to examine the controversy.

Possible intermediate responses include:

• distinguishing preservation for research from prominent promotion;
• shelving the memoir alongside victim accounts and independent studies;
• publishing the reasons and criteria for acquisition; and
• ensuring that the offender’s account does not monopolise the public record.

Reading is not endorsement. But reading also produces attention and sometimes revenue. A reader is not wholly outside the market being judged.

Ricoeur: a self-narrative can rebuild a person without owning the truth

Paul Ricoeur’s idea of narrative identity explains why people arrange fragments of experience into a temporal account and say, “this is the person I was.” Narrative connects a changing present self to a past self and can become part of accepting responsibility.

Zekka performs this work. It places bereavement, isolation, impulse, arrest, institutional treatment and reintegration on one line, reconstructing the author as a person with continuity rather than an incomprehensible monster.

That may be necessary for rehabilitation. Yet narrative can carry responsibility or dilute it.

When a story explains why something happened, a reader may silently move from “this helps me understand” to “this made the act unavoidable.” Explanation and excuse can be uncomfortably close.

The answer is not to prohibit self-narration. It is to place first-person narrative among independent records, expert analysis and the voices of others.

Kant: were the victims made material for the author’s recovery?

Kant’s principle of respect requires that persons never be treated merely as means.

Publication may have served the author’s self-understanding, income and recovery of a human identity. But the same project is ethically defective if victims and families are used as raw material for those ends.

For the author, the case is “his past.” For a family, it is the life of a child who was taken. Neither side exclusively owns the event as a story.

Kant’s principle does not automatically produce an absolute family veto. It does, however, require that they be treated as persons with their own purposes rather than as obstacles to a publishing plan. Advance notice, restraint in description and consultation over proceeds would have been basic forms of respect.

If the publisher rightly insists that it owns the decision, it also owns the responsibility extending beyond that decision.

Mill: social value does not require maximum commercial exploitation

John Stuart Mill’s defence of liberty protects even disturbing expression because exposure to it may allow society to test assumptions and deepen understanding.

An offender’s account may have value for the study of youth crime, treatment, juvenile justice and reintegration. Suppression before examination can remove information useful to prevention.

But two conditions remain distinct:

1. society can access the account; and
2. the account is heavily promoted as a commodity whose revenue belongs without qualification to its author.

If public understanding is the aim, conflicts of interest can be reduced: proceeds can be independently administered, compensation judgments can take priority, specialist context can accompany the text and financial flows can be disclosed.

Making a text available and maximising its sale are different projects.

Levinas: the force of the first person can cover the face of the other

For Emmanuel Levinas, ethics begins when another person’s vulnerability calls us before we have finished arranging the world around ourselves.

A memoir has the force of the first person: I felt, I feared, I changed. That voice draws a reader inward. The murdered children cannot answer with first-person accounts of their own futures.

No literary skill can remove that asymmetry.

The more completely the offender’s interior life fills the page, the greater the risk that the victims become events in his development. Ethical reading therefore asks not only what the narrator reveals, but how the absence of those who cannot speak is treated within his revelation.

Marx: when a crime story becomes a commodity

A book is also a commodity. Editing, printing, distribution, retail and publicity convert attention into revenue.

Marx’s analysis of commodities shows how human relationships can disappear behind a price. The ¥1,500 price of Zekka does not display the children’s lost lives, the survivors’ injuries, the families’ time, the author’s treatment, the editor’s decision or society’s fear and curiosity. They are compressed into the single object “a controversial bestseller.”

Unease about royalties is not merely envy. The crime produced notoriety; notoriety produced demand; demand produced income for the offender. The sequence appears to reverse the proper order of justice.

A complete profit ban, however, could also suppress testimony with genuine public value. The better question is not simply “may he speak?” but who administers value created by criminal notoriety and whose injury should be repaired first.

Derrida: compensation cannot purchase forgiveness

Jacques Derrida warned against reducing forgiveness to a transaction that restores normality.

An apology does not compel forgiveness. A payment does not end a relationship. A book explaining an inner life does not require understanding from those harmed.

Compensation is an obligation, not the price of forgiveness. Families remain free to accept money without forgiving, to reject money produced in a particular way, or to remain silent.

The refusal of royalty-funded payment should not be dismissed as emotional or wasteful. It rejected a narrative chosen by the offender: publish, earn and then define the earnings as atonement.

Reparation does not mean requiring the other person to accept one’s preferred ending.

Would a Son of Sam law solve the problem?

After Zekka, Japan debated a version of the American “Son of Sam” laws that redirect proceeds from crime stories toward victims.

The Japanese government’s 2015 parliamentary answer said that a regime regulating income from publications about one’s crimes would require careful examination because of freedom of expression.

The concern is real. In 1991, the US Supreme Court invalidated New York’s then-existing law because it imposed a financial burden specifically on speech about crime and swept too broadly. The US Department of Justice’s case summary explains that victim compensation is compelling, but a law targeting only expressive proceeds was not narrowly tailored.

Silence is not the only alternative. A more neutral system would enforce existing compensation debts effectively against income and property of every kind—wages, assets and royalties—rather than punish a particular subject of speech.

The principle then becomes: when a person who owes compensation gains resources, victim recovery has priority. It does not become: the state may financially penalise only the telling of disfavoured stories.

A framework for publication without impunity

The lesson of Zekka need not be either prohibition or laissez-faire. Commercial publication by a person responsible for a serious crime could follow at least six principles:

1. Separate publication from proceeds. A work may be publishable even when the author cannot freely dispose of all revenue.
2. Prioritise existing compensation obligations. Enforce them across income categories, not only book royalties.
3. Provide advance notice. Notice need not create a veto, but it gives families time and reduces surprise harm.
4. Protect private communications. Material addressed to a family should not silently become commercial copy.
5. Disclose financial flows. Convert a promise to compensate into a verifiable mechanism.
6. Preserve victim voices in the public record. The offender’s searchable narrative must not become the only narrative.

Such a framework leaves speech available while resisting the conversion of criminal notoriety into an asset belonging solely to the offender.

Conclusion: a right to speak is not ownership of the story

Zekka narrates the author’s childhood, his retrospective account of the path to the crimes, institutional treatment and life after release as one continuing identity. It may possess documentary value for thinking about youth crime and rehabilitation.

Self-explanation does not, however, monopolise truth. Comprehensibility is not exoneration.

The defensible royalty facts are a ¥1,500 list price, a 100,000-copy first printing and an early additional 50,000 copies. The familiar ¥15 million and ¥22.5 million figures assume a ten-percent rate; the actual contract and payment remain unknown. A reported desire to use royalties for compensation is not the same as the families receiving them.

The central task is to move beyond the binary of publication or silence.

The author has a freedom to speak. Society may have reasons to examine the account. A publisher may make an editorial decision.

But the story does not belong to the offender alone. It also contains victims who can no longer speak, families who could not choose whether to be drawn back into public attention, and a society that carries the costs.

Freedom to publish therefore requires not unconditional profit, but continuing and verifiable responsibility for the lives used as its material.

NOW IN QUESTION

Are we angry that an offender spoke?

Or are we angry that, while the victims had no choice, his speech alone became a successful commodity?

If it is the latter, deleting the book is not the only answer.

The harder answer is an institution that preserves speech while ensuring responsibility arrives before profit.

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References

• Ohta Publishing statement on the publication of Zekka
• Ohta Publishing book information for Zekka
• CiNii Books bibliographic record for Zekka
• Fuji Television review of reporting on Zekka
• Kansai Television report on the Hase family, compensation and the royalties
• Akashi City request concerning the handling of Zekka
• Diet question on a Japanese “Son of Sam” law
• Japanese government response to the Diet question
• US Department of Justice: The First Amendment Problems of “Son of Sam” Laws