Evil and the Mask
Praise for Fuminori Nakamura’s
The Thief
A
Wall Street Journal
BEST FICTON OF 2012 SELECTION
A
Wall Street Journal
BEST MYSTERY OF 2012
A
World Literature Today
NOTABLE TRANSLATION
A
Los Angeles Times
BOOK PRIZE NOMINEE
“
The Thief
brings to mind Highsmith, Mishima and Doestoevsky.… A chilling philosophical thriller leaving readers in doubt without making them feel in any way cheated.”
—
The Wall Street Journal
“An intelligent, compelling and surprisingly moving tale, and highly recommended.”
—
The Guardian
“Nakamura’s prose is cut-to-the-bone lean, but it moves across the page with a seductive, even voluptuous agility. I defy you not to finish the book in a single sitting.”
—
Richmond Times Dispatch
“Fuminori Nakamura’s Tokyo is not a city of bright lights, bleeding-edge technology, and harujuku girls with bubblegum pink hair. In Nakamura’s Japan, the lights are broken, the knives are bloodier than the tech, and the harujuku girls are aging single mothers turning tricks in cheap tracksuits. His grasp of the seamy underbelly of the city is why Nakamura is one of the most award-winning young guns of Japanese hardboiled detective writing.”
—
The Daily Beast
“
The Thief
manages to wrap you up in its pages, tightly, before you are quite aware of it.”
—
Mystery Scene
“Nakamura succeeds in creating a complicated crime novel in which the focus is not on the crimes themselves but rather on the psychology and physicality of the criminal. The book’s power inheres in the voice of the thief, which is itself as meticulously rendered as the thief’s every action.”
—Three Percent
“Fascinating. I want to write something like
The Thief
someday myself.”
—Natsuo Kirino, bestselling author of Edgar-nominated
Out
and
Grotesque
“
The Thief
is a swift piece of crime noir, surprisingly light on grit but weighted by existential dread. It’s simple and utterly compelling—great beach reading for the deeply cynical. If you crossed Michael Connelly and Camus and translated it from Japanese.”
—Grantland
“Surreal.”
—
Sacramento Bee
“Page-Turner” Pick
“Nakamura’s writing is spare, taut, with riveting descriptions.… Nakamura conjures dread, and considers philosophical questions of fate and control.… For all the thief’s anonymity, we come to know his skill, his powerlessness and his reach for life.”
“Disguised as fast-paced, shock-fueled crime fiction,
The Thief
resonates even more as a treatise on contemporary disconnect and paralyzing isolation.”
—
Library Journal
“I was deeply impressed with
The Thief
. It is fresh. It is sure to enjoy a great deal of attention.”
—Kenzaburō Ōe, Nobel Prize–winning author of
A Personal Matter
“Nakamura’s memorable antihero, at once as believably efficient as Donald Westlake’s Parker and as disaffected as a Camus protagonist, will impress genre and literary readers alike.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“Compulsively readable for its portrait of a dark, crumbling, graffiti-scarred Tokyo—and the desire to understand the mysterious thief.”
—
Booklist
“Like Camus’
The Stranger
, Nakamura’s
The Thief
is less concerned about the fallout of a particular crime than about probing the nature of human existence.… The story is fast-paced, elegantly written, and rife with the symbols of inevitability.”
—
ForeWord
“The drily philosophical tone and the noir atmosphere combine perfectly, providing a rapid and enjoyable ‘read’ that is nonetheless cool and distant, provoking the reader to think about (as much as experience) the tale.”
—International Noir Fiction
“Both a crime thriller and character study, it is a unique and engrossing read, keeping a distant yet thoughtful eye on the people it follows.… [Nakamura] may be looking at his story with a cold eye, but the warmth he sees is real and all the more poignant because of its faintness. It’s a haunting undercurrent, making
The Thief
a book that’s hard to shake once you’ve read it.”
—Mystery People
“[An] extremely well-written tale.… Readers will be enthralled by this story that offers an extremely surprising ending.”
—
Suspense Magazine
The Thief
Aku To Kamen No Ruuru
© 2010 Fuminori Nakamura. All rights reserved.
First published in Japan in 2010 by Kodansha Ltd.
Publication rights for this English edition arranged through Kodansha Ltd., Tokyo.
Translation copyright © 2013 by Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates.
First published in English in 2013 by
Soho Press
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nakamura, Fuminori, 1977–
[Aku to kamen no ruru. English]
Evil and the mask / by Fuminori Nakamura.
p. cm
eISBN: 978-1-61695-213-6
1. Family secrets—Fiction. 2. Corruption—Fiction. 3. Japan—Fiction.
I. Title.
PL873.5.A339A7713 2013
895.6’36—dc23
2013000545
Interior Design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.
v3.1
Detective’s Diary (Extract)
While that big case was moving towards an unexpected solution, the fact that several unnatural deaths surrounded it was barely mentioned. Their exact relation to the case is still unclear, and now that the most important evidence has disappeared it will be impossible to uncover the truth. I was only responsible for investigating one man, but in retrospect it should have been a couple, a man and a woman. Even though I was just a single member of the inquiry team, I wondered at the time if our solution was acceptable. Maybe I was operating under a serious misconception all along. Reflecting on it now, I can’t help thinking that perhaps by some chance I alone was the closest to the truth about that entire sequence of events, which could have been linked but never were
.
I still don’t fully understand that couple’s relationship. Right from the beginning, however, I was obsessed with a single hypothesis. If he offered to explain everything he knows about those mysterious events and about his own life, I’d love to hear it. Not so much to solve the case—I’d love to hear it as a fellow human being
.
As a detective, I’ve always been involved in other people’s lives. Looking back, I’ve hardly lived my own life at all. I’ve spent my career prying into their affairs, sticking my nose in, prodding their lives in the right direction. It may be an odd way of putting it, but the main character has always been the criminal. I’ve spent more time thinking about them than about my own life. In that sense, I’ve allowed other people to take the lead and I’ve been merely an observer
.
If this case were fiction, I would obviously have a supporting part, appearing only rarely, a genuine bit player. But still, I’d like to talk some more with that man, who was born and raised in that peculiar family and who, if my guess is correct, ended up choosing the wrong path in his life. Now I want to know everything about him
.
Not as a detective, but as a man. As a man who, in spite of being a detective, has always borne a grudge against society
.
“NOW I’M GOING to tell you some important facts about your life.”
I was eleven, and my father had called me to his study. In his black suit he leaned back heavily on the leather sofa, perhaps because he was already an old man and standing tired him. A ray of the setting sun peeped through a crack in the curtains. With the orange light behind him, his face was in shadow. Clutching a red, radio-controlled car, still with dirt on its tires, I was aware of how small I was in the center of the large, cold room. Father’s breath smelled faintly of alcohol.
“About your education. This does not mean, though, that I hold any great hopes for you. It’s just that I intend
to leave a ‘cancer’ in this world. Under my guidance, you will become a cancer. A personification of evil, you could say.”