Praise for The Thief
A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist
A Wall Street Journal Best Fiction of the Year Selection
A World Literature Today Notable Translation
Winner of Japan’s Prestigious Ōe Prize
“Brings to mind Highsmith, Mishima and Doestoevsky . . . A chilling existential thriller.”
—Wall Street Journal, Best Fiction of the Year Selection
“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
“Fascinating. I want to write something like The Thief someday myself.”
—Natsuo Kirino, bestselling author of Edgar-nominated Out and Grotesque
“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 harajuku girls with bubblegum pink hair. In Nakamura’s Japan, the lights are broken, the knives are bloodier than the tech, and the harajuku 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.”
—Daily Beast
“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.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
Praise for The Gun
A Wall Street Journal Best Fiction of the Year Selection
A World Literature Today Notable Translation
“A thriller in the same elevated sense as is Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Camus’s The Stranger . . . Nature versus nurture, free will versus fate: Such are the themes that flicker almost subliminally through this shocking narrative, which also emits echoes of Poe and Mishima.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“More a suspenseful study of obsession than a crime novel, Nakamura’s noir story, translated by Allison Markin Powell, is about liberation . . . Love, even illicit love, has a way of bringing out the best—or the worst—in a person.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“[Nakamura] tightens the screws on his character with eerie effectiveness, making the inevitable outcome shudder on the page.”
—Chicago Tribune
“[The Gun] offers an addictive—one might even say compulsive—night’s worth of chillingly unnerving entertainment.”
—The Richmond Times-Dispatch
“[Nakamura] straddles the crime-literary fiction boundary like few others. It gives a new twist to Chekhov’s rule: a gun mentioned in the first act—or here, a gun found by a dead body in the opening pages—must eventually be fired.”
—Maclean’s
“[A] powerful existential thriller.”
—The Sunday Times (UK)
“The psychological downward spiral into obsession is what drives this book, and during my reading, I couldn’t help but think that Alfred Hitchcock could have created a brilliant film adaptation.”
—BookPage
Praise for Last Winter, We Parted
“Crime fiction that pushes past the bounds of genre, occupying its own nightmare realm . . . For Nakamura, like [Seichō] Matsumoto, guilt or innocence is not the issue; we are corrupted, complicit, just by living in society. The ties that bind, in other words, are rules beyond our making, rules that distance us not only from each other but also from ourselves.”
—Los Angeles Times
“This slim, icy, outstanding thriller, reminiscent of Muriel Spark and Patricia Highsmith, should establish Fuminori Nakamura as one of the most interesting Japanese crime novelists at work today.”
—USA Today
“Some of the darkest noir fiction to come out of Japan—or any country—in recent years . . . Nakamura’s stories, however labeled, are memorable forays into uncomfortable terrain.”
—Mystery Scene
“A tense, layered story . . . [Nakamura’s] stripped-down prose and direct style drop the reader straight into his nightmare.”
—The Japan Times
“A coldly sophisticated, darkly disturbing logic puzzle written in the style of the great ice queen of the genre, Patricia Highsmith.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
“Deeply erotic and haunting . . . climaxes with a shocking twist.”
—Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
“Extremely dark and certainly twisted.”
—Suspense Magazine
Praise for The Kingdom
“Nakamura has described The Kingdom as a sister novel to The Thief . . . But the new novel bests its companion.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Few protagonists in modern crime fiction are as alienated as those in the challenging, violent, grotesque tales of Japanese author Fuminori Nakamura . . . Yurika’s struggle to escape her vexed fate elevates this shocker well above the lurid.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Multilayered and intense . . . [The] monstrous crime lord ‘Kizaki’ is a formidable nemesis.”
—The Independent (UK)
“Dark and strangely seductive . . . A recommended read for fans of noir as well as for anyone looking to be mesmerized by a masterful storyteller.”
—Pank Magazine
“A face-paced, dark novel of psychological suspense, told in a succinctly poetic style.”
—Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
Praise for Evil and the Mask
“Karma runs thicker than blood in Evil and the Mask, the thought-provoking and unpredictable new novel by the Japanese zen-noir master Fuminori Nakamura.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“A brilliant novel from one of Japan’s most current authors . . . If you love Patricia Highsmith, you’ll love Nakamura.”
—Globe and Mail
“A hard-to-put-down novel of ideas and a savage comment on nihilism, both Japanese and global . . . Shouldn’t be missed.”
—Booklist, Starred Review
“A twisted tale of revenge . . . mixing noir and the existential question of free will.”
—The Japan Times
“Full of themes that everyone can appreciate . . . Nakamura blurs the line between light and dark, good and evil. He illustrates that nothing in life is completely black and white.”
—Tulsa Books Examiner
Praise for The Boy in the Earth
“Absorbing . . . Just what abuse the narrator suffered as a youth is one of the puzzles to be solved (in horrific detail) by The Boy in the Earth. Another mystery is whether he will find a nonfatal way to break out of his Kafkaesque memory palace. By the book’s end, the reader comes to care about the second answer as much as the first.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Although many orders of magnitude darker, Nakamura may be the spiritual heir to Kenzaburō Ōe. This is existential literature at its compelling and nauseating best . . . His work isn’t merely noir as titillation; it’s the hideous truth below the surface, and he is one of the most vital writers at work today in Japan.”
—The Japan Times
“[Nakamura] has demonstrated time and again, and does so again here, that he is one of the best crime novelist working today.”
—Pank Magazine
“The Boy in the Earth offers readers a darkly philosophic musing on violence, history, purpose and what it means to be alive, told in elegant prose.”
—Shelf Awareness
Also by Fuminori Nakamura
The Thief
Evil and the Mask
Last Winter, We Parted
The Gun
The Kingdom
The Boy in the Earth
Copyright © 2014 Fuminori Nakamura. All rights reserved.
Translation copyright © 2018 by Kalau Almony
Original Japanese edition published in 2014 by Shueisha Inc., Tokyo.
This English edition published by arrangement with Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc.,
Tokyo, on behalf of Shueisha Inc., Tokyo.
First published in English in 2018 by
Soho Press
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nakamura, Fuminori, 1977–author. Almony, Kalau, translator.
Title: Cult X / Fuminori Nakamura ; translated by Kalau Almony.
ISBN978-1-61695-786-5
eISBN 978-1-61695-787-2
1. Cults—Japan—Fiction. 2. Terrorism—Japan—Fiction. 3. Criminals—Japan—
Fiction. 4. Suspense fiction. 5. Mystery fiction. I. Title.
PL873.5.A339 C8513 2018 895.63’6—dc23 2017043255
Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.
Case design concept by Jeff Wong
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
O Varuna, what has
been my greatest
transgression?—Rigveda
“She’s alive.”
The bar’s blue lights faintly illuminated Narazaki’s face. Their malicious glow seemed to bleach the color from his body. Has his face always looked like that? Kobayashi wondered. He looked like he’d lost something he needed to go on living. Yet his gaze was terribly powerful, and had a strange radiance.
“She’s really alive?” Narazaki’s voice was rough.
“I wouldn’t lie, and it’s no mistake. Ryoko Tachibana is alive.” The woman who had vanished from Narazaki’s life, who had hinted at suicide and then disappeared.
Kobayashi realized quite a bit of his whiskey was gone. His hand was moving his glass to his lips automatically. He was almost unsure he was in control of it.
“Okay, look.” Kobayashi hesitated. “I don’t think you should get involved.”
“Why?”
“Well . . .”
To Kobayashi, Narazaki’s relationship with Ryoko Tachibana had always seemed a bit off. When Kobayashi had happened to see her last month, he hadn’t had the courage to speak to her, but—maybe it was because of the work he did—he’d decided to tail her. She’d gone into an old apartment building. Without a doubt, it had been her.
“You looked into it for me, right? Tell me what you found.”
“Well . . .”
Kobayashi could hear shouting coming from a table at the far side of the room. The voices gradually lost strength and vanished, as if dissolving into the darkness.
A few weeks ago, when Kobayashi had told him he’d seen Ryoko Tachibana, Narazaki had looked surprised, but also seemed to have already known. Like it somehow made sense to him. Kobayashi had given Narazaki the address of the apartment building, but for some strange reason Narazaki had insisted Kobayashi investigate instead. It was true, Kobayashi did work at a P.I.’s office, but he hadn’t even been there six months. So far he’d mostly just assisted the other investigators, and had never worked a case alone. He’d felt a case like this would be too much for him. But he’d taken the job, if reluctantly, and he had actually discovered quite a lot in a short time. There was something odd about that, he thought. How could someone like me, someone still training, find so much out so easily?
“Is there some big secret? Something that would hurt me?”
“Not exactly . . .”
A peal of laughter from another distant table. In the dim light of the restaurant, Kobayashi could only make out the outlines of the people laughing. He caught himself drinking again. He was trying to get drunk. Why?
Should I tell Narazaki what I’m worried about? Kobayashi wondered. He had all the material he’d collected about Ryoko Tachibana in his bag. She’d been born in Nagasaki Prefecture, had attended elementary through high school there, and then moved to Tokyo to enroll in Rikkyo University. But she’d withdrawn, and that trail of information ended. She next surfaced at a meeting held at the facility of a certain small religious organization in Tokyo—the kind of organization people didn’t hear many good things about. But eventually she’d vanished again. She reappeared last year, and that was when she met Narazaki. There were no traces of her life between the time she left that religious organization and when she met him. She’d just somehow appeared before Narazaki, then vanished again.
This religious group also bothered Kobayashi. It was the sort of thing one just shouldn’t get involved in.
And now she had already moved out of the apartment he’d seen her enter.
Kobayashi stared listlessly at the counter. The three bartenders looked like triplets. They moved slowly and emotionlessly. Kobayashi shook his head slightly.
“I understand you’re puzzled. But, in any case, she’s not dead. That I confirmed. And given that . . . Look, what’s clear is that she left you. She probably had her reasons. I understand that’s not enough to satisfy you, but she left you.”
Kobayashi’s whole investigation of this woman had felt strange. As he traced her history, it was as if a single line had been prepared for him to follow. Like she was somewhere in the distance, beckoning him. Kobayashi took another sip of whiskey. She should have known he worked at an investigator’s office. Had she shown herself to him that first time on purpose? But why? Why would she do that?
“Listen.” Kobayashi turned to face Narazaki. “Let me say this clearly. I’ve got a bad feeling about this. You shouldn’t try to find her. There’s no need for you to get dragged into whatever this is.”
“Why?”
“You have your life.”
“My life?”
“You could get hurt.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
Kobayashi would remember, for the rest of his life, Narazaki’s next words.
“The life I lived . . . That life has no value at all.”
Kobayashi stared for a second at Narazaki’s face. In the end, he handed him the envelope filled with everything he’d found about Ryoko Tachibana. There was a small commotion at the table next to them. Kobayashi sipped his whiskey. As he drank, he realized he was getting drunk so he would be able to give the envelope to Narazaki.
He watched Narazaki open the envelope, wondering what his role was. If this were a novel, he probably wouldn’t be anything more than a side character. Whatever happened to whom, it would have nothing to do with him. He’d just be the cog that happened to set things in motion.
The other customers gradually headed home. Eventually, only Narazaki and Kobayashi were left in the dim bar. The blue lights illuminated only Narazaki.
Though there was no longer any need for him to drink, Kobayashi ordered another whiskey. His life had no value—that’s what Narazaki said. That may be true, Kobayashi thought. Even to Kobayashi, Narazaki’s life did not seem like a fulfilled one. Certainly, his life was not something anyone would be jealous of. Just like Kobayashi’s.
Part 1
1
In front of Narazaki was a gate.
It
was an old, enormous wooden gate. There was something written on it, but the characters had faded and Narazaki couldn’t make them out. Should I go straight in? Narazaki was unsure. There’s something strange about this place. But isn’t it just a normal house? It seems more like a house than a church or temple.
The gate cut through the frigid air and towered over Narazaki. It seemed like it was looking down on him, testing him, about to pass down some sort of judgment. Looking up at the gate, Narazaki was made aware of the smallness of his own body. He wasn’t ready to go in, so he walked past. The building was surrounded by tall brick-and-clay walls, and Narazaki couldn’t see inside.
He recalled Kobayashi’s report. Ryoko Tachibana had certainly belonged to this group. The founder was named Shotaro Matsuo, a man who called himself an amateur intellectual. The group seemed to be some sort of religious organization, but they didn’t have a proper name, they weren’t registered as a religion, and the whole concept of “believing in” their faith seemed foreign to them. They didn’t worship a particular god—in fact, the group’s focus seemed to be pondering the question, “Is there a god?”
What were they? Narazaki didn’t understand.
As he passed the gate, Narazaki thought to himself, I always do this. I always hesitate. It was as though he wanted to spend the rest of his life stuck, the days sinking away heavily. Though they were unhappy, he wanted to savor that unhappiness. The languor seemed to be his very flesh, and he could never leave it. But he had decided to stop living that way. He would follow the pull of the gravity he had begun to feel within himself. He would give himself up to whatever came. He didn’t care what would come of it.