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.”
—Cleveland.com
“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
Also by Fuminori Nakamura
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
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Part 1: Past Chapter 1: Past
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part 2: Past/Present Chapter 1: Present
Chapter 2
Chapter 3: Past
Chapter 4
Chapter 5: Present
Chapter 6: Past
Chapter 7
Chapter 8: Present
Part 3: Present Chapter 1: Present
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part 4: Present Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
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.”
I couldn’t see my father clearly, but it was hard to imagine that he was smiling. No doubt his face was as immobile and expressionless as ever.
“My other children are already adults, occupying important positions in society. That is because they came into the world uninvited, and were free to choose their own paths. Your life, on the other hand, I created on purpose, when I was already past sixty. This is something of a practice in my—no, our—family.”
I still couldn’t see his face.
“By ‘cancer’ I mean a being that will make this world miserable. That will make everyone wish that they had never been born, or at least make everyone think that the light of virtue does not shine in this world.”
There was a knock at the door, and at his signal a young servant girl entered. Her lips and nose were narrow, her eyes large and clear. I thought she was probably my father’s type. On our estate there were at least seven domestic servants. When she whispered something to him he nodded. “Send her in,” he muttered, then turned back to me. “The most recent recorded example was in the Taisho era, almost eighty years ago.”
The servant left the room silently.
“Our ancestor revived the custom when he was over sixty years old—the custom of delivering a cancer into the world. He seems to have realized that his own life was nearing its end, and that even though he would die, the world would carry on. That was something he was unable to forgive. In his life he had obtained everything he wanted and he was arrogant, as I am. If his life was going to end, then everything must perish. So on June eighteenth, nineteen fifteen, a young woman gave birth to his child. To bring this world to an end—no, to be precise, to be a negative force, to make the world as unhappy as possible. He raised that child to be a cancer on society, and the boy was excellent. He turned into a creature who was destined to make many peoples’ lives hell, who was destined to increase the number of people who believed that life wasn’t worth living. They say that when the old man was on his deathbed, he was no longer afraid. He thought the unhappy people created by that cancer would create more unhappiness, and cancer would spread like gushing foam. If that continued, the world would begin to fail. Well, he thought, at the very least I have been able to create a person who will spread a stain over the light of the world in my stead after I am gone. In his bed, the old man heard the news of the outbreak of the war in the Pacific. That cancer had nothing to do with the events leading up to the war, but as a high-ranking officer he committed all manner of atrocities—so much evil that God covered his eyes.”
The door opened and a girl I had never seen before entered. Cold air from the rest of the house flowed in, and she walked toward us on skinny legs. Her face was immediately flushed with the slanting orange sunlight, and her large eyes stood out vividly in her face. I caught my breath, confused, as though I was threatened by the unexpected presence of those eyes, as though they were going to vanish into the light. I was careful not to show it, however. My father gave no reaction to the girl’s entry.
“With our wealth and power that have been passed down through the generations, we can use this life to do whatever we want. Then when we feel that our time is running out, by breeding one of these cancers we can mask the fear of death with amusement at the entertainment it provides. Of course this custom is not observed in every generation. From time to time, however, it is remembered and put into practice. I have revived it once more. A number of years ago a religious group occupied a nuclear power plant. When their plan was foiled by Public Security, they all committed suicide. While that group was in the process of turning into a cult, one student from Tokyo University played a leading role. His roots can be traced back to that cancer clan. Namely, he was the son of that soldier, from a lesser branch of our family tree.”
The girl was about my age, wearing a white dress and carrying a large bag. She stared at my father and me in wonder. I looked idly at the nascent bulge of her breasts. Even after I turned back to my father, his face still hidden in shadow, the image of her white dress, tinged with orange, stayed in my mind’s eye.
It was not just me and Father that she seemed to find strange, but everything around her. The room, spacious and unheated. The deer’s head mounted on the wall, antlers spread wide on either side, its coat covered in dust as if it had turned to stone. The enormous black desk, the sofa where my father was sitting, the countless books and earthenware pots placed carelessly on the ancient shelves.
“First, you need to become competent.”
My father’s lecture was not finished.
“In this world, you must be powerful, because when an able person becomes a cancer, he is formidable. I hear you are highly intelligent. That, however, is thanks to your education thus far. The differences between people are not as great as the differences between humans and apes. Talent is simply the ability to work harder than other people. At present, you have the habit of diligence—in other words, perseverance and willpower. From now on you must also form the habit of resisting the temptation towards inertia or resignation. To purge from your soul any tendency to give up. You must also form the ability to communicate, to manage human relationships shrewdly. Last week a young man was going around assaulting people at random in the streets, but I don’t want you to limit yourself to trivial crimes like that. Under my tutelage, you will become a brilliant man. Intellectually you will be greatly in advance of your years, and then when you turn fourteen, I am going to show you hell.”
Still he did not move a muscle. He must have been well into his seventies, and his legs were spindly. The girl continued to stand beside me, forgetting even to put her bag on the floor.
“A hell which will make you want to reject the world. A cruel, devastating hell. This girl will play an important part in that torment. At that time, as you are entering adolescence, under the surface your psychological balance will be upset, causing major neurological disturbances. You will be engulfed by that evil, and you will feel a need to use it to influence the people around you. That is just the beginning, however. When you turn fifteen I will show you hell once more, and twice when you turn sixteen. Then at eighteen you will learn another truth about your life. All this has already been determined. It cannot be altered.”
My father shifted position slightly
, and for a moment his head moved out of the shadow. I caught a brief glimpse of his face, still completely without expression, and then it was hidden again.
“You will become part of the nerve center of this country, or else the nerve center of some organization that is fighting against this country, and you will foment evil. I will leave you a greater share of my wealth than my other children, so that ideally this world may be brought to an end.”
He sighed heavily. The girl’s frightened eyes were still illuminated by the glow of the setting sun.
“Why am I telling you this now? There are three reasons. One is that I am exceedingly drunk. The second is that you are still young and will not remember this conversation for long, because you are still in short pants and holding a toy car in your hand.”
I thought he might laugh at this, but he didn’t.
“And the third reason is that your mother was a good woman. She spent nights with an old man like me and gave birth to you. She waited patiently for a chance to bring out the goodness that I rejected my entire life—no, which I couldn’t even comprehend. I respect that. But you will soon forget this talk. Probably you don’t even understand a word of it. It will be like a tale heard in a dream.”
My father stood. With the light behind him, his body looked like a black void that had appeared in the air.
“This girl will live here with you. From now on the two of you must become close. For the hell that you will see in the future, so that you will become a cancer. However, you and this girl will not live happily ever after. Never. Now got to bed. You are still a child, and there is nothing so foolish as a child.”
Father turned his back and took a book from the shelf as though he had already forgotten us. Then he went through the door to the adjoining room at the rear. Whenever he opened a door, it never made a sound. The girl in the white dress was staring intently at the stuffed deer’s head.