Over the last few years, I have added a number of Japanese authors to my reading lists. I typically go out of my way to expand my bookish horizons, and I love the Japanese culture. Happily, MY ANNIHILATION is not the first book I have read by Fuminori Nakamura, who is considered to be a master of literary noir in his home country of Japan.

I am always concerned about reading a novel that has been translated for fear that I might lose the “inner voice” that each writer carries with them through their narrator or various protagonists. I am not sure that would have made much of a difference with MY ANNIHILATION. This is a real puzzle box of a story that is consciously designed to keep readers off guard and stabbing blindly in the dark to try to figure out what is really going on versus what the narrator is letting you know.

"This is a real puzzle box of a story that is consciously designed to keep readers off guard and stabbing blindly in the dark to try to figure out what is really going on versus what the narrator is letting you know."

You kind of know you are in for it when the first page features this warning: Turn this page, and you may give up your entire life. I thought to myself, Well, that’s extreme. I might be dedicating a few hours of my life to finishing it, but the same can be said about any book I’m reading. I’m a curious sort, so those words of caution didn’t have any impact on me. In fact, it made me want to dive in faster.

It begins with a manuscript on a desk in a cramped room, opened to page one like it’s daring someone to step forward and take a look. Our narrator lights a cigarette, lies back on the only piece of furniture in the room --- a ratty bed --- and begins to read it: “I guess it started with the funeral.” The person who penned this manuscript talks about someone being apprehended for committing multiple murders and indicates that they had found a place of their own to live.

With each passing chapter, we get to learn a bit more about both the writer and the reader. Then, at times, the two roles inexplicably begin to blend, and it becomes difficult to tell the two apart from each other. As if you are not confused enough, one chapter of the manuscript ends like this: “It doesn't even feel like this is me. It’s all so blurry, like something shrouded in a distant fog. But evidently somebody is going to take my place. Someone willing to take over for me, accepting all the horrors…I’m going to be saved.”

As the reader gets drawn deeper inside the mind of this writer, it seems more and more like he has been left some sort of sordid confession that only he was intended to ever read and understand. It is not made clear what, if anything, is to be done with this information. What’s worse is that we never really know if anything we are being told is true.

Our “ghostwriter” literally saves the best for last with a final entry that will have your head spinning and will find you either looking to go back and reread certain passages, or walking away from the book as you digest what you read and slowly come to the realization that it was a work of dark brilliance. Don’t say you weren’t warned!