Fuminori Nakamura makes it look easy --- that tightrope walk he performs on the very narrow line between crime and literary fiction. He has been actively writing in his native Japan, where his genius was recognized almost immediately, for well over a decade. It only has been within the last three years or so that he has become established with reading audiences in the United States, thanks in large part to Soho Crime and translators Satoko Izumo and, more recently, Allison Markin Powell, who translated LAST WINTER WE PARTED and now THE GUN, Nakamura’s most recently published book on these shores.

Interestingly enough, THE GUN was the first of Nakamura’s works to be published. One sees almost immediately the themes of guilt, alienation and obsession that are explored in various ways in the subsequent titles that have been made available here. The book is by current standards more of a novella than a novel --- it ends just short of 200 pages --- but is of such depth and width that readers will not notice any brevity in the page department.

"As THE GUN reaches its finale, it becomes obvious that what occurs was preordained from the beginning of the book; we simply didn’t know how bad it was going to get."

The plot is deceptively straightforward. A university student who becomes known to us as Nishikawa is taking a very roundabout walk home one night when he makes a grisly discovery, stumbling across the corpse of a man by a river. A gun is lying next to the body; Nishikawa, who is extremely impulsive, picks up the gun. He takes it home and soon becomes obsessed with it. Even as he goes through the events of what constitutes his everyday life, at least part, if not the majority, of his attention is occupied with the gun. Certainly Nishikawa has more than enough distractions other than his newly found talisman. He has a friend devoted to partying and seduction; a woman he is seeing on the down-low and another who has made it clear, at least initially, that she is interested in him; and, of course, his studies, which seem to slip further into the background.

As the book progresses, Nakamura demonstrates with a great deal of subtlety how deeply and fatally flawed Nishikawa was long before he picked up the gun. A scene in which he meets his biological father --- a man he never knew --- for the first time is a pivotal event in the book and one of the most uncomfortable. Nakamura has a talent for getting under not only his readers’ skins but also those of his characters. When two characters on different occasions figuratively throw Nishikawa a life preserver --- one directly, the other indirectly --- he is too far gone to know the gesture for what it is or to appreciate it. As THE GUN reaches its finale, it becomes obvious that what occurs was preordained from the beginning of the book; we simply didn’t know how bad it was going to get.

Here’s hoping that Soho Crime will continue to do the fine job it’s been doing in bringing Nakamura’s work to American reading audiences. The critical reaction to Nakamura here has been building slowly, and hopefully he will become a household name in the US as he has in Japan.