Fuminori Nakamura is in a class by himself. He tends to write relatively short but very dense books that feature unsettling characters in disturbing situations. His work reminds me somewhat of the middle period of the books of Philip K. Dick. It is not that Nakamura writes science fiction; it is that his characters, like Dick, seem to exist in a world where the rules that they think apply keep shifting; one must either shift and improvise or be horribly lost.

Five of Nakamura’s 12 novels to date have been translated into English. THE KINGDOM, newly published here (thanks to the venerable Soho Crime imprint and the fine translation of Kalau Almony), is, as Nakamura explains in his interesting afterword, a sister volume to THE THIEF. But you don’t have to have read or referenced that august work to appreciate THE KINGDOM. The narrative is presented in the first person by Yurika, one of Nakamura’s more complex creations. Yurika poses as a freelance prostitute, but her situation is somewhat more complicated. She is actually an instrument for hire in the employ of a blackmailer, luring a target into a compromising position and then taking photographs. 

"[Nakamura's] straightforward prose advances the story quickly, even as he creates an atmosphere that shimmers around the edges while slowly transforming the environment and the characters."

Yurika doesn’t know much about her employer, or why or how the targets are picked. She finds the work satisfactory on a number of levels and otherwise enjoys her life, which is somewhat solitary and quiet, a direct contrast to what she does for a living and to her past life, an element of her personality that she keeps closely held. That all changes, though, when someone approaches her without warning and claims to be a friend from the past. The man appears to be who he says he is, but Yurika isn’t entirely sure of either his identity or his motivation. She also makes the acquaintance of an enigmatic gentleman who she eventually learns is a mysterious and feared crime lord known as Kizaki.

Yurika’s confident and self-assured world is soon turned upside down when Kizaki insists that she start working for him in a manner that will put her in direct opposition to her current employer. Yurika begins playing both ends against each other (or does she?) in a last-ditch effort to survive. The drama, played out against the backdrop of the gritty glitz of the Tokyo nightclub scene, gradually becomes a sinister playground in which the stakes become higher and higher not only for Yurika but also for her erstwhile employers. As the climax approaches, it becomes less and less likely that anyone will survive.

THE KINGDOM clocks in at just over 200 pages, but Nakamura makes the most of each one of them. His straightforward prose advances the story quickly, even as he creates an atmosphere that shimmers around the edges while slowly transforming the environment and the characters. He does not write for western audiences, so that some --- myself included --- might occasionally find his structural concepts of the novel vaguely unsettling but always interesting.

My understanding is that there are a number of Japanese novelists of equal worth to Nakamura who have yet to be translated to English, and that he may represent the first wave of “Asian noir,” if you will, in the same manner that Stieg Larsson opened the door to the repopularization of Scandinavian crime fiction for English audiences. THE KINGDOM may well be the first to do this for Japan. Jump on now.