The Kingdom: A Novel - Softcover

Fuminori Nakamura

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1616958103 ISBN 13: 9781616958107

Publisher: Soho Press, 2017

Synopsis

Zen-Noir master Nakamura returns to the Tokyo of The Thief, where a young grifter named Yurika finds herself in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with the shadowy crime lord Kizaki.

Yurika is a freelancer in the Tokyo underworld. She poses as a prostitute, carefully targeting potential johns, selecting powerful and high-profile men. When she is alone with them, she drugs them and takes incriminating photos to sell for blackmail purposes. She knows very little about the organization she s working for, and is perfectly satisfied with the arrangement, as long as it means she doesn t have to reveal anything about her identity, either. She operates alone and lives a private, solitary life, doing her best to lock away painful memories.

But when a figure from Yurika s past resurfaces, she realizes there is someone out there who knows all her secrets: her losses, her motivations, her every move. There are whispers of a crime lord named Kizaki a monster, she is told and Yurika finds herself trapped in a game of cat and mouse. Is she wily enough to escape one of the most sadistic men in Tokyo?

From the Hardcover edition.

About this title

Review:

Praise for The Kingdom:

"[Yurika] makes an ideal guide into Nakamura's nightmare kingdom, one node in a nihilistic entanglement of lives forged outside of conventional legal and moral frameworks." - Publishers Weekly

"Nakamura has described The Kingdom as a sister novel to The Thief . . . But the new novel bests its companion." - New York Times Book Review

"With a complex yet sympathetic anti-heroine who must outwit the most cunning and twisted minds, Nakamura's dark crime novel sets the bar for gritty, twisted plots that keep readers constantly guessing." - Library Journal

"Suspense writing at its tautest and most philosophical." - Politics and Prose Bookstore

"Unsettling, The Kingdom offers both psychological suspense on the most intimate personal level as well as some sinister geo-political (un-)doings in the background... A quick, dark read, in which the reader is like Yurika constantly kept off balance." - The Complete Review

"A classic in the making... Just make sure there's room in your schedule for recovery from this highly purposeful journey into darkness." - Kingdom Books

"Nakamura excels in writing brief, taut suspense and both this work and his exemplary The Gun really should be on your reading list." - Bookgasm.com

"Few protagonists in modern crime fiction are as alienated as those in the challenging, violent, grotesque tales of Japanese authorFuminori Nakamura...Yurika s struggle to escape her vexed fate elevates this shocker well above the lurid." --The Wall Street Journal

Praise for Fuminori Nakamura:

"Crime fiction that pushes past the bounds of genre, occupying its own nightmare realm . . . 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

"Nakamura s prose is cut-to-the-bone lean, but it moves across the page with a seductive, even voluptuous agility." - Richmond Times-Dispatch

"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

About the Author:

Fuminori Nakamura was born in 1977 and graduated from Fukushima University in 2000. He has won numerous prizes for his writing, including the e Prize, Japan s largest literary award; the David L. Goodis Award for Noir Fiction; and the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. The Thief, his first novel to be translated into English, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His other works include Evil and the Mask, The Gun, and Last Winter, We Parted.

From the Hardcover edition."

About this edition

• Publisher: Soho Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1616958103
• ISBN 13: 9781616958107
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 1