Pricing
Paperback $15.95
More books by Fuminori Nakamura
Description
On a nighttime walk along a Tokyo riverbank, a young man named Nishikawa stumbles on a dead body, beside which lies a gun. From the moment Nishikawa decides to take the gun, the world around him blurs. Knowing he possesses the weapon brings an intoxicating sense of purpose to his dull university life. But soon Nishikawa’s personal entan...
On a nighttime walk along a Tokyo riverbank, a young man named Nishikawa stumbles on a dead body, beside which lies a gun. From the moment Nishikawa decides to take the gun, the world around him blurs. Knowing he possesses the weapon brings an intoxicating sense of purpose to his dull university life. But soon Nishikawa’s personal entanglements become unexpectedly complicated: he finds himself romantically involved with two women while his biological father, whom he’s never met, lies dying in a hospital. Through it all, he can’t stop thinking about the gun—and the four bullets loaded in its chamber. As he spirals into obsession, his focus is consumed by one idea: that possessing the gun is no longer enough—he must fire it.
Media
“A Wall Street Journal Best Mystery of 2016”
“A compelling study of a man whose deep wounds begin to open when, by accident, he stumbles across a gun. Nakamura understands how a life can swirl and eddy around an inanimate object, becoming so possessed by it as to suddenly be not a life at all. ”
Brian Evenson, author of Windeye
“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.”
—Daily Beast
“Nakamura's prose is cut-to-the-bone lean, but it moves across the page with a seductive, even voluptuous agility. ”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
“Drenched — literally — in noir atmosphere... almost be a thesis on the seductive potential of handguns.”
–Kirkus on The Gun
“Suspenseful to the last page, Nakamura’s existential noir translates well to America, [and is] a timely allegory for our gun-crazed culture. ”
–Library Journal
“This portrait of obsession and madness starts slowly but soon exerts an almost hypnotic pull as we contemplate both the extent of Nishikawa’s alienation and the primal allure of these little machines for killing. ”
–Booklist on The Gun
“Nakamura does obsessive and delusional very well... A fine first effort by a talented writer. ”
–The Complete Review on The Gun
“The author does more in less than 200 pages than most authors could pull off in 600 ... stripped down, focused, intense, and worth every second you spend reading. ”
–Bookgasm on The Gun
“[Nakamura] spins dark, brooding tales of crime, deftly using acts such as murder and theft as unsettling ruminations on the human psyche and its predilection for darkness. ”
–The Straits Times (Singapore) on Fuminori Nakamura
“A thriller in the same elevated sense as is Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Camus’s The Stranger.... Nature versus nurture, free will versus fate: Such are the themes that flicker almost subliminally through this shocking narrative, which also emits echoes of Poe and Mishima.”
--Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal on The Gun
“More a suspenseful study of obsession than a crime novel, Nakamura’s noir story, translated by Allison Markin Powell, is about liberation ... Love, even illicit love, has a way of bringing out the best — or the worst — in a person. ”
–The New York Times Book Review on The Gun
“[The Gun] offers an addictive — one might even say compulsive — night’s worth of chillingly unnerving entertainment. ”
–The Richmond Times-Dispatch
“An intense, claustrophobic, and effective noir/philosophical thriller. ”
–International Noir Fiction
“No crime author out there is currently doing what Fuminori Nakamura is doing. I’ve read every novel of his Soho Press has translated and they’ve all been unique in their subject matter and tone and exactly the same in terms of effectiveness and the wonderfully bizarre, oblique way in which Nakamura approaches the genre. ”
–Gabino Iglesias, Dead End Follies on The Gun
“[Nakamura] paints the story in short strokes, capturing nuance in simple, short sentences, somehow squeezing out the personal in cold prose. His story is small in the sense that it is only one person’s strange world we see; yet universal in the way it characterizes how we might be led into it. ”
–Ronald Tierney
“An incredibly tense story about how obsession can mold your actions and how an inanimate object can become animate in the “right” pair of hands. ”
–Old Firehouse Books, Ft. Collins, Colorado
“[Nakamura] tightens the screws on his character with eerie effectiveness, making the inevitable outcome shudder on the page. ”
–Chicago Tribune on The Gun
“The psychological downward spiral into obsession is what drives this book, and during my reading, I couldn’t help but think that Alfred Hitchcock could have created a brilliant film adaptation. ”
–Bruce Tierney, BookPage on The Gun
“Another masterwork from one of the best modern practitioners of the crime novel. ”
–World Literature Today on The Gun
“A fascinating, addictive thriller. ”
–The Japan News
“"One of the jewels in the Japanese crime fiction crown, [Nakamura's] debut novel features a nihilistic anti-hero filled with terrible rage."”
–South China Morning Post on The Gun
“BookRiot 100 Must-Read Novels of Noir. ”