The Kingdom
Fuminori Nakamura
ISBN: 9781616955922
Published: July, 2016
Pricing
Paperback $15.95
More books by Fuminori Nakamura
Description
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 perfect...
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?
Media
“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
“Nakamura’s prose is cut-to-the-bone lean, but it moves across the page with a seductive, even voluptuous agility. ”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
“With a complex yet sympathetic antiheroine 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 on 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 on The Kingdom
“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
“Suspense writing at its tautest and most philosophical. ”
–Politics and Prose Bookstore on The Kingdom
“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 author Fuminori Nakamura.”
–Wall Street Journal on The Kingdom
“Nakamura is in a class by himself . . . 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.”
—Book Reporter on The Kingdom
“The Kingdom offers another sample of Japanese author Fuminori Nakamura's heady blend of disaffected philosophy and noir suspense.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Nakamura has described The Kingdom as a sister novel to The Thief . . . But the new novel bests its companion.”
—New York Times Book Review
“If I had to name just one author who is absolutely iconic in the field of border- and boundary-crushing noir, it would be Fuminori Nakamura. ”
–Shotgun Logic on The Kingdom
“Multilayered and intense... [The] monstrous crime lord ‘Kizaki’ is a formidable nemesis.”
–The Independent on The Kingdom
“A face-paced, dark novel of psychological suspense, told in a succinctly poetic style.”