The Gun by Fuminori Nakamura

First published in Japan in 2003; published in translation by Soho Crime on January 5, 2016

Fuminori Nakamura’s crime novels are built on psychological suspense rather than action, but they move at a brisk pace, thanks to a writing style that wastes no words. The Gun, Nakamura’s first novel, doesn’t have the depth of The Thief. It nevertheless creates a reasonable amount of dramatic tension as the reader wonders about the fate of the central character.

Walking along a street on a rainy night, Nishikawa feels a deep sense of satisfaction, even elation, when he discovers a gun near a dead man’s body. The gun gives him a sense of fulfillment; he knows he cannot part with it. When he picks up a girl and has sex with her, he realizes the next day that she did not compare to the pleasure he receives from handling the gun.

Soon, just knowing that he has the gun is not enough. Nishikawa begins to carry it around, savoring the tension he feels. Of course, he has fantasies about shooting the gun and, of course, those fantasies become darker. Nishikawa is consumed and controlled by the gun. Decisions are made by the demanding gun, not by Nishikawa.

Nishikawa is emotionally stunted, a characteristic Nakamura develops through Nishikawa’s distracted relationships with women. Nishikawa lives inside his head but seems incapable of understanding his feelings and motivations. He has a problem with impulse control, while the impulses he manages to resist turn into obsessions and plans. Nishikawa’s half-hearted attempts to analyze his urges provide no insights that might help him to control them.

Whether and how Nishikawa will use the gun are the questions that keep the pages turning. The speed with which the story moves is due in part to its focus on Nishikawa. Other characters make brief appearances, but we learn little about them. Instead, we learn much about Nishikawa’s life and how that life changes as the result of a chance encounter with a gun.

The abrupt ending comes as something of a surprise despite its inevitability. While The Gun lacks the richness of The Thief, its noir sensibility showcases Nakamura’s ability to delve into tormented minds.

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Death by Water by Kenzaburo Oe

Published in Japan in 2009; published in translation by Grove Atlantic on October 6, 2015

Most of Death by Water is comprised of conversations among artistic intellectuals. Reading it is like pulling a sled up a snow-covered hill, exalting at reaching the top, enjoying the speedy ride down the other side, wandering for a while, and then trudging up the next hill. There are times when the novel is fun and times when it is rewarding, but most of it is tough sledding.

At the novel’s center is the novelist Kogito Choko, the alter ego of Kenzaburo Oe, but Choko is the least intellectual (or perhaps the least chatty) of the characters. His sister and other admirers spend most of their time dissecting Choko’s work or, more often, his life. My impression was that the characters love hearing themselves talk, even when they don’t have much to say -- which I suppose makes the characters realistic, if not particularly interesting.

The novel begins with Choko’s preparation to write the story of his father’s drowning. Since Choko cannot rely on his own memory, which he has either suppressed or is unable to distinguish from his dreams, he needs access to a red leather trunk that, he believes, contains the story of his father’s life. His mother has instructed Choko’s sister Asa to give Choko the trunk ten years after his mother’s death. His mother lives to the age of 95, making Choko a senior citizen before he can claim the trunk. Returning to his childhood home to do so, he consents to being interviewed by The Caveman Group, an acting troupe that wants to incorporate the interviews into stage adaptations of Choko’s work. That setup enables many of the conversations with Choko that drive the novel.

The core of the story is promising. Choko plans to write about his father through the prism of the “Death by Water” section of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” As Choko discusses his past and his writing with members of The Caveman Group, we learn about Choko as both a person and an artist. We also learn about the process of making art from the perspective of a craftsman who uses art to reflect himself.

The best segments of Death by Water involve Choko’s attempt to understand his recurring dream about his father’s disappearance in a small boat. According to Asa, Choko’s dim memories of his father and of the flood in which he drowned have been conflated with Choko’s childhood fantasies, which include an imaginary friend named Kogii who is young Choko’s exact duplicate. Choko also wants to view his father as brave and heroic, although he portrayed his father in quite a different way in one of his novels. Choko is unprepared for the reality of his father’s political extremism -- a reality from which Choko’s mother wanted to shelter him. Unfortunately, anticipation of learning the truth about Choko’s father’s death builds and then wanes as the story gets sidetracked by endless conversations concerning the details of Choko’s life, including his inability to make a connection with his developmentally disabled son.

I had difficulty developing the same keen interest in Choko's life that the characters have. No incident in Choko's life and no sentence in his writing seems too trivial to dissect at length. I also had difficulty caring about the acting troupe’s artistic achievements, which mainly consist of having audience members throw stuffed dogs at actors who are performing dramatic readings of Choko’s work.

Key themes in Death by Water include folklore and myth in world and Japanese history, the nationalist movement in post-World War II Japan, the relationship between aging and attachment to (or detachment from) an era, and whether an aging writer (or any other artist) whose best works are thought to be behind him might still be capable of producing something memorable. Rebirth might be the most important theme, as explored through the discussions of folklore and of Japan and as applied to the life of Choko. At least to me, those themes are more intellectually interesting than emotionally engaging.

The novel might be more meaningful to someone with greater interest in Japan’s uneven transition from “traditional/imperial” to “modern/democratic.” It may be more enjoyable to someone who has more patience than I possess. It is a serious novel, to be sure, but I found it to be more self-important than elevating. If Oe wonders why Japanese readers are turning to modern writers instead of, well, to novels like this one, perhaps it is because they do not want to undertake all the uphill climbs that Oe, despite his sincerity and perceptive analysis of modern Japan, forces them to endure.

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Last Winter, We Parted by Fuminori Nakamura

Published in Japan in 2013; published in translation by Soho Press on October 21, 2014

The crime novels of Fuminori Nakamura explore the psychology of the criminal mind while making the point that the criminal mind is difficult to distinguish from the noncriminal mind. Guilt is often a fluid and ambiguous concept, easily shared and spread, not always understood by those who refuse to look beyond the superficial.

Yudai Kiharazaka, a photographer, has been sentenced to death for the murders of two women who were incinerated in separate fires. The narrator of Last Winter, We Parted has been commissioned to write a book about the murderer. Some people the narrator interviews speculate that Kiharazaka burned the women so that he could photograph them in flames, thus replaying a version of the climactic scene in a classic Japanese short story called "Hell Screen."

The narrator begins his project after becoming fixated on a photograph Kiharazaka took of black butterflies obscuring a figure that might be a woman. He is also drawn to Kiharazaka's obsession with lifelike silicon dolls that are patterned on real women, an obsession shared by a group known as K2.

Some chapters of Last Winter, We Parted consist of Kiharazaka's letters to the narrator and to his sister. Some chapters relate the narrator's interviews with people who knew Kihirazaka, each adding insight to his life while prompting the reader to question what really happened. Some chapters follow the narrator's introspective life as he decides what to do about Yukie, his girlfriend. The narrator becomes uncomfortably involved with both Kiharazaka and his sister while coming to understand their true nature ... and his own.

Last Winter, We Parted is a short but complex novel. The truth about the two deaths is surprising and complicity is found in unexpected places. This is the kind of novel that needs to be read in its entirety before all of the parts can be understood and integrated. Some chapters require reinterpretation by the story's end, while the ending gives the reader a new understanding of the entire book, including the dedication. The novel's brevity and tight construction make all of that possible without placing an undue burden on the reader.

Last Winter, We Parted also considers the relationship of art to the living and the dead, as well as the reality that the art of fiction can inspire. This is a work of philosophy and psychology as much as it is a crime novel, yet the mystery that unfolds is riveting. Near the end, a character asks "Just what does it all mean? This world we live in." Nukamura provides no answer, but he offers the reader fruitful opportunities to think about the question.

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Evil and the Mask by Fuminori Nakamura

First published in Japan in 2010; published in translation by Soho Crime on June 11, 2013

"It wasn't revenge. I simply wanted to set him on fire. Air, that was the word that came to mind. I felt as little emotion as air." Fumihiro wants to destroy evil, but does the killer of evil become the thing he kills? That question lies at the heart of Evil and the Mask, the second novel by Fuminori Nakamura (after The Thief) to be translated into English.

Evil and the Mask opens with a fascinating premise. It is a tradition for men in a certain family, after attaining the age of sixty, to sire a child who will become a cancer in the world, tasked with spreading misery. The men do this to punish the world for continuing to exist after they perish. In an attention-grabbing first chapter, Shozo Kuki explains the tradition to his youngest son, Fumihiro. Shozo tells Fumihiro he will experience hell when he turns fourteen. Hell will somehow involve Kaori, an orphaned girl Shozo adopted, and to whom Fumihiro becomes attached.

The novel jumps between the formative events of Fumihiro's childhood and the present, more than a dozen years later. The adult Fumihiro has changed his face to match that of Koichi Shintani, a dead man whose identity Fumihiro purchased on the black market. The plot springs forward along three twisted paths. One involves Shintani's past and the baggage that comes with it. Another brings Fumihiro (with Shintani's face) into Kaori's life again, but in a very different role. The third introduces a cultish group of pseudo-terrorists who use absurdity to undermine culture.

Like The Thief, Evil and the Mask is a novel of psychological suspense. The story's strength involves Fumihiro's struggle to shed one identity and to adopt another, to reinvent himself -- an impossible task, perhaps. It's easy to change a face and a name, not so easy to change your inner self, to abandon memories. Unlike The Thief, however, Evil and the Mask is so determinedly a novel of psychology that some characters indulge in lengthy analytical speeches -- about beauty, death, morality, anarchy, entropy, familial love, the motivations for violence and war, the nature of evil -- that too often seem forced.

Still, the character of Fumihiro is impressively constructed. The reader feels the crushing weight of his oppressive past, his struggle to feel something. His coffee has no flavor, he doesn't notice the cold. He is little more than an animated corpse. He has forsaken the happiness he experienced while he and Kaori were still innocent -- a happiness that the adult Fumihiro regards as "some kind of mistake" that "soon vanished into the distance." He still longs for Kaori but fears that another character's prediction will come true, that he will destroy the one thing in the world that remains precious to him if he gets close to her. Can Fumihiro shed the despondency that consumes him only by embracing madness? Whether his future is to be determined by destiny or choice, the novel's dramatic tension comes from the uncertainty of the path that Fumihiro's life will follow.

Evil and the Mask is a meditation on change and choice, on killing and on what it means to be alive. Apart from its philosophical implications, the story is intriguing. The plot threads weave together convincingly, although the storyline involving Shintani's past doesn't quite reach its potential. The ending (like The Thief, inconclusive, permitting the reader to imagine what might happen next) is satisfying.

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Paprika by Yasutaka Tsutsui

First published in Japanese in 1993; published in translation by Vintage Contemporaries on February 12, 2013 

It's hard to know what to make of Paprika. There's a surrealistic bizarreness to the story that is both appealing and frustrating. The surrealism is a natural component of the story's subject matter: the intersection of dreams and conscious thought.

Paprika imagines a world in which mental illnesses can be detected with devices that scan "the inside of the psyche." One such device is a dream collector that allows a therapist to monitor (and actually enter) a patient's dreams. Now that the devices have been legalized, two researchers are at the cutting edge of the technology: Atsuko and Tokita. One storyline involves a Beauty and the Beast love story between Tokita, who is obese and socially stunted, and Atsuko, whose love for Tokita is rivaled by her love for one of her patients.

The best dream detective is a woman with dual identities who is known in her younger persona as Paprika. Paprika has not worked in several years -- when she was working, the devices were still illegal -- but she's asked to rejoin the Institute for Psychiatric Research to diagnose the neurosis of a businessman named Tatsuo Noda, who is suffering from panic attacks. Paprika's work with Noda, and the secret of Paprika's true identity, gives rise to the novel's second storyline. This evolves into the story of Noda's work, the difficult decisions he must make and the rivalries with which he must cope. The corporate intrigue provides some of the novel's best moments.

The dream collector has certain drawbacks. Therapists can become lost in a patient's mind. A therapist named Tsumura has apparently become infected with a patient's schizophrenia by using the dream collector, but Atsuko suspects that the device was sabotaged. This provides the novel's third plot thread, evolving into a tale of conspiracy as factions within the Institute wage war against each other. That storyline gives the novel its binding narrative but it is also the novel's least interesting aspect.

There are other plot threads and many other characters woven together in this complex and occasionally confusing book. One of the characters is an embittered, misogynistic co-worker who is envious that Atsuko might win the Nobel Prize he was denied. Other characters are patients who, like the therapists, suffer from a variety of anxieties and mood disorders. Nearly all of the characters are developed with surprising subtlety given the novel's brevity.

Jungian dream interpretation and the insight it offers into anxiety and depression is the novel's most interesting theme, and the dream sequences are the best (if also the most ambiguous) in the book. Time and place shift unpredictably and words become garbled; sometimes text is represented as **** because the narrator can't understand what is being said. Yet the novel goes beyond dream analysis. It is also about the confusion (and potential merger) of dreams and reality. Dreams and reality become hopelessly tangled, leaving characters in an understandable state of confusion. If dreams can create reality, should you react to the new reality by pretending you're in a dream? And how do you know whether you're dreaming?

The novel incorporates a number of sex scenes. They are not limited to traditional two-person, male-female coupling. The scenes aren't particularly graphic, and those that are dreamt don't always make sense, but some readers might find them disturbing. Both while she's dreaming and while she's awake, Paprika is raped or nearly raped. Her fatalistic acceptance of sexual assault might upset some readers, as might a dream in which she's begging a man to rape her (or just to have sex with her, whichever he prefers).

Because Paprika is a difficult novel to absorb, I found myself reading a few of the short chapters, then chewing on them for a day or two before returning to the novel. Perhaps I should have soldiered through it in fewer sittings, and if I were to read it again (a second reading would, I think, help me grasp its subtleties), that's probably what I would do. While I ultimately admired the novel and even enjoyed most of it, I'm not sure whether I'll ever be up to a reread because the first reading was a bit draining. Maybe in a few years, after it settles in, I'll tackle it again.

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