Mystery and Thriller Author Nakamura Fuminori has created quite a buzz in the last few years with his english translated versions of his novels "The Thief", Evil and The Mask", "The Last Winter We Parted", and "The Gun". I was told by my local bookstore that "The Gun" wasn't released yet but it would come out in December. Who knows how true this is since the novel is supposedly out online. Fuminori was mostly been praised for "The Thief" more than his other releases as this was his first novel to be translated into English language. Major novel reviews such as The Wall Street Journal and Time Out Chicago highly commented the novel even placing it on the Best Fiction of 2012 list where it made the cut. I picked up this book just because I saw it was a new Japanese author and I wanted to support his work. I'm so glad I did because I have bought most of his releases since then. "The Kingdom" is Fuminori's most recent novel to be imported stateside.
Yurika is a women who poses as a prostitute in a world of underground crime in order to blackmail important top business men. She meets these men seduces them and then drugs them so she can take pictures only to give these picture to the man she works for. Somehow a game of cat and mouse plot begins with Yurika taking on a job that might cost her life. People from a past she wishes to forget also suddenly resurface.
The trait I love about this novel and "The Thief" is that you are pushed into the world of the two main character's from the first page. Fuminori doesn't' give the reader time to warm up to the characters. He only puts you in the cross fire right away and leaves it to the reader to choose who they feel about a character through the choices they make. The world is described with shocking clarity using the eyes of Yurika. This world is unforgiving and doesn't care about the next person. Its a dog eat, dog world. If you can't stand on your own two feet then you will get trampled by the dogs trying to eat. Our leading lady is attracted to this dark world and is also controlled by it. Each turn of the page made this kingdom seem more like a separate world from the normal life in everyday Tokyo, Japan. I felt like I was on the inside looking in at a world that Yurika wasn't apart of. Maybe she was never meant to be apart of that safe world in the first place. Every detail of Tokyo told on the pages of "The Kingdom" warned the divide of two worlds. The world that people went out at night into the bustling city of Tokyo to enjoy their life. Then there's the other world that is frozen solid like a piece of ice where once the ice is completely frozen, you will never get out unless someone melts the ice for you. I'm sure you guessed, Yurika is encased in this icy world.
Any emotional connections that the reader could possible feel from Yurika is destroyed by her personality. She has a lot of emotional mental issues that has marked by her desire to dominate men. Her background is also a very bleak one making the reader understand why she acts the way she does. I had a love hate relationship with her. She very unlikable but I also felt really sorry for how her life turned out. You kind of get confused at times as to if she really wanted her life to be that way or if after a while everything started to spin out of her control. She wants to remain in control but her past comes back to hunt her causing her to realize that her life had meaning after all. Yurika's fight to survive was inspiring for a character as unlikable as her's.
The reference content in "The Kingdom" weighed down the story. Yurika was a character that was well learned in different history involving certain time events and famous women.(Mostly prostitutes like herself.) Sometimes the writing of her thoughts had to do with the story and other times her facts just diverted from the real action. A deep meaning is present in between the lines that I understood but most of the time I would see a sentence leading into a history lesson and my eyes would roll to the back of my head. I didn't read this book for a history lesson. I want to get back to the real conflict.
"The Kingdom" is like the sister novel to "The Thief "only one is better written than the other. "The Thief" had a more likable well thought out character along with a engaging storyline that keeps the pages turning until its conclusion. This novel has a few of the same traits and is a page turner but falls short to live up to the "The Thief" because the story's content isn't as good. As I was reading, I kept thinking that this was the female version of the "The Thief" only to have that confirmed by the Author's note at the end of the book. I would suggest reading both back to back if you can. That might make "The Kingdom" more enjoyable for you than it was for me. I didn't hate the book but its my least favorite Fuminori novel. I also had the misfortune of reading this novel two books after reading the "The Thief" so its wasn't fresh in my mind. With all this being said, I'm looking forward to reading his next book titled "The Gun".
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