The Thief [Hardcover]

I must admit to having read very little Japanese crime fiction, but drawn by a cover quote from Natsuo Kirino, the author of the remarkable `Out', I was immediately hooked by this bijou slice of Japanese noir. Centred on the criminal activities of pickpocket, Nishimura, this is a at times shocking, but poignant tale of the seedy underbelly of Tokyo. Nishimura spends his days targeting prosperous looking individuals with his deft pickpocketing skills but then finds himself coerced by a fellow friend and member of the criminal fraternity into a seemingly straightforward house invasion that leads to murder. Manipulated by an enigmatic and philosophical crime boss, Kizaki, he finds himself in a desperate situation and is forced to take part in another job that leads himself into great peril. Running alongside this we also see a tentative friendship develop between Nishimura and a young boy who is falling into criminal ways due to the instability of his home life, and this relationship is beautifully captured as Nishimura, himself a criminal, attempts to liberate his protege from a life of crime.

This book is wonderful example of less being so much more with its brevity of narrative style and the compact nature of its prose. Despite its sparseness of style it captures all the salient details of location and atmosphere of everyday life in Tokyo, and the grim human experiences that lurk beneath this quintessentially modern metropolis. The characterisation is pitch perfect as Nishimura is raised from the status of common thief to an all to human protagonist, attempting to rescue the young boy and also by the references to Saeko, a former lover, whose absence impacts strongly on Nishimura's psyche. The crime boss, Kizaki, is a debonair yet utterly ruthless man, who thinks nothing of using others as sacrificial pawns and using a high degree of reason and intelligence to achieve his aims.

A slim but ultimately satisfying read that rises above a simple tag of crime thriller into an altogether more literary exploration of the criminal mind that challenges the reader's assumptions at every turn. A tale of morality and redemption in equal measure. and an author that I will certainly return to in the future.

I don't know if it's supposed to a clever postmodernist twist, but somebody seems to have stolen the ending of 'The Thief'. The story is a first person narrative, and whilst the novel's conclusion doesn't quite break the number one rule of first person narratives, it ends in such a way to leave the reader bewildered as to how the story could ever have come be told. It's an open end, but not in a good way. It's open in a 'why did you bother to tell the story, if you were going to leave it like that?' way.

It's a shame as the rest of the book is pretty good. The Thief is the the third Japanese crime novel I've read, and they all have a similar narrative style. Pared down prose, and unsensational storytelling that focuses on the frustrating details of life. None of them have felt particularly Japanese, and I suspect if names hade been changed I could happily have believed the story to be set in the US, UK or perhaps if you could imagine such a thing, Scandanavia. Some may consider this lack of a sense of place a drawback. I don't particularly mind, as long as the story is strong.

Our narrator is a pickpocket, and his tale makes his crimes feel like magic. He's a loner. He steals for money, he steals for fun, he steals for revenge. He even steals without realising it. The novel has a metaphysical thread running through it. The Thief occasionally narrates otherworldly events, that could not happen, yet he seems totally convinced of. These episodes combined with the spare prose, reminded me of James Sallis', The Killer is Dying

The central story is old, but well told. The Thief is pulled into something bigger than he can handle. Something with political and gangster connections. He cannot escape the destiny mapped out for him. Despite the thief's desire for isolation, he has one meaningful relationship in the world, and it is through this that the gangsters control him.

The Thief poses interesting questions about destiny and fate, and shows the perils of both forming emotional attachments and the futility of living life without them. The book is readable, but ultimately lightweight. It certainly isn't a patch on The Devotion Of Suspect X a book I consider to be one of the finest crime novels written in the last decade. Nakamura has created an interesting, conflicted narrator, but his story fails delivers on its promise.

The Thief (2009) by Fuminori Nakamura, newly translated into English, is crime noir with an existential twist, set on the streets of Tokyo. The narrator, whose real name is alluded to only once, goes nameless throughout the novel and is known primarily as `the thief'. A pick pocket, the thief is an artist of petty crime. He steals from the rich and the unpleasant to make a living. Well versed in the history and craft of his profession, the thief's life moulds effortlessly with his work: he is a loner without connection to the world and who can pass through a room, a crowded street, a city, unnoticed. So practiced is he that the thief steals by instinct, barely engaging his mind throughout his work, and so it runs onto to other thoughts: more profound and metaphysical issues. It is these streams of consciousness that the reader is made party too throughout as the thief goes about his routine. But, when he makes a rare emotional connection with a young boy, the thief leaves himself vulnerable and, after meeting an old friend, is pulled into dangerous circles, mixing with gangsters who will play with his life as though it is meaningless. They force the thief to perform a number of increasingly difficult thefts in order to save his life, but who is truly in control of the thief's destiny; himself, the gangsters, fate or something larger?

The thief is a loner, trapped in a solitary existence and burdened by his own sense of ennui. Living life on the margins of society, he leaves no mark on the world; he is a nameless, faceless apparition that silently haunts the chaos which surrounds him; he represents the marginalised Other. The grimy world of the novel is a harsh place where almost all the relationships are predatory and the world is indifferent to one's existence. The thief has only one real emotional attachment during the course of the narrative and it is this that the gangsters leverage to manipulate and control him - an interesting comment on the dangers and vulnerabilities of emotional connections in a life lived without them. Theft itself is used predominantly as a rumination on possession and ownership, and the morality of one's position to them.

There are numerous reflections on the role that fate plays in one's life and the novel becomes a meditation on a life lived outside of society, beyond the reach of conventional morality and social influences. The theme of fate is carried through right to the novel's ambiguous conclusion, the thief left in the uncertain land between life and death - where, after all, he has been from the novel's first page.

Nakamura's prose is elegant but stripped down to a stark minimalism. This works well with the protagonist's sense of ennui, but also strips the setting of any individuality; the thief could have been operating in any of the world's major cities, and this speaks to the universality of his condition. There is poetry in the prose too however, a mix of beauty with the indifferent that comes to represent the thief's own mentality. There was a certain jarring suddenness to many of the key events as the novel spiralled towards its conclusion, and this only added to the writing's potency and the sense of the thief's thin grasp on existence.

Some of the dialogue is very weak, with huge amounts of exposition and a very unnatural rhythm to many of the conversations - it's hard to say whether there is something lost in the translation or whether this is simply a stylistic trope, either of Nakamura's or of Japanese fiction in general, either way it reads badly to the Western ear.

Overall, there is a sense that the constituent elements of the novel are all slightly too thin to make this a wholly satisfying read; it lacks the punch of crime fiction, but neither does it have the depth of truly moving philosophy. It is a half-breed, but an intelligent, unusual, and well-considered piece of writing.