The Gun

November 9, 2015
Nakamura’s first novel, a deeply unsettling meditation on violence and obsession, starts slowly. Nishikawa, an emotionally troubled college student, stumbles across a dead body one night while out walking in Tokyo. Next to the corpse is a .357 magnum handgun, which is covered with blood, a fact he doesn’t notice until he’s picked it up and left the scene of the crime. At first, just the thought of possessing such a weapon satisfies him, but naturally a desire to fire the gun comes over him. Meanwhile, Nishikawa attends lectures and seduces several women, one of whom, the alluring Yuko Yoshikawa, he might even allow himself to feel something for, but it’s the gun that dominates his world. With obvious nods to Meursault and Raskolnikov, Nishikawa slips into a sort of feverish psychosis that demands release. Nakamura (The Thief) propels his story to a truly disturbing, yet inevitable ending.

October 1, 2015
A sullen student descends into obsession and mayhem when he impulsively steals a gun in this paranoid Japanese noir. The book opens in a scene that is drenched]literally]in noir atmosphere. Aimlessly wandering the city at night in a pouring rain, Nishikawa stumbles upon a corpse in a pool of blood with a gun nearby. Deciding to take the weapon with him, he squirrels it away in his tiny apartment, treating it as both hidden treasure and nearly religious totem. He spends his time polishing it, finding just the right silky handkerchiefs on which to rest it. Soon he's drifting off in conversation, his thoughts returning to the gun, becoming detached even as he's becoming more aggressive, especially in the strictly sexual arrangement he conducts with a young woman he meets on an evening out. The meaning of the book can't be separated from the scarcity of privately owned guns and relative infrequency of gun violence in Japan. This account of Nishikawa's becoming more and more a slave to the gun, more and more delighted with his unleashed aggression, and, inevitably, succumbing to the nearly erotic thrill of actually using it on live targets, might almost be a thesis on the seductive potential of handguns. (This behavior would be far less striking in an American setting.) But a character who's a drag to begin with is not one whose conversion to violence provides much tension or loss. This thriller has a jammed mechanism.

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October 1, 2015

"Last night, I found a gun," says the protagonist at the beginning of Japanese author Nakamura's (The Thief; Evil and the Mask) newly translated first novel (which won the Shincho Prize for New Writers in 2002), but it might be better said that the gun found him. From the moment Nishikawa, an unmotivated student, sees the gun lying next to a dead body and claims it, the gun fills him with a sense of power and purpose he's never before felt. What begins as admiration for the physicality of this "beautiful" weapon--how it feels and how it makes him feel--soon gives way to an escalating compulsion to use it. Even the presence of a policeman investigating the dead man and the missing gun isn't enough to curb Nishikawa's growing impulses. His obsession with every intricacy of the object, told in flat and tedious detail, may initially frustrate, but it lends a terrific tension, as readers wonder how far he will go as his grasp on reality gets more detached. VERDICT Light on action but suspenseful to the last page, Nakamura's existential noir translates well to America, a timely allegory for our gun-crazed culture.--Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2015
Tokyo college student Nishikawa finds a dead body under a bridge. Next to the body is a gun. The sight of the gun sparks a deep feeling of joy, and he takes it, the body immediately an afterthought. In the days to come, the gun becomes a fetish, and as Nishikawa polishes it, holds it, and even begins carrying it in his pocket, the reader knows he'll use it. But when? And how? 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. The lean, almost barren prose is well suited to the subject, and there is something chilling about sentences such as, At times, I yearned for the gun to find favor with me, regardless of what might happen. The dialogue between Nishikawa and others is less successful, prompting one to wonder if stilted speech is a requirement for characters in existential crisis. Still, a fascinating new work from the award-winning author of The Thief (2012).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)