Review: “The Thief” by Nakamura Fuminori

Title: “The Thief”

Author: Nakamura Fuminori

Genre: Adult, Crime, Thriller, Contemporary

Release Date: March 2012

Summary: The Thief is a seasoned pickpocket. Anonymous in his tailored suit, he weaves in and out of Tokyo crowds, stealing wallets from strangers so smoothly sometimes he doesn’t even remember the snatch. Most people are just a blur to him, nameless faces from whom he chooses his victims. He has no family, no friends, no connections…. But he does have a past, which finally catches up with him when Ishikawa, his first partner, reappears in his life, and offers him a job he can’t refuse. It’s an easy job: tie up an old rich man, steal the contents of the safe. No one gets hurt. Only the day after the job does he learn that the old man was a prominent politician, and that he was brutally killed after the robbery. And now the Thief is caught in a tangle even he might not be able to escape.

☆: 1/5 – pretty much all stream of consciousness narration without any action.

Review: I was really severely disappointed in this one. Usually, I like thrillers and crime novels if they can hook me, but this one failed to, and failed spectacularly. While it’s a really short read, “The Thief” lacks in every department – arc, character creation/advancement, worldbuilding (because you do have to do some worldbuilding even within a contemporary novel), and sensory language. The translation was adequate, but I feel like a lot had been lost when switching languages – which, to a certain extent, is always unavoidable, but it felt like there were gaping holes here.

We get the story of “The Thief” from The Thief’s first-person POV, and it’s all really one big stream-of-consciousness mess. I usually love stream-of-consciousness narration because there’s always a opportunity for poetry to be inserted in there as well as magical realism, but here we just have The Thief recounting random bits and pieces of his own childhood clumsily juxtaposed with current day – so clumsily, I might add, that it’s kind of hard to tell which is which. We get to know his teacher in the art of thievery, Ishikawa, who may or may not still be alive (it’s never really made clear, even in flashbacks), and the eventual plan for him to be used in a big mob operation. The character of the thief, with all of these experiences, still feels very 2D (even if, as a thief, he’s supposed to be ghost-like in his trade), and is only filled in by his memories and current movement throughout Tokyo in his own narrative. I got confused in large parts (which is a danger associated with using stream-of-consciousness, but even so, this was really, really confusing) as to when was when and what was what.

As for worldbuilding, Nakamura does a good job in rooting us in a very paranoid world that is the head of The Thief, who thinks that he’s constantly going to get caught. This is the only thing done right in the novel through the use of stream of consciousness – the constant feelings of paranoia and alienation compared to his marks and the other people around him was used so well that even when I was confused, I did have a sense of the world in that it’s never safe to be anywhere. But as for characteristics other than the term “paranoid”, none really come to mind.

And then there’s the problem of translation – I haven’t read the original, so I can’t say with certainty that there are big holes here compared to the original text, but I got the sense that there were through translation. There are pieces that seem repeated a great deal (alas, a lament of all translators everywhere since you just run out of equivalent words after awhile), but then this image of a “tower” in the distance” every now and then…well, I couldn’t help but feel it was connected to something deep within The Thief himself, whether it be a delusion or a real connection. I never really figured out what the hell the tower actually was, or if it was real at all, and I just got really frustrated at the text. However, good translator, I salute you for trying, since this seems like a very vague text to deal with in a language where ambiguity is the name of the game. I can’t blame the translator at all, because it feels like they really did try. But it seems that there just some really big shortfalls in terms of trying to localize it to a Western audience.

Final verdict? Skip it. There are better texts out there, all more engrossing and better written than this one. “The Thief” is out in North America on March 20th, 2012 from Soho Crime, so you can go out and make your own conclusions. I was just really disappointed and confused by this one.