The Thief
By Fuminori Nakamura
Soho Crime, 2012
Translated from the Japanese novel Suri, published in 2009
Winner of the Oe Prize
Winner of the 2014 David L. Goodis Prize for Noir Fiction
211pp, trade paperback
Finished The Thief by Fuminori Nakamura, an existential crime novel as bleak as it is elegant. It pokes free will hard in the eye by postulating that what we call god in our moments of desperate hope may be merely a psychopathic, manipulative, sadistic crime boss. We are left with small acts of vain defiance that don’t matter.
Narrated in prose as concise and functional as an expert pickpocket’s sleight-of-hand finger moves, it’s a slender novel that demonstrates effortless mastery throughout. The writer behind this pseudonym knows what to leave out and how to make what is not there ominous, eerie, and awful.
Over the thief’s life looms the mysterious tower he glimpses, misty and distant, when he cannot sufficiently immerse himself in the hollow, dark places where theft exists, negative spaces of non-life that let him escape his awareness of oppressive, meaningless existence. Is it a childhood memory of a glimpsed TV repeater tower or is it a metaphorical guard tower watching over a guilt-fenced barbed-wire captivity?
His guilt accrues interest as others link to him.
When his skills draw the notice of a seemingly omniscient, omnipresent crime boss, the thief is first forced to go along with a break-in and robbery that seems too easy, too simple a caper. It requires none of his skill, merely his presence. When this proves to have been political murder, the thief learns he can neither run nor refuse further tasks. The crime boss is influencing if not controlling not only people like the thief but whole nations, perhaps more.
His new, unwanted boss makes a few brief speeches about minutely planning others’ lives. Dispassion makes the violence backing up the boss’s megalomania terrifying yet impersonal.
The thief is tasked with a trio of impossible thefts. Accomplish them by a certain day or die. Worse, a woman and child the thief has linked to despite his best efforts to prevent such connections, other people he has somehow come to be involved with if not actually to care about, are threatened too, if he fails.
The child is a talented street urchin with a budding knack for theft, even pickpocketing, spotted by the thief while trying to shoplift food for his mother. She is the woman the thief gets slightly tangled with, a crass prostitute who cares only for immediate gain and who pops pills for endless, mechanical orgasms.
Faced with impossible tasks and hopeless choices, the thief does what is possible and by the end we see clearly how astoundingly good he is at his profession and how that amazing skill counts for nothing. In the end we see a coin flying to blot out the last gleam of sunlight left to him.
It is a very human reaching, and yearning, for what is not there.
What a breath-taking plunge of story, character insight and revelation, shock and surprise, and chilling cosmic existential cynicism. Simenon would light his pipe and nod. Hammett and Chandler would both have appreciated it from different slants, as would Camus and Dostoyevsky. What began as hard-boiled is here the ice-cold of deep space taking indifferent notice of you.
By all means read it.
