The Kingdom

by Fuminori Nakamura Narrated by Lucie Kondo

Overview

Yurika is a freelancer in the Tokyo underworld. She poses as a prostitute, carefully targeting potential Johns, selecting powerful and high-profile men. When she is alone with them, she drugs them and takes incriminating photos to sell for blackmail purposes. She knows very little about the organization she's working for, and is perfectly satisfied with the arrangement, as long as it means she doesn't have to reveal anything about her identity, either. She operates alone and lives a private, solitary life, doing her best to lock away painful memories. But when a figure from Yurika's past emerges, she realizes there is someone out there who knows all her secrets: her losses, her motivations, her every move. There are whispers of a crime lord named Kizaki-"a monster," she is told-and Yurika finds herself trapped in a game of cat and mouse. Is she wily enough to escape one of the most sadistic men in Tokyo?

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Jan Stuart

Much like its alternately victimized and victimizing antiheroine, The Kingdom pins the reader in the cross hairs of bullets and bombast.

Publishers Weekly

05/23/2016
Femme fatale Yurika, the emotionally detached narrator of Nakamura’s second noir set in Tokyo’s criminal underworld (after 2012’s The Thief), makes a living by seducing powerful men into compromising photographs. Used to a position of control, Yurika is confused by the vulnerability provoked by an encounter with a gentle, long-lost friend from the orphanage she grew up in, a meeting that unexpectedly pulls her into the orbit of Kizaki, an omnipotent, demonic underworld boss, whose meticulously devised (yet randomly triggered) cruelty emerges not from self-interest but from an infatuation with chaos and human fear. The novel’s straining toward philosophical meaning sometimes weighs down the plot, but the tense, brutal style and shocking images enmesh an uneasy reader in the dark mechanics of the shadow systems underwriting society. Yurika, deliberately unlikable, yet determined to survive, makes an ideal guide into Nakamura’s nightmare kingdom, one node in a nihilistic entanglement of lives forged outside of conventional legal and moral frameworks. (July)

From the Publisher

Praise for The Kingdom

“Nakamura has described The Kingdom as a sister novel to The Thief . . . But the new novel bests its companion.”
—The New York Times Book Review

"Few protagonists in modern crime fiction are as alienated as those in the challenging, violent, grotesque tales of Japanese author Fuminori Nakamura . . . Yurika’s struggle to escape her vexed fate elevates this shocker well above the lurid."
—The Wall Street Journal

"Multilayered and intense . . . [The] monstrous crime lord ‘Kizaki’ is a formidable nemesis."
—The Independent (UK)

"The Kingdom offers another sample of Japanese author Fuminori Nakamura's heady blend of disaffected philosophy and noir suspense."
—Shelf Awareness

"Dark and strangely seductive... A recommended read for fans of noir as well as for anyone looking to be mesmerized by a masterful storyteller."
—Pank Magazine

"A face-paced, dark novel of psychological suspense, told in a succinctly poetic style."
—Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

"[Yurika] makes an ideal guide into Nakamura’s nightmare kingdom, one node in a nihilistic entanglement of lives forged outside of conventional legal and moral frameworks."
—Publishers Weekly

"With a complex yet sympathetic antiheroine who must outwit the most cunning and twisted minds, ­Nakamura’s dark crime novel sets the bar for gritty, twisted plots that keep readers constantly guessing."
—Library Journal 

“Nakamura is in a class by himself . . . His straightforward prose advances the story quickly, even as he creates an atmosphere that shimmers around the edges while slowly transforming the environment and the characters.”
—Book Reporter

"On a par with Jo Nesbo or Don Winslow."
—Lit Hub

"Suspense writing at its tautest and most philosophical."
—Politics and Prose Bookstore

"Unsettling, The Kingdom offers both psychological suspense on the most intimate personal level as well as some sinister geo-political (un-)doings in the background . . . A quick, dark read, in which the reader is—like Yurika—constantly kept off balance."
—The Complete Review

"A classic in the making... Just make sure there's room in your schedule for recovery from this highly purposeful journey into darkness."
—Kingdom Books

"If I had to name just one author who is absolutely iconic in the field of border- and boundary-crushing noir, it would be Fuminori Nakamura."
—Shotgun Logic

“Nakamura excels in writing brief, taut suspense and both this work and his exemplary The Gun really should be on your reading list.”
—Bookgasm.com

Praise for Fuminori Nakamura 

Japan Objects' Best Japanese Authors of All Time

“Crime fiction that pushes past the bounds of genre, occupying its own nightmare realm . . . Guilt or innocence is not the issue; we are corrupted, complicit, just by living in society. The ties that bind, in other words, are rules beyond our making, rules that distance us not only from each other but also from ourselves.”
—Los Angeles Times

“This slim, icy, outstanding thriller, reminiscent of Muriel Spark and Patricia Highsmith, should establish Fuminori Nakamura as one of the most interesting Japanese crime novelists at work today.”
—USA Today

“Nakamura’s prose is cut-to-the-bone lean, but it moves across the page with a seductive, even voluptuous agility.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Some of the darkest noir fiction to come out of Japan—or any country—in recent years . . . Nakamura’s stories, however labeled, are memorable forays into uncomfortable terrain.”
—Mystery Scene

Library Journal

06/01/2016
In the Japanese underworld, Yurika is an enigma posing as a prostitute who lures high-profile men to drug and photograph them for blackmailing purposes. She knows very little about the crime organizations that she works for and prefers it that way. Yurika's shadowy life has kept the young woman, who fled a dark and sad past, alive. But one night she crosses paths with an old acquaintance, the rumored psychopathic crime boss Kizaki. She is forced to play a dangerous game in which betrayal, trust, and revenge become weapons. The high-tension, sparse narrative adds to the complicated nature of the crime underworld depicted here. VERDICT With a complex yet sympathetic antiheroine who must outwit the most cunning and twisted minds, Nakamura's (The Thief) dark crime novel sets the bar for gritty, twisted plots that keep readers constantly guessing. A great summer pick for crime and mystery buffs. [See Prepub Alert, 1/25/16.]—Ron Samul, New London, CT

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171256708
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	07/12/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Kingdom"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Fuminori Nakamura.
Excerpted by permission of Soho Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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