The Gun
  • Published: 15 February 2017
  • ISBN: 9781616957681
  • Imprint: Soho Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $32.99

The Gun

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The award-winning debut novel by Japanese noir master Fuminori Nakamura, translated into English for the first time

A Tokyo college student’s discovery and eventual obsession with a stolen handgun awakens something dark inside him.

On a nighttime walk along a Tokyo riverbank, a young man named Nishikawa stumbles on a dead body, beside which lies a gun. From the moment Nishikawa decides to take the gun, the world around him blurs. Knowing he possesses the weapon brings an intoxicating sense of purpose to his dull university life. But soon Nishikawa’s personal entanglements become unexpectedly complicated: he finds himself romantically involved with two women while his biological father, whom he’s never met, lies dying in a hospital. Through it all, he can’t stop thinking about the gun—and the four bullets loaded in its chamber. As he spirals into obsession, his focus is consumed by one idea: that possessing the gun is no longer enough—he must fire it.
  • Published: 15 February 2017
  • ISBN: 9781616957681
  • Imprint: Soho Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $32.99
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Also by FUMINORI NAKAMURA

The Rope Artist
My Annihilation
Cult X
The Boy in the Earth
The Kingdom
Last Winter We Parted
Evil And The Mask
See all

Praise for The Gun

Praise for The Gun

An ABA Indie Next Selection

"A thriller in the same elevated sense as is Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment or Camus's The Stranger... Nature versus nurture, free will versus fate: Such are the themes that flicker almost subliminally through this shocking narrative, which also emits echoes of Poe and Mishima."--The Wall Street Journal

"More a suspenseful study of obsession than a crime novel, Nakamura's noir story, translated by Allison Markin Powell, is about liberation...Love, even illicit love, has a way of bringing out the best--or the worst--in ­a person."--The New York Times Book Review

"[Nakamura] tightens the screws on his character with eerie effectiveness, making the inevitable outcome shudder on the page."--Chicago Tribune

"[The Gun] offers an addictive--one might even say compulsive--night's worth of chillingly unnerving entertainment."--The Richmond Times-Dispatch

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