Order THE GUN Here
Let me start this review with one of those statements that
cause a stir: no crime author out there is currently doing what Fuminori
Nakamura is doing. I’ve read every novel of his Soho Press has translated and they’ve
all been unique in their subject matter and tone and exactly the same in terms
of effectiveness and the wonderfully bizarre, oblique way in which Nakamura
approaches the genre. The Gun was his
first novel, so I expected a slightly diminished version of the author who
wrote The Thief, Evil and the Mask, and Last Winter, We Parted. Instead, I
encountered a narrative that moves forward at the same brutal speed as those
previously translated novels and that explores human psychology, violence, and
obsession with a commanding voice that belongs to a seasoned veteran.
Nishikawa is a young man out on an aimless nighttime stroll
along a Tokyo riverbank. The rain makes him duck under a bridge and there he
finds a dead man with a gun lying next to him. He decides to take the gun and
run home. The simple act of taking the weapon quickly becomes the epicenter of
Nishikawa’s thoughts and actions. He’s a college student with a few friends and
a biological father who’s dying in a hospital and wishes to connect with him
before his final breath, but the gun and the two ladies the young man starts
seeing after picking up the gun soon start to complicate his life. More than
anything, Nishikawa obsesses about the gun. He polishes it incessantly, wonders
about how it’d feel to fire it, and eventually starts carrying it with him
wherever he goes. The fixation grows until it consumes every aspect of his
life. Then he becomes convinced that he has to fire it.
The Gun starts off
with a crime and then spirals into the planning of a crime, but most of the
novel is spent in the interstitial space between those two. In a way, Nakamura
wrote a superb crime novel about an object and its owner’s intent instead of
the actions of that duo; a narrative built on the constant presence of a dark
possibility instead of an action and its consequences. Nishikawa’s descent into
a gun-centric mania is at once sad and fascinating. An individual must
obviously have some profound flaw of character or a strange psychological malady
to change his life around just because he found a gun, but that is never
discussed and the way the author presents the character’s quick plunge into a
very specific kind of rationalized madness is at once distinctive and full of
echoes that point to the current mental state of many gun aficionados.
I returned to my apartment and opened the satchel. The
gun was breathtakingly beautiful as ever. The girl I had just slept with was no
comparison for the gun. In this moment, the gun was everything to me, and would
be everything to me from now on as well. As I pondered whether or not it was
loaded, I gazed at its piercing metallic sheen.
One of the elements of Nakamura’s oeuvre that help him make
my list of top living crime writers is the way he meticulously deals with the
human psyche and filters it through a style that still obeys the breakneck pace
and quick dialogue imposed by noir. TheGun is a study about the way dangerous fixations can become a problem and a
psychologically oppressive narrative about the potential evil of guns, but it’s
also a simple, relatively short novel about a young guy who finds a gun and
shoots a cat because he’s curious about the object he found. That combination
makes for a novel that works on a plethora of levels.
Perhaps the thing that makes this novel a must-read as much
as one of the crime books that will surely make a lot of noise in 2016 is the
fact that guns are now in the spotlight and gun violence permeates the news.
More than a solution, what Nakamura offers here is a entertaining and slightly
scary fictional account of how someone can be consumed by the power of an
object:
The explosive sound the gun made when it discharged
its bullets, the corresponding impact transmitted from hand to body, the smoke,
the force—I wanted to experience all of these things fully. Thinking about it,
I was filled with excitement mixed with nervous tension. I could hardly wait to
shoot it, I thought to myself. It was a strange sensation, but it made me
happy.
The fact that Nishikawa is obsessed with his gun and insanely curious about its effects is what drives the novel. This leads to an ending that feels inevitable (and which I won't give you here). Perhaps one of the problems of mediocre crime fiction is that it focuses on crime rather than people and ideas, and this novel flips that on its head. Be ready to see this one in a lot of Best of 2016 lists, and read it now.