Remember the reactions to Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life? People either loved it or flung it across the room. This promises to provoke similar adoration/ire (I’m in the former camp). As Nakamura’s strange book opens, his unnamed protagonist is alone in a Japanese mountain lodge. He begins reading a manuscript that’s been left there. It’s by Ryodai Kozuka, a man whom the narrator believes he will take the place of; he hopes to use the manuscript as a manual for living as its author. Ryodai tells of becoming obsessed with pushing his sister off a cliff, an obsession that can only be cured by completing the deed. Next is his in-depth description of the psychology of real-life Japanese serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki. Abrupt, dreamlike shifts in the author’s location and persona continue, and he is next a psychologist who attempts to hypnotize a patient into forgetting past abuse and tolerating new trauma at his hands, leading to a detached account of destroying others in her life (suicide is described). Cruel ideas are intellectual exercises for this man, with his crimes adding up to a thought-provoking picture, in Nakamura’s words, of “what it means to be human and what it means to exist in the world.” Some true crime set in Japan might be the thing after this: try Richard Lloyd Parry’s People Who Eat Darkness or Haruki Murakami’s Underground.
