{"id":2563,"date":"2021-07-01T19:59:51","date_gmt":"2021-07-01T19:59:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=2563"},"modified":"2023-03-08T20:00:41","modified_gmt":"2023-03-08T20:00:41","slug":"my-annihilation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=2563","title":{"rendered":"My Annihilation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Remember the reactions to Hanya Yanagihara\u2019s <em>A Little Life<\/em>? People either loved it or flung it across the room. This promises to provoke similar adoration\/ire (I\u2019m in the former camp). As Nakamura\u2019s strange book opens, his unnamed protagonist is alone in a Japanese mountain lodge. He begins reading a manuscript that\u2019s been left there. It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 <strong>a thought-provoking picture, in Nakamura\u2019s words, of \u201cwhat it means to be human and what it means to exist in the world.\u201d<\/strong> Some true crime set in Japan might be the thing after this: try Richard Lloyd Parry\u2019s <em>People Who Eat Darkness<\/em> or Haruki Murakami\u2019s <em>Underground<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Remember the reactions to Hanya Yanagihara\u2019s A Little Life? People either loved it or flung it across the room. This promises to provoke similar adoration\/ire (I\u2019m in the former camp).&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":2562,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[99,55,78],"class_list":["post-2563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-international-crime-mystery","tag-mystery-detective","tag-noir"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Annihilation-400x400.jpg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Annihilation.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"Henrietta Thornton","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=4"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2563\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}