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Sign up todayLast Winter, We Parted
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Learn moreInstantly reminiscent of the work of Osamu Dazai and Patricia Highsmith, Fuminori Nakamura's latest novel is a dark and twisting house of mirrors that philosophically explores the violence of aesthetics and the horrors of identity.
A young writer arrives at a prison to interview a convict. The writer has been commissioned to write a full account of the case, from its bizarre and grisly details to the nature of the man behind the crime. The suspect, a world-renowned photographer named Kiharazaka, has a deeply unsettling portfolio—lurking beneath the surface of each photograph is an acutely obsessive fascination with his subject.
He stands accused of murdering two women—both burned alive—and will likely face the death penalty. But something isn't quite right, and as the young writer probes further, his doubts about this man as a killer intensify. He soon discovers the desperate, twisted nature of all who are connected to the case, struggling to maintain his sense of reason and justice. Is Kiharazaka truly guilty, or will he die to protect someone else?
Evoking Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's Hell Screen and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Fuminori Nakamura has crafted a chilling novel that asks a deceptively sinister question: Is it possible to truly capture the essence of another human being?
Fuminori Nakamura graduated from Fukushima University in 2000. In 2002 he won the prestigious Noma Literary Prize for new writers for his first novel, A Gun, and in 2005 he won the Akutagawa Prize for The Boy in the Earth. The Thief, winner of the 2010 Kenzaburō Ōe Prize, Japan’s most important literary award, was his first novel to be published in English.
Feodor Chin, an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator, is an actor classically trained at the American Conservatory Theater and UCLA. His acting career includes numerous credits in film, television, theater, and voice-over.
Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. His book, The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.
P. J. Ochlan, an Audie Award-nominated and multiple AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator, has recorded close to 200 audiobooks. His acting career spans more than thirty years and has included Broadway, the New York Shakespeare Festival (under Joseph Papp), critically acclaimed feature films, and regular roles in television series. Along the way, he's worked with countless icons, including Jodie Foster, Clint Eastwood, Robin Williams, Al Pacino, and Garry Marshall.
Allison Markin Powell has been awarded grants from English PEN and the NEA, and the 2020 PEN America Translation Prize for The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami. Her other translations include works by Osamu Dazai, Kanako Nishi, and Fuminori Nakamura. She was the guest editor for the first Japan issue of Words Without Borders, served as cochair of the PEN America Translation Committee, and currently represents the committee on PEN’s Board of Trustees. She maintains the database Japanese Literature in English and lives in New York.
Reviews
“Crime fiction that pushes past the bounds of genre, occupying its own nightmare realm…For Nakamura…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.”
“In this creepy if elegantly crafted stand-alone from Nakamura, the narrator, a nameless young writer, gets assigned to pen an In Cold Blood–style exploration of Yudai Kiharazaka, a thirty-five-year-old Tokyo art photographer awaiting execution for burning two models to death…The more he learns, the greater his doubts about the case—and himself. As the shadow of a second writer begins to cloud the picture, and the story accelerates down the slippery slope separating love and obsession, the twisty—and twisted—turns it takes ambush narrator and reader alike.”
“In a story as claustrophobic as the prison cell housing its villain, a nameless, naïve writer struggles to maintain boundaries while researching the life of a death row prisoner…While the numerous narrative shifts require a fully engaged reader, the complex—and morally twisted—plot rewards with one unexpected punch after another.”
“Nakamura’s writing is spare, taut, with riveting descriptions.”
“Nakamura’s prose is cut-to-the-bone lean, but it moves across the page with a seductive, even voluptuous agility.”
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