Fuminori Nakamura's THE THIEF (Tr by Sakoto Izumo and Stephen Coates)

With the bag completely concealed under my jacket, no one could see anything. I put my left hand inside, hunted quickly for the phone, hooked my finger through the strap and slid it into my sleeve.. just as I felt the warmth escaping from my throat, the phone in my sleeve shrilled loudly.

As my January in Japan comes to a close, it has brought me a tightly plotted Western-style thriller with lots of tasty and tense little scenes like the above, amidst all the gentle satire and deeply felt aesthetics that have colored most of my reading this month. The Thief, Japanese superstar Fuminori Nakamura's first novel translated into English, feels more like a Robert Ludlum or Richard Starks novel than any of the graceful and subtle literary fiction I've chosen for myself.*

The titular thief, Nishimura, is a pickpocket of sufficient skill and discipline to live within his means - but his means are very, very ample. He has cultivated a discerning eye for clothing labels and other even subtler details that communicate a person's wealth at a glance, and steals only from the wealthy, helping himself to the cash in their wallets but then dropping everything else, credit cards and all, into nearby mailboxes so his victims eventually stand a good chance of getting their IDs and whatnot returned to them. What a guy. 

An encounter with his old mentor, Ishikawa, alters his simple trajectory significantly, though; almost before he realizes it, Nishimura and an old friend, Tachibana, have let themselves get roped in to helping out a group planning to rob a politician's house and get some documents out of a safe. Nishimura's and Tachibana's job is to subdue and tie up a woman who lives in the house to keep her from interfering or calling the authorities while other members of the group force the politician to give up the combination to the safe. For which each of them will be paid a ridiculous amount of money. 

Easy! 

It all goes off without a hitch, but as they finish, one of the group members lingers behind on a related task, and Nishimura receives a cryptic warning to get the hell out of town as soon as he can. Lying low, he later learns that the politician did not survive that night, and that a series of related crimes all took place at about the same time Nishimura was trying not to ogle the half-naked woman he was responsible for incapacitating. Yikes!

The plot only gets more fiendish from here, which is quite enough enjoyment to ask of a good crime novel, but that's not even the best part of The Thief; the novel's greatest pleasures lie in Nishimura's reveries about his art, its techniques and greatest practitioners, and his impulsive all-but-adoption of a small boy he rescues from a store detective who's been watching him ineptly shoplifting at his mother's urging. The little boy knows a good teacher when he sees one, and soon Nishimura seems to be in danger of becoming an ersatz family man just when all the consequences of his earlier caper start appearing in his life. His shoplifting lessons with the little boy are  charming as hell for all that they're only adding to his burden of guilt and foreboding.

As Nishimura steals wallets, phones and finally an envelope sewn into a guy's jacket (!) through increasingly desperate and cunning means, the reader who is also a movie fan won't be able to avoid imagining Robert Bresson's masterful film treatment of his art, Pickpocket and indeed Nakamura lists the film as source material at the novel's end. Great art begets great art. Nakamura has convinced me I really do need to read more crime fiction.

And that's the end of my literary sojourn through Japan, in January. I enjoyed this so much I decided to do it again next month, but like a fool I posted a poll on Mastodon as to which country to visit next which one person answered, and so, probably because everybody loves a little alliteration, I'll be doing February in France, or more broadly, February in French because I've got some stuff on my TBR that was translated from French but originated in countries other than La France. Including some more crime fiction! Vive la.

*I only came into possession of this copy because a Twitter and Two Month Review podcast pal, Derek Maine, was culling his collection a while back and none of the stuff he was giving away was familiar to me, so I told him to surprise. And he sure did!