The Kingdom was written by Japan's Fuminori Nakamura, a sister novel to his title The Thief.
It follows some of the same characters in a separate hard crime story, moving headlong into the darkness of human behaviour.
Yurika appears to be a Tokyo prostitute - in fact, she is an operative for a network that pays her to drug her powerful clients and take photos for blackmail. She grew up in an orphanage with no ties of any kind. Exceedingly good at her job, she collects enough money to help a sick boy from her orphanage, which gathers the attention of Hasegawa, a boy she knew when she was young, and the orphanage director. She is soon asked to do more jobs than usual and is frightened to discover an unknown network has highjacked her services, one time arriving to find the client had been stabbed to death. This new network is more powerful than hers and she is assigned to gather information about the leader Kizaki, well known in the underworld as 'a monster'. Kizaki was featured in The Thief and has no problems literally playing God with people's lives. Indeed, he finds nothing more satisfying than to manipulate someone to the lowest level, stripping them of humanity until they beg to be killed, at that point excited to die. The world he lives in is degrading and she plays that card to get close to him. Working both networks now, she secretly tries to gain a fake passport to flee Japan. What she doesn't expect is that all her plans were forecast, actually laid out by Kizaki since she was a girl in the orphanage, part of a larger 'project' (a silly game) to fully control another human being.
The Thief was ominous with an even darker ending, it left me at the end of a dark alley with more of a chill than The Kingdom. Kizaki spends too much time at the halfway mark, for me, talking about his self-seen position as a God - killing people or letting them live in suffering - whichever his whim at the time - which took me out of the story. Although Yurika enjoys her role making a mockery of men, she still has enough self left to try to escape.
The novel is quite dark with a strong theme of degradation, so it was a strange feeling to be entertained by the character sliding into blackness, as Kizaki describes his thrill at the same. I did put it down a few times when the action was a little sick, but was then left wanting when the story stalled half way. I felt it ended weakly and the novel was not successful, the ideas and the tone competing. I don't mind a dark book, but this was not as successful as his previous novel I've reviewed, Last Winter, We Parted, which was written after this.
Not very recommendable, but glad to have read his work again.
2011 / Hardcover / 217 pages
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