The Kingdom
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Zen-Noir master Nakamura returns to the Tokyo of The Thief, where a young grifter named Yurika finds herself in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with the shadowy crime lord Kizaki.
Yurika is a freelancer in the Tokyo underworld. She poses as a prostitute, carefully targeting potential johns, selecting powerful and high-profile men. When she is alone with them, she drugs them and takes incriminating photos to sell for blackmail purposes. She knows very little about the organization she’s working for, and is perfectly satisfied with the arrangement, as long as it means she doesn’t have to reveal anything about her identity, either. She operates alone and lives a private, solitary life, doing her best to lock away painful memories.
But when a figure from Yurika’s past resurfaces, she realizes there is someone out there who knows all her secrets: her losses, her motivations, her every move. There are whispers of a crime lord named Kizaki—“a monster,” she is told—and Yurika finds herself trapped in a game of cat and mouse. Is she wily enough to escape one of the most sadistic men in Tokyo?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Femme fatale Yurika, the emotionally detached narrator of Nakamura's second noir set in Tokyo's criminal underworld (after 2012's The Thief), makes a living by seducing powerful men into compromising photographs. Used to a position of control, Yurika is confused by the vulnerability provoked by an encounter with a gentle, long-lost friend from the orphanage she grew up in, a meeting that unexpectedly pulls her into the orbit of Kizaki, an omnipotent, demonic underworld boss, whose meticulously devised (yet randomly triggered) cruelty emerges not from self-interest but from an infatuation with chaos and human fear. The novel's straining toward philosophical meaning sometimes weighs down the plot, but the tense, brutal style and shocking images enmesh an uneasy reader in the dark mechanics of the shadow systems underwriting society. Yurika, deliberately unlikable, yet determined to survive, makes an ideal guide into Nakamura's nightmare kingdom, one node in a nihilistic entanglement of lives forged outside of conventional legal and moral frameworks.
