Fuminori Nakamura, 'Last Winter, We Parted' (2013)

Let me begin with an admittedly bizarre comparison: the crime novels of Fuminori Nakamura are the Goldilocks and the Three Bears of the genre. The Thief (2009, Trans. 2012) is written in a beautifully lean style that I personally love but that for many readers will leave too much undeveloped and too many questions unanswered. Evil and the Mask (2010, Trans. 2013), by contrast, I find to be badly overwritten almost to the point of feeling bloated; it’s filled with characters pontificating about their nihilistic philosophy of the world and the dead weight of this speechifying drags the book down. But Last Winter, We Parted (2013, Trans. 2014) is just right. It’s the perfect balance of the leanness of the first novel and the complexity of the second. It manages to be the most complex as well as the most compelling of the three. It begins by seeming to channel The Silence of the Lambs: a writer is visiting a notorious murderer in prison because he is writing a book about him. The murderer refuses to cooperate until the journalist reveals some things about his own life. After this relatively straightforward and even familiar beginning, the plot rapidly grows increasingly complex. By the time we reach the end of the novel we can be forgiven for not being completely sure about who did what to whom and why. In most crime novels, these would be unforgivable omissions, but Nakamura gets away with it partly because one of his themes is the universality of guilt and partly because he explores so many other interesting issues along the way: the gap between imitation and reality, the representational power of photography (this would be a fascinating novel to read alongside a viewing of Michael Powell’s notorious 1960 film Peeping Tom), the nature of human desire, and the relation between crime and revenge, just to name a few. Add to this a fascinating formal construction that multiplies narrative voices by reproducing various pieces of evidence under the heading of ‘Archives,’ and Last Winter becomes one of the most challenging crime novels you’ll read in a long time. One final note: the other thing one notices when looking at Nakamura’s crime novels in a group is that the lag time between their original publication in Japanese and their translation into English is getting shorter. This is evidence not only of Nakamura’s increasingly impressive reputation, but also of the growing popularity of international crime fiction in general. Both are good news for fans of the genre.