The Thief | Fuminori Nakamura

This episode of Books for Men features The Thief by Fuminori Nakamura. It's a novel about a skilled Japanese pickpocket who must answer for a job he did years prior. Can you escape fate? Or is it inevitable? The story is bleak, subtle, and outright chilling. Listen for more!

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Welcome back to Books for Men, a podcast to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. And so we are pivoting this week into our first work of fiction for 2023. So I wanted to pick a really good book or one that I enjoy a lot, I should say. And it comes in a subgenre that I would say is probably one of my favorites to read, and that is a literary mystery. And so it's a mystery written with a literary sensibility. And I know that sometimes the categories and the labeling, it's kind of silly, it's kind of foolish, but it does help make sense of where books sit in the grand scheme of things. And I think it's helpful to think about books in this way because any other art form, it helps you refine your palette, right? It helps you understand your taste or where you might have some success with future books instead of just going off titles and covers, which, hey, I get it.

(01:08)

Sometimes it's easier to just pick from a title or a cover, or sometimes it's more fun. But I like to kind of understand where they fit in the landscape of literature so that way I have a better idea of if I'm going to actually enjoy the book or if I'm reading out of a genre that I typically read in, then I'm aware of that also. And I think it's just a good reminder to touch on the crime genre as a whole because it's a big genre and there's a lot that falls into it. And basically, you have mysteries and thrillers, and so there's a lot of gray area between these two sub-genres. And they go even cascade further down, even further down techno-thriller, medical thriller, political thriller, international thriller. And on the mystery side, cozy mystery, noirs. And like I said, there's a lot of blurring of lines when it comes to where this stuff fits in, but if you have a kind of general understanding, then I think it's easier to find books.

(02:11)

So to me, this book that I'm featuring is a literary mystery to somebody else. It might be a thriller or something else, and I don't want to make it sound like they are that fluid, but unless they're just pure genre fits, like a thriller thriller or a murder mystery, let's say, or something like that, has that defined genre, and it's exactly what it is, and there are a million replicas of the same story. To me, a literary work of fiction is a little bit more adventurous in that it's playing a lot more with the tropes, and it's also got a different type of sensibility. And for me, it's usually paced a little bit differently. It's a little slower, a little more subtle. Again, it comes down to that sensibility aspect. And it's kind of hard to explain because even in the literary genre, things that weren't considered literary when they came out might eventually end up in the genre based on how the culture perceives it and how people perceive it.

(03:10)

They all of a sudden go from genre to literary. And so it's this interesting thing that happens with works of fiction. With that being said, I think one thing is for certain literary works of fiction tend to be very thematical, so there is a large thematical point that runs through the entire story, whereas, in a genre book, it's moral the plot line, right? That's the focal point. And that may feed into some greater theme, but it's not set out as the point of the actual story. And this again, isn't a rule, this isn't exact. It's just a way to think about the different works, especially as you engage with them more. And you may already have a useful way to think through this. I'm just trying to stay high level in helping you think through literary versus genre and what this book, particularly that I'm featuring today, The Thief by Fuminori Nakamura, why it is a literary work of fiction in conjunction with a mystery as opposed to just being a mystery.

(04:12)

And primarily that is because of the large thematical element to it and some of the bigger questions that it will pose to you about life while you are reading it. And for me, that is really the strength of the novel and why I love the literary mystery genre so much is because it combines both the aspect of thinking deeply about the thematical element of the work, as well as resolving some type of mystery. Because the funny part about mystery is that every story is a mystery. At its core. You don't know what's going to happen, and the author is telling you the story. And so there's the mystery behind it, but there is an actual genre mystery, and that usually means that there's a crime involved. Doesn't have to be a murder, but there's definitely always a crime involved in the mystery genre in some fashion.

(05:04)

And I love crime, so literary crime, literary mystery, bring it on. I love it. Now with that being said, who is Fuminori Nakamura? Well, it's actually a pseudonym, and he's a Japanese author. He's only got, I think, nine novels that are translated into English. And I didn't know this, but according to Wikipedia, because I looked it up before I started recording, he has probably doubled that in Japanese, and even more so in short story collections. I really like his sensibility as a writer. It's very subtle. It's very simple. This story is written in the first person, so it's very easy to follow. It's very linear and does have some flashbacks, so it's not totally linear, but the majority of the story is told sequence after sequence after sequence. And so what is it about? Well, it's about an extremely skilled and seasoned pickpocket who has no family, no friends, nothing really.

(05:59)

And all he has is his honed ability to be a thief. And he's so skilled that from time to time, he often forgets who or where he steals stuff from because it's a daily practice, and basically, he gets hired to do this job that comes back to haunt him, and will he be able to escape from this predicament? Dun dun dun. I don't want to make it sound cheesy though, because it's very far from cheesy. This book has a chilling quality about it, and it's not going to leave you on the edge of your seat because that's not the style of book that it is. It is going to be quite suspenseful in its own way, and given the length of the novel at only 214 pages or 220 pages, something of that nature, it's very approachable. It's very readable. Again, it's written in the first person, so it's easy to follow in that way.

(06:54)

Even though it uses vagueness and mysteriousness to its advantage, I don't think you'll have a problem following it. And if you haven't gathered it by now, I love the shorter novel. It's just something that I don't know. I wish that more American novels were written in the shorter range called the 200 to the 250-page range, but they're just not. And I don't know why. I think it has to do with a business standpoint in that publishers want to be able to justify the price, so they have to publish 'em at a certain length, and it gives a certain type of appearance to the consumer. With that being said, I think it's pretty cool that in Japan, the shorter novel is actually coming back and it's trending a little bit more. Maybe that'll find its way into American novels. We'll see. And just to tie this up, I wanted to read you one quote that I really, really love from the book.

(07:48)

It's more of an excerpt, and I think it'll give you a good understanding of the writing style and what you can expect from the book. “On the men's wear floor, which was full of brand name shops, there was a display mannequin wearing a coordinated outfit, something reasonably well-off guys in their late twenties or thirties would wear the mannequin and I was dressed the same. I had no interest in clothes, but people in my line of work can't afford to stand out. You have to look prosperous so that no one suspects you have to wear a lie. You have to blend into your environment as a lie. The only difference between me and the store dummy was the shoes, keeping in mind that I might have to run away. I was in sneakers.” Oof. Such a good little excerpt there. I think there's a lot to take away from it, both on a meta-level and a micro-level, but that's just the type of detail and depth that occurs in extremely subtle and extremely simple writing.

(08:46)

Okay, this episode is a wrap. I hope you enjoyed it. I think you'll really, really like this book. I hope you pick it up. If you enjoyed today's episode, I want to remind you to please share it with family, friends, and anybody else who you think might enjoy it. This podcast has one goal, and that is to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. And we need women and men and everybody to do that. So please share. Share, of course, if you want to double down on that support, don't forget to subscribe, follow, rate, and review on whatever podcast platform you'll listen to this on. And if you would like more information, you can always visit BooksforMen.org where you can also sign up for the newsletter, which is just a monthly roundup of all the books and authors that you hear on the podcast, as well as some additional book recommendations along with quotes and excerpts from the books that you hear featured here. And again, you could do that at BooksforMen.org.