The Gun [Paperback]

A Tokyo college student’s discovery and eventual obsession with a stolen handgun awakens something dark inside him.

On a nighttime walk along a Tokyo riverbank, a young man named Nishikawa stumbles on a dead body, beside which lies a gun. From the moment Nishikawa decides to take the gun, the world around him blurs. Knowing he possesses the weapon brings an intoxicating sense of purpose to his dull university life. But soon Nishikawa’s personal entanglements become unexpectedly complicated: he finds himself romantically involved with two women while his biological father, whom he’s never met, lies dying in a hospital. Through it all, he can’t stop thinking about the gun—and the four bullets loaded in its chamber. As he spirals into obsession, his focus is consumed by one idea: that possessing the gun is no longer enough—he must fire it.Praise forThe Gun

A Wall Street Journal Best Mystery of 2016
A World Literature Today Notable Translation for 2016
An ABA IndieNext Selection
BookRiot 100 Must-Read Novels of Noir

A thriller in the same elevated sense as is Dostoevsky’sCrime and Punishmentor Camus’sThe Stranger. . . ​Nature versus nurture, free will versus fate: Such are the themes that flicker almost subliminally through this shocking narrative, which also emits echoes of Poe and Mishima.
—Tom Nolan,The Wall Street Journal

More a suspenseful study of obsession than a crime novel, Nakamura’s noir story, translated by Allison Markin Powell, is about liberation . . . Love, even illicit love, has a way of bringing out the best—or the worst—in ­a person.
—The New York Times Book Review

Chilling.
—Toronto Star

[Nakamura] tightens the screws on his characterlCÏ