The Kingdom [Paperback]

Zen-Noir master Nakamura returns to the Tokyo ofThe 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?Praise forThe Kingdom 

“Nakamura has describedThe Kingdomas a sister novel toThe Thief. . . But the new novel bests its companion.”
—The New York Times Book Review

Few protagonists in modern crime fiction are as alienated as those in the challenging, violent, grotesque tales of Japanese author Fuminori Nakamura . . . Yurika’s struggle to escape her vexed fate elevates this shocker well above the lurid.
—The Wall Street Journal 

Multilayered and intense . . . [The] monstrous crime lord ‘Kizaki’ is a formidable nemesis.
—The Independent(UK)

The Kingdom offers another sample of Japanese author Fuminori Nakamura's heady blend of dilC˜