A review by jasonfurman
The Kingdom by Fuminori Nakamura

4.0

I thought this slim, noirish crime novel set in Tokyo was great (and unfair to complain that it did not live up the Dostoyevsky hype on the cover). Told in the first person it is about a smart, strong, loner woman raised in an orphanage who is employed to pretend to be a prostitute while putting men in compromising positions that her bosses can use to blackmail them. She knows almost nothing about the context for her work, just gets assignments and does them. But then she starts getting pushed from another side that has also been observing her and gets caught between two powerful men, playing a single/double/triple agent game that gets increasingly scary. Overall it presents a bleak vision of Tokyo and human nature with an outstanding heroine and page turning novelty.