The Thief: Summary and book reviews of The Thief by Fuminori Nakamura, plus links to an excerpt from The Thief and a biography of Fuminori Nakamura.

The Thief is a seasoned pickpocket. Anonymous in his tailored suit, he weaves in and out of Tokyo crowds, stealing wallets from strangers so smoothly sometimes he doesn't even remember the snatch. Most people are just a blur to him, nameless faces from whom he chooses his victims. He has no family, no friends, no connections... But he does have a past, which finally catches up with him when Ishikawa, his first partner, reappears in his life, and offers him a job he can't refuse. It's an easy job: tie up an old rich man, steal the contents of the safe. No one gets hurt. Only the day after the job does he learn that the old man was a prominent politician, and that he was brutally killed after the robbery. And now the Thief is caught in a tangle even he might not be able to escape.

BookBrowse

...Nakamura deftly creates the tale of a Tokyo pickpocket while exploring questions of fate and manipulation. Here, the underworld bears little trace of the glamor that sometimes occurs in works featuring an anti-hero. As this criminal world consumes its members along with its victims, readers are treated to an empathetic portrayal of a man whose desire for life resurfaces under duress.  (Reviewed by Karen Rigby).

Full Review (894 words).

Media Reviews

Suspense Magazine Readers will be enthralled by this story that offers an extremely surprising ending.   Mystery Scene The Thief manages to wrap you up in its pages, tightly, before you are quite aware of it.   Publishers Weekly Nakamura's memorable antihero, at once as believably efficient as Donald Westlake's Parker and as disaffected as a Camus protagonist, will impress genre and literary readers alike.   ForeWord Fast-paced, elegantly written, and rife with the symbols of inevitability   Booklist Compulsively readable for its portrait of a dark, crumbling, graffiti-scarred Tokyo - and the desire to understand the mysterious thief.   Library Journal Disguised as fast-paced, shock-fueled crime fiction, The Thief resonates even more as a treatise on contemporary disconnect and paralyzing isolation... Mystery/crime aficionados with exacting literary standards, as well as readers familiar with already-established-in-translation Japanese writers Miyuki Miyabe (Shadow Family), Natsuo Kirino (Out, Grotesque), and Keigo Higashino (Naoko, The Devotion of Suspect X), will especially enjoy discovering Nakamura. Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel Prize-winning author of A Personal Matter I was deeply impressed with The Thief. It is fresh. It is sure to enjoy a great deal of attention once translated. Natsuo Kirino, bestselling author of Edgar-nominated Out and Grotesque Fascinating. I want to write something like The Thief someday myself.

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