(hb; 2014, 2018: translated from the Japanese by Kalau Almony)
From
the inside flap
“When Toru Narazaki’s girlfriend, Ryoko Tachibana,
disappears, he tries to track her down, despite the warnings of the private
detectives he’s hired to find her. Ryoko’s past is shrouded in mystery, but the
one concrete clue to her whereabouts is a previous address in the heart of
Tokyo. She lived in a compound with a group tht seems to be a cult led by a
charismatic guru with a revisionist Buddhist scheme of life, death, and
society. Narazaki plunges into the secretive world of the cult, ready to expose
himself to any of the guru’s brainwashing tactics if it means he can leatn the
truth about Ryoko. But the cult isn’t what he expected, and he has no idea of
the bubbling violence he’s stepping into.”
Review
Cult is an ambitious
hybrid genre novel by a great writer: it is a thriller, a crime tale, a
philosophical exposé on international corruption, a romance and (possibly) an
emotional purging for those in Japan during the 1995 sarin gas attacks.
Unfortunately for me, a middle-aged, agnostic American male, I had difficulty
relating to the malaise─the spiritual and cultural emptiness─that infects the
majority of Cult’s characters and
drive them toward manic sexual activity, sadism, violence and cobbled-together,
faux-scientific, historical and political philosophy. Not only that, Cult feels like it was mostly written for
its Japanese audience (I could be wrong, I am only speaking for myself). That
is not to say this is a bad novel, nor is it badly intended─far from it: I was
not the intended audience for this admirable, sometimes clever and audacious
work, with its often-rambling speeches and backstories, which more often than
not succeed.
Check
this out from the library before commiting too much cash to it. If you want to
check out Nakamura’s other works, I would recommend The Thief, its thematic counterpart The Kingdom and my favorite of the bunch, Evil and the Mask.
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