Thursday, August 02, 2018

Cult X by Fuminori Nakamura


(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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