The Rope Artist

Informationen zum Autor Fuminori Nakamura was born in 1977 and graduated from Fukushima University in 2000. He has won numerous prizes for his writing, including Japan's prestigious Oe Prize; the David L. Goodis Award for Noir Fiction; and the Akutagawa Prize. The Thief, his first novel to be translated into English, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His other novels include Cult X , The Gun , The Kingdom , Evil and the Mask , The Boy in the Earth , My Annihilation , and Last Winter, We Parted. Sam Bett is a fiction writer and Japanese translator. His translation work has won the Japan-US Friendship Commission Prize and been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Klappentext The aftermath of the murder of a bondage teacher reveals the darkest corners of the human mind in this chilling new mystery from the master of Japanese literary noir. Two detectives. Two identical women. One dead body then two, then three, then four. All knotted up in Japan's underground BDSM scene and kinbaku, a form of rope bondage which bears a complex cultural history of spirituality, torture, cleansing, and sacrifice. As Togashi, a junior member of the police force, investigates the murder of a kinbaku instructor, he finds himself unable to resist his own private transgressive desires. In contrast, Togashi's Sherlock Holmesian colleague Hayama is morally upright to a fault, with a stalwart commitment to the truth and nearly superhuman powers of deduction. When Hayama notices a dangerous measure of darkness within Togashi, he embarks on a parallel investigation, which soon spirals out of control. Unflinching in its flayed-raw treatment of identity, violence, sexuality, power, the occult, and the divine, The Rope Artist is both viscerally painful and unexpectedly hopefula genre homage that shines a light on the most dangerous elements of the human psyche. Leseprobe 1 When I was a kid, I got sucked into a tiny whirlpool. The waves were not especially high. Something heavy pulled me down, then my feet lost touch with the bottom and I went under, sinking into the abyss. Swallowing my juvenile body, the whirlpool did the only thing that it knew how to do: spin downward. It hit me that this whirlpool was a part of a gigantic ocean, as obvious as that may sound. Appearing out of nowhere, it swallowed me like it had stuffed me in a bag. Water rushed into my throat, ignoring my attempts to cough it out. I felt the whirlpool passing through my body, but a kind stranger scooped me up. My face broke through the surface of the water. Whirlpool, I told this strange adult, but all he did was shake his head. You'd think he thought I had pretended I was drowning. A neglected child, oblivious to all the trouble he might cause, trying to capture the attention of any adult who would listen. To a grown man, the water was embarrassingly shallow. The arm that he had hooked around me was suntanned, two big moles in a row on the part of his skin just under my nose. She vanished , I thought. When I was being sucked down by the whirlpool, in the middle of it all, I could have sworn I saw the figure of a woman. But no, it must have been some kind of fantasy, washing over me. A woman in the middle of the water, bobbing in the waves. A woman swatting her bony fingers at the waves that threatened to tear off her bathing suit like countless hands. She had to. Otherwise, her body would be seen by all these people. Her long black hair fanned out and undulated in the water. Through the blueness of the moving sea, her body was a distant flash of white. But it had vanished. Had I really seen her? I began to have my doubts. In the kind arms of the stranger, I was pulled out of the water to the safety of the beach. My head was spinning. Colorful ...

Auteur
Fuminori Nakamura was born in 1977 and graduated from Fukushima University in 2000. He has won numerous prizes for his writing, including Japan’s prestigious Ōe Prize; the David L. Goodis Award for Noir Fiction; and the Akutagawa Prize. The Thief, his first novel to be translated into English, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His other novels include Cult X, The Gun, The Kingdom, Evil and the Mask, The Boy in the Earth, My Annihilation, and Last Winter, We Parted.

Sam Bett is a fiction writer and Japanese translator. His translation work has won the Japan-US Friendship Commission Prize and been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.

Texte du rabat

The aftermath of the murder of a bondage teacher reveals the darkest corners of the human mind in this chilling new mystery from the master of Japanese literary noir.

Two detectives. Two identical women. One dead body— then two, then three, then four. All knotted up in Japan’s underground BDSM scene and kinbaku, a form of rope bondage which bears a complex cultural history of spirituality, torture, cleansing, and sacrifice.

As Togashi, a junior member of the police force, investigates the murder of a kinbaku instructor, he finds himself unable to resist his own private transgressive desires. In contrast, Togashi’s Sherlock Holmesian colleague Hayama is morally upright to a fault, with a stalwart commitment to the truth and nearly superhuman powers of deduction. When Hayama notices a dangerous measure of darkness within Togashi, he embarks on a parallel investigation, which soon spirals out of control.

Unflinching in its flayed-raw treatment of identity, violence, sexuality, power, the occult, and the divine, The Rope Artist is both viscerally painful and unexpectedly hopeful—a genre homage that shines a light on the most dangerous elements of the human psyche.