The award-winning novel The Boy in the Earth, by Fuminori Nakamura, recently published in English, has been reviewed in The Wall Street Journal by the author Tom Nolan.
The Boy in the Earth, which won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in Japan, was first published in Japanese in 2005 and in English translation in hardback in April 2017, by Soho Press. The book has been described as “a darkly melancholic tale that combines Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Camus’ The Fall set in Tokyo”.
The Boy in the Earth, translated by Alison Markin Powell, is 160 pages long and is rapidly gaining the attention of reviewers and readers online. One reader, for example, commented on Goodreads.com: “Brilliant author, brilliant book. Read it!” and another on Amazon: “Nakamura truly has a way with words and has created a haunting novel that stayed with me well after I read the last page.”
Many other publications including, for instance; Publishers Weekly, This Is Horror , Library Journal, and 20SomethingReads have also published reviews of The Boy in the Earth.
This is Horror, an online site for horror fans, says in its review that: “if this review had a title, it would be “Zen and the Art of Noir. And the Zen master, the true Buddha of Noir, is the dark genius that is Fuminori Nakamura.”
The Wall Street Journal ranked his novel The Thief, Nakamura’s first novel to be published in English, as one of the best 12 published in 2012 and will no doubt consider his latest novel to appear in English in its 2017 rankings.
Book Synopsis:
An unnamed taxi driver in Tokyo has experienced a rupture from his everyday life. He cannot stop daydreaming of suicide, envisioning himself returning to the earth in what soon become terrifying blackout episodes. His live-in girlfriend, Sayuko, is in a similarly bad phase, surrendering to alcoholism to escape the memory of her miscarriage. He meets with the director of the orphanage where he once lived, and must confront awful memories of his past and an abusive family before determining what to do next.
About Red Circle:Red Circle Authors Limited is a specialist publishing and communications company that conducts bespoke projects on behalf of a carefully selected and curated group of leading Japanese authors. Red Circle showcases Japan’s best creative writing. For more information on Red Circle, Japanese literature, and Red Circle authors please visit: www.redcircleauthors.com.-
About Fuminori Nakamura:Fuminori Nakamura is the most exciting thriller and crime writer of his generation in Japan whose fast-paced narratives hypnotically blend psychological suspense with literary fiction. Nakamura, who has won numerous literary prizes in Japan, won his first non-Japanese literary award in 2014, the NoirCon’s David L. Goodis Award, named after the American crime fiction writer, who epitomized the noir fiction genre.
