{"id":2273,"date":"2012-08-15T06:25:03","date_gmt":"2012-08-15T06:25:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=2273"},"modified":"2012-08-16T05:53:53","modified_gmt":"2012-08-16T05:53:53","slug":"the-thief-by-fuminori-nakamura","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=2273","title":{"rendered":"The Thief by Fuminori Nakamura"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Translated by Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by\u00a0Corsair 16 August 2012<\/strong><\/p>\n

208 pp, hardback,\u00a0\u00a39.99\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by John Petherbridge<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Want to know how to lift a wallet from the inside pocket of a fellow passenger on the tube? \u00a0Then this is the book for you.<\/p>\n

But The Thief<\/em> is much more than an instruction manual.\u00a0 It\u2019s the gripping story of how Nishimura, a male pickpocket with no apparent family or friends, gets entrapped when he becomes emotionally involved with a young boy and his mother. This is in stark contrast to the fate of the similarly solitary Michel, the male protagonist in Robert Bresson\u2019s 1960s film Pickpocket<\/em>. At the end of Bresson\u2019s film, Michel is trapped by the police and imprisoned, only to be redeemed by the love of a woman whose attentions he has hitherto neglected.\u00a0 Nishimura\u2019s fate is much grimmer.<\/p>\n

The similarities between scenes in the novel and those in the film are surely not fortuitous.\u00a0 But there are great differences.\u00a0 Bresson prefaces his film with a strict opening disclaimer that his film is not a thriller; the last sixty pages of the novel would do credit to any thriller writer.<\/p>\n

Nakamura\u2019s first person narrator, Nishimura, a name he takes pains to conceal from his associates and readers, lives in Tokyo in a seedy one-room flat. His only real contact with other human beings is through his hands roving through men\u2019s outer clothing to remove their wallets. He is careless with the money he steals. It\u2019s the thrill of the act and the sense of triumph afterwards which matters most to him. Nishimura says he can\u2019t be bothered to sell the credit cards he finds in victims\u2019 wallets: a sign of his indifference to money and his desire to avoid involvement with other people.<\/p>\n

One evening, Nishimura sees a woman and her son shoplifting in a supermarket. Noticing that they have been spotted by a store detective, he warns her. Outside the woman is anything but grateful, but offers herself for ten thousand yen before riding off on her bike with her son.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nishimura sees in the boy something of his younger self. After observing the boy shoplifting Nishimura prevents him being caught and gives him money to buy the groceries his mother has ordered him to steal. The boy becomes obsessed with Nishimura and starts following him around.\u00a0 Nishimura takes pity on him and eventually pays his mother, who has little time for her son, to put him in a children\u2019s home to protect him from her abusive boyfriend.<\/p>\n

After helping some old acquaintances with a robbery, Nishimura is ordered by a crime boss obsessed with exercising his power over others to do three pickpocketing tasks. Refusal, he is told, will lead to the killing of the boy and his mother. Nishimura accepts. He is then told that failure will lead to his own death. He is not told the penalty for success<\/p>\n

The translation reads well. However I was disturbed by the word \u2018homeless\u2019 being applied to characters by the narrator solely on the basis of their appearance. Do all Japanese homeless people look the same or is the word for homeless in Japanese applicable to everybody who looks poor? It would also have been nice to know, maybe through a footnote, how much a yen is worth in sterling to get a sense of the value of the money Nishimura steals and sometimes gives away. For those of you who read reviews to find out stuff you don\u2019t already know, there are, at the time of writing, 122.4 yen to one pound sterling.<\/p>\n

The Thief <\/em>is a very readable novel which convincingly depicts the psychology of a Japanese pickpocket whose thinking and actions are universally comprehensible.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by John Petherbridge<\/p>\n

This is the gripping story of how Nishimura, a male pickpocket with no apparent family or friends, gets entrapped when he becomes emotionally involved with a young boy and his mother. This is in stark contrast to the fate of the similarly solitary Michel, the male protagonist in Robert Bresson\u2019s 1960s film Pickpocket<\/em>. At the end of Bresson\u2019s film, Michel is trapped by the police and imprisoned, only to be redeemed by the love of a woman whose attentions he has hitherto neglected. Nishimura\u2019s fate is much grimmer.[…] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2273"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2278,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2273\/revisions\/2278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}