I don’t think I’d have noticed let alone read this book if it hadn’t appeared on the list of titles eligible for this year’s International Dagger Award for translated crime fiction published in the UK and that would have been my loss. It’s a great reminder of why I follow this particular award more closely than any other; I am prompted to read more widely in terms of geography and style than I otherwise would do.*
THE THIEF is an odd book, not really fitting neatly into any of the crime genre’s boxes though it is, I suppose, closest to noir even though there is a bit too much overt metaphysical symbolism for it to fully conform to the necessary tropes . It recounts a short period in the life of a Japanese pickpocket who describes his daily ‘work’ (identifying victims and the various ruses used to steal their stuff) and how he gets caught up with a gang who coerce him into crimes he would not have chosen to commit. He also, somewhat reluctantly, befriends a young boy who he one day notices shoplifting with his mother and prevents the pair from being caught by a store detective.
There are several reasons why I should not have liked THE THIEF but in an almost ornery way my brain decided to be transfixed by it. Despite me. I am sure the fact that it is a teeny tiny book amongst a landslide of doorstop-sized tomes didn’t hurt.
I know I sound like an uncaring, middle class, cow but I’m not really fond of books told from the career criminal’s point of view. In most cases I’m not sympathetic to them, regardless of the real or imagined traumas that led them to their lives of crime, and I’m rarely swayed or intrigued by their angst or their revelling in the misery they inflict. So a story told by a pickpocket should not, on past experience, have engaged me at all but it did. It may have something to do with the fact that the eponymous thief (named only once as Nishimura) doesn’t delve deeply into the morality of his actions (aside from a claim to only steal from rich people) and certainly doesn’t spend time justifying himself. He is what he is and rather dispassionately tells his story which I somehow found more acceptable than the books which give lengthy reasons for a person becoming a life-long criminal. They always seem to boil down to “it’s not my fault I turned out this way” at which point I usually mumble “cry me a river” under my breath (I warned you I’d sound like a cow).
There is also, at least on the surface, is not a lot going on here in that rather than a major story arc the book concerns itself with an almost random slice of Nishimura’s life which is another reason I ought not to have been engrossed in the book as that kind of thing often irks me. But with THE THIEF almost immediately I did want to know what troubles would befall the narrator (there was never even a glimmer that his life would bring something other than troubles). Somehow his detachment and reserve made me hang on for the few tiny morsels that would provide insight into the man, his personal history and his ultimate fate.
Some of THE THIEF borders on the surreal, the female characters are prostitutes or dead (downtrodden women are a feature of all the Japanese crime fiction I have read) and the ending is as ambiguous as it gets which are all more reasons why I would normally not enjoy a book. And yet I listened to the whole thing in a single sitting almost without noticing the time passing. There are some things that don’t really work (I don’t care how downtrodden she is I didn’t for a moment ‘buy’ the character of the boy’s mother who at a point I won’t detail for fear of spoiling utters the line “what good are kids anyway” which did cause my eyes to roll) but overall I am glad to have read the book and would recommend to those prepared for something a little different.
*I see now that a delay in this book’s UK publication date has ruled it out of contention for this year’s award but I’m still glad to have read it (and can now I say I’ve started reading titles eligible for next year’s award).
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THE THIEF has been reviewed at International Noir Fiction, Mrs Wordopolis Reads and The Crime Segments
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My rating 3.5/5
Translators Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates
Narrator Charlie Thurston
Publisher AudioGO [This edition 2012, original work 2009]
ASIN B007EJIBOC
Length 4 hours 1 minute
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series standalone
Source I bought it
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
