The Thief
The plot follows a familiar crime template: the expert free-lancer is forced to work for a big crime boss. This time it's a pickpocket, who narrates, a guy who makes a good living lifting the wallets of the rich while riding on subway trains. An old friend gets him involved in a robbery, and he can never quite figure out why he is employed by the shadowy boss.
The book is written by a Japanese writer, Fuminori Nakamura, and is set in Tokyo. It's also a very nihilistic book, the overarching theme being our lives our controlled by others. A long story is told by the villain in which a king decides to write out the life story of a man, and then, by manipulation, he makes that life come true. Certainly this is of interest to writers of fiction, because that is essentially what they do.
The pickpocket is the kind of guy who has no attachments, but he does befriend a boy who is forced to shoplift for his mother, who is a prostitute. This attachment ends up being used against him. The world, Nakamura is telling us, is a brutal and unfeeling place.
I would have liked this book more but the writing is poor, and I imagine much of it is the translation, such as this passage: "I heard the laughing cries of a group of children my own age. A boy with long hair was holding a little toy car. It was bought overseas, he shouted in a piercing voice. Operated by a small controller he held in his hand, the sophisticated car sparkled brilliantly as it went racing around." That's bad.
But other parts are not the translation, such as the big boss making a speech about how robberies are only successful with good planning. Well, thanks, Captain Obvious.
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