The Thief

Amazon Best Books of the Month, March 2012: In Fuminori Nakamura's new novel, the main character weaves along the streets of Tokyo pickpocketing his way through the flow of humanity, as if in a dream. He lifts wallets filled with cash and credit cards with a masterful ease, his mind occupied with a trance-like debate about whether to care anymore. Whether to care about the young kid he sees clumsily stealing food at a supermarket. Whether to care about his partner, who disappeared after a botched robbery years ago. Oscillating between the real connection he establishes with the shoplifting boy and the drug-like daze of his own criminal past, the thief drifts back into the clutches of the mastermind of that ill-fated robbery. And the thief starts to wake up, only to realize that a noose is being carefully, and slowly, drawn around his neck. --Benjamin Moebius