My Annihilation

August 1, 2021

"Turn this page, and you may forfeit your entire life." What would you do if you read those lines? Can reading a diary implicate its interrogator in a terrible crime? Can an offhand suggestion turn someone into a murderer? These are the questions carefully weighed by award-winning Japanese author Nakamura in his latest literary noir.

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October 15, 2021
A steep dive into the psyche of a man who may or may not have done some truly terrible things. The first thing Ryodai Kozuka wants you to know is that that's not his real name; he's switched identities with someone else so that he can start a new life. Nor did the narrator push his half sister off a cliff when they were children; she fell on her own once he'd taken her into the woods to get her some breathing room from the home in which her father routinely beat their mother. The narrator isn't a bit like Tsutomu Miyazaki, the Otaku Murderer of four young girls who was executed in 2008, not long after he reported being urged to commit his heinous crimes by a group of Rat Men only he could see. Instead, he's a former doctor of psychosomatic medicine whose seduction of his vulnerable patient, sex worker Yukari, was entirely therapeutic, helping her recover from the sexual memories her previous physician, Dr. Yoshimi, had implanted in her. Implanted memories, it becomes gradually clear, are at the heart of this searing novella, though it's not clear whether her treatment by the smilingly unrepentant Yoshimi or the narrator himself, who wonders if he really slept with her after all, is responsible for Yukari's suicide. Once she's hanged herself, the narrator vows to avenge himself on Kida and Mamiya, two former clients who showed her a video of herself that he's convinced is what really drove her to take her life. Working with Wakui, the cafe owner whose budding relationship with Yukari had finally seemed to promise some stability in her life, he captures the two clients and starts messing with their own heads, and vice versa. An unnerving tale that richly earns its title. By the last chapter, you won't believe a word the narrator tells you.

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November 8, 2021
The unnamed, memory-challenged narrator of this unsettling psychological mystery from Nakamaura (Cult X) wakes up in a “cramped room in a rundown mountain lodge,” where he finds various forms of identification under the name Ryodai Kozuka and a journal he’s sure was written by Kozuka that starts, “Turn this page, and you may give up your entire life.” In the diary are details of playing video games and growing sexual awareness in adolescence, and Kozuka gradually recalls a previous life as a doctor of psychosomatic medicine. He treated a young woman in crisis, Yukari, struggling with the burden of past traumas, who, through hypnosis, unleashed a repressed memory of a recent assault at the hands of her previous psychiatrist, Yoshimi. The narrator later leaves the lodge and uses the account of this repressed memory to initiate a romantic relationship with Yukari, which ends tragically. The stakes rise when the narrator confronts Yoshimi over his mistreatment of Yukari only to uncover more extensive abuse of patients. The narrator also sees a way to exact his revenge. Nakamura expertly mixes a look into the criminal mind with a story of doomed love. This fever-dream of a novel will long linger in the reader’s memory.

January 1, 2022
Nakamura's seventeenth book focuses on what it means to be human. It is a dark, strange, violent, frightening story of how the mind can be traumatized and even transformed completely into the mind of another. A young man who endured a deeply troubled childhood has become a psychiatrist. He falls in love with Yukari, but after she is raped by two men, she kills herself. The psychiatrist is traumatized and vows to avenge her death using his psychiatric training, including high doses of shock therapy and drugs, to manipulate the minds of the two rapists. Nakamura is a gifted and highly imaginative writer. His characters and the shocking plot are bewildering and bizarre, with even the layout of the book supporting the dark, eerie theme. While this novel may not appeal to some reading tastes, it is a profound, revelatory, and deeply moving examination of the human mind, and for those willing to grapple with the tangled plot and deeply troubling themes, it will leave a lasting impression.

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December 10, 2021

A man books into a mountain lodge. He's hiding there under a false name, Ryodai Kozuka. Kozuka's dead body lies folded up in his suitcase. There's an open manuscript on his desk. He begins to read. It tells of a man who murdered four young girls in one month in 1988. The young narrator (he was only a third grader at the time) can't shake off his fascination with the murderer but soon has his own issues to address, sexual and physical. He fantasizes about pushing his sister off a cliff. When she trips and falls but survives, he accepts his mother's judgment that he'd tried to kill her. His mother sends him to a treatment center, where he begins to feel that someone else, not him, is taking over his personality. A doctor hypnotizes him to replace bad memories with new. Electroshock treatment follows, leading to the breakdown of whatever personhood he'd had. The story becomes a maze of conflicting accounts, back and forth between manuscript and reader--black boxes within black boxes, memory and personality transient, even basic facts losing a foundation. VERDICT Nakamura's (The Thief) dark, elegant novel will appeal more to lovers of experimental fiction than fans of crime thrillers.--David Keymer, Cleveland

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.