The Rope Artist: A Novel (Sonosaki no michi ni kieru)

Two detectives. Two identical women. One dead body— then two, then three, then four. All knotted up in Japan’s underground BDSM scene & kinbaku, a form of rope bondage which bears a complex cultural history of spirituality, torture, cleansing, & sacrifice.
As Togashi, a junior member of the police force, investigates the murder of a kinbaku instructor, he finds himself unable to resist his own private transgressive desires. In contrast, Togashi’s Sherlock Holmesian colleague Hayama is morally upright to a fault, with a stalwart commitment to the truth and nearly superhuman powers of deduction. When Hayama notices a dangerous measure of darkness within Togashi, he embarks on a parallel investigation, which soon spirals out of control.

Unflinching in its flayed-raw treatment of identity, violence, sexuality, power, the occult, & the divine, Fuminori Nakamura’s explosive, complex new mystery is both viscerally painful & unexpectedly hopeful—plus, intriguingly pulpy. As is the case with all Nakamura’s work, The Rope Artist has a twisted, tangled plot, & functions as a profoundly philosophical treatise on the most tantalizing, most dangerous elements of the human psyche.

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Fuminori Nakamura was born in 1977 & graduated from Fukushima University in 2000. He won the 2002 Shinchō Literary Prize for New Writers for his first novel, A Gun, the prestigious Noma Literary Prize for Shade in 2004, & the 2005 Akutagawa Prize for The Boy in the Earth. The Thief, his first novel to be translated into English, won the 2010 Oe Prize, Japan’s largest literary award, & was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is the recipient of NoirCon’s David L. Goodis Award.