Deepanshu D

A novel about youth alienation and potential for violence: A Japenese "The Stranger" Novel has the haunting quality of Camus' "The Stranger". Adds to the genre of alienated young men who are driven by motives they cannot understand. In this way has similar haunting quality of Temple of the "Golden Pavilion" and "Crime and Punishment. Although questions about what motivates narrator's fascination with "the gun" and with violence are never fully answered and might not be answerable, Nakamura's use of biographical material enriches our understanding of the narrator's character and what is ultimately his psychopathology. The writing is uneven, which might be due to problems with translation, but a haunting feeling about the relationship between alienation and apparently spontaneous and violence comes through. Well worth reading.