Fuminori Nakamura

Informed by his elderly, enigmatic father that he was created to cause misery in an uncontrollable world, Fuminori is educated to invoke as much destruction and unhappiness as possible and lives a hedonist life without repercussions before starting to question his father's mandates. By the award-winning author of The Thief.

Evil and the Mask

jess

"Happiness is a fortress." - Fuminori Nakamura.
The quote fits the last puzzle of the plot, the head of the Kuki family, an aristocratic clan with a successful business empire, deems to turn his youngest son, Fumihiro, into a “cancer” on the world, “a personification of evil … a being that will make this world miserable” — just as previous generations of Kuki patriarchs had done, profiting from the dark influence these “cancers” had on war, politics and business. Of course, the protagonist, Fumihiro, has other ideas. Fueling an immense desire to protect the adopted daughter of Kuki family, also his first love, he set up to destroy Kuki's family with the addition of the transformation of another man for himself.
Nakamura's fiction blurs the line between the crime and literary genres, with “Evil and the Mask” mixing noir and the existential question of free will. The ending was a bit rushed and the book filled more of unnecessary "TED-talk" rather than the implicating actions. Re-reading has never once showed up in my thoughts, but I found that there is a movie version of this book, which I may check it out, not soon.

Dennis Jacob Rosenfeld

High concept novel that fails to deliver in almost every aspect.

Martin Lukanov

This is the second book by Nakamura that I’ve read and I find it to be somewhat similar in tone and style to the previous one, The Thief. 
In many ways, Evil and the Mask feels like a direct continuation of the themes explored by the author in The Thief. Both books are noir written from a first person perspective in which the narrator is deeply rooted in crime.

However, there are a number of important differences between both books. First of all, Evil and the Mask is quite longer. As such, there is much more space for us to understand the narrator and the reasons why he is the person he is. These reasons are mainly given through a number of episodes from the narrator’s past, especially his adolescence. These episodes are interesting for a number of reasons. The main one is the fact that they seem not to represent the narrator’s subjective memories about his childhood, not the objective facts. I think this is suggested around the end of the book when the narrator takes a ride with a childhood friend. It seems like her recollections of the past are pretty different from his. 

There are also quite a few things I found the book to be lacking. One of them is the ending which seems out of nowhere. A second one is the whole subplot with the crazy terrorist group. I feel like the plot wouldn’t suffer if the whole thing was not there. 

In the end, I enjoyed the book and liked the way it is written/translated. However, I found it not as impactful as The Thief. One of the main reasons fro that is the abovementioned fact that both books seem very similar.

S. R. Spencer

Informed by his father that he was created to cause misery, Fuminori is educated to invoke as much destruction and unhappiness as possible and lives a hedonist life without repercussions before starting to question his father's mandates.

Evil and the Mask

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