The Thief, by Fuminori Nakamura (hardcover, $23)

If you have tuned in to this review to find out the meaning of The Thief, I have an 80-page thesis you could look at. Just kidding. Your guess is as good as mine, and I will make some guesses under the heading "Spoiler."

Fuminori Nakamura has won a bunch of prizes in Japan, including the Oe prize, awarded to the best literary work by a young author, for this book.

The narrator of The Thief is Nishimura (mentioned only once), a pickpocket in Tokyo. After he participated in a puzzling home invasion in which the purported motive for breaking in felt spurious, Nishimura hightailed it out of Tokyo to lay low for a while. Nakamura doesn't tell us the whole story of the robbery until about a third of the way through, and that story sets the stage for the surreal nature of the rest of the book.

After Nishimura hesitantly returns to Tokyo, he is spotted by an old acquaintance and the jig is up. Kizaki, the gangster/nemesis/devil who masterminded the robbery, has Nishimura in his power again. Nishimura would run but he has come to know a 10-year-old boy who reminds him of himself at that age, a budding pickpocket. He must mentor the boy and help the boy's mother, even though it means acquiescing to Kizaki.

The last part of the book, fulfilling the quest Kizaki has set before Nishimura, is very clever. This is more than a crime novel, however. The question of fate keeps popping up. Is it Nishimura's fate to be where he is, or is it someone else's fate to control him? Why is Nishimura satisfied to live as he does, depending on the contents of whatever wallets he picks? What is the meaning of his life? This must be the literary part for which Nakamura won the Oe award.

SPOILER

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The philosophizing and ambiguous ending add an interesting layer to an underlying smart and engaging crime story. The tower that Nishimura has glimpsed at points in his life represents the unattainable "normal" and respectable life he has fallen further away from as he leads his life of petty crime, to the point that he no longer sees the tower. At the end, when Nishimura is about to give his life for the boy and his mother, the tower appears again; he has redeemed himself. Is he saved by the coin toss? Isn't that the ultimate negation that fate is written for us, that a coin tossed toward a stranger may change the life that Kizaki claims he has written for Nishimura?