Cult X

1
 
In front of Narazaki was a gate.
      It was an old, enormous wooden gate. There was something written on it, but the characters had faded and Narazaki couldn t make them out. Should I go straight in? Narazaki was unsure. There s something strange about this place. But isn t it just a normal house? It seems more like a house than a church or temple.
      The gate cut through the frigid air and towered over Narazaki. It seemed like it was looking down on him, testing him, about to pass down some sort of judgment. Looking up at the gate, Narazaki was made aware of the smallness of his own body. He wasn t ready to go in, so he walked past. The building was surrounded by tall brick-and-clay walls, and Narazaki couldn t see inside.
      He recalled Kobayashi s report. Ryoko Tachibana had certainly belonged to this group. The founder was named Shotaro Matsuo, a man who called himself an amateur intellectual. The group seemed to be some sort of religious organization, but they didn t have a proper name, they weren t registered as a religion, and the whole concept of believing in their faith seemed foreign to them. They didn t worship a particular god in fact, the group s focus seemed to be pondering the question, Is there a god?
      What were they? Narazaki didn t understand.
      As he passed the gate, Narazaki thought to himself, I always do this. I always hesitate. It was as though he wanted to spend the rest of his life stuck, the days sinking away heavily. Though they were unhappy, he wanted to savor that unhappiness. The languor seemed to be his very flesh, and he could never leave it. But he had decided to stop living that way. He would follow the pull of the gravity he had begun to feel within himself. He would give himself up to whatever came. He didn t care what would come of it.

Fuminori Nakamura was born in 1977 and graduated from Fukushima University in 2000. He has won numerous prizes for his writing, including the e Prize, Japan's largest literary award; the David L. Goodis Award for Noir Fiction; and the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. The Thief, his first novel to be translated into English, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His other novels include The Gun, The Kingdom, Evil and the Mask, The Boy in the Earth, and Last Winter, We Parted.

A Japanese Bestseller, with over 400,000 copies sold
A LitHub Most Anticipated Crime, Mystery, and Thriller Title of 2018
A Library Journal Best Book of 2018

Praise for Cult X

"You'll think about Nakamura's questions long after you've closed his book's covers. He uses the conventions of a genre to prop up a tent for big ideas about groupthink and individual responsibility. If you feel a few frissons along the way? Consider how easily you might be seduced into a cult, and then take a long, cold shower."
NPR

"Raises the literary stakes to literally cosmic proportions . . . Cult X, translated into handsome, unadorned English by Kalau Almony, pushes the boundaries of the thriller genre to an extreme degree. Mr. Nakamura has written a daunting, challenging saga of good and evil on a Dostoevskian scale. Those who persevere to its finale may well feel the richer for it."
Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal

"Nakamura's impassioned writing is part of a continuum that stretches from Dostoevsky to Camus to e."
Los Angeles Times

"Nakamura s talent for characterization and willingness to engage make this a novel worth wrestling with."
Los Angeles Review of Books

"One of the most buzzed about novels of the season."
Salon

"The Fuminori Nakamura novel we ve been waiting for . . . [Nakamura's] talent has always been for exploring the lives of those on the fringes of society, the damaged and the ostracized, and that remains at the heart of this work."
The Japan Times

"Taking as his inspiration the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, award-winning author Nakamura weaves together politics, religion, and science including biology, cosmology, and quantum physics into a fascinating noir brimming with insightful commentary on totalitarianism that is especially apt for our times."
Booklist, Starred Review

"Gripping . . . This noirish thriller will resonate with