The Nature of Things

This book was a sensation when it was first published in Japan in 2011. Published in English in the UK last year, it also garnered respectable sales. Now the U.S. edition is out, published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, and it will be interesting to see how it is received in the long term here. For this is a very different crime fiction/thriller/police procedural to what American readers are used to. For one thing the protagonist is not a detective, although he has been a police detective in the past and for most of his professional career. But at the time that we meet Yoshinobu Mikami, he has for several months been the press director for the police department, charged with liaising with journalists and getting out the story which the police want to get out to the public. It's a role that he finds something like a strait jacket and he does not embrace it. He spends much of his time longing to be transferred back into the Criminal Investigation Division. Moreover, when we meet Mi...