The Rope Artist - Paperback

by Fuminori Nakamura (Author), Sam Bett (Translator)

The aftermath of the murder of a bondage teacher reveals the darkest corners of the human mind in this chilling new mystery from the master of Japanese literary noir.

Two detectives. Two identical women. One dead body-- then two, then three, then four. All knotted up in Japan's underground BDSM scene and kinbaku, a form of rope bondage which bears a complex cultural history of spirituality, torture, cleansing, and sacrifice.

As Togashi, a junior member of the police force, investigates the murder of a kinbaku instructor, he finds himself unable to resist his own private transgressive desires. In contrast, Togashi's Sherlock Holmesian colleague Hayama is morally upright to a fault, with a stalwart commitment to the truth and nearly superhuman powers of deduction. When Hayama notices a dangerous measure of darkness within Togashi, he embarks on a parallel investigation, which soon spirals out of control.

Unflinching in its flayed-raw treatment of identity, violence, sexuality, power, the occult, and the divine, The Rope Artist is both viscerally painful and unexpectedly hopeful--a genre homage that shines a light on the most dangerous elements of the human psyche.

Author Biography

Fuminori Nakamura was born in 1977 and graduated from Fukushima University in 2000. He won the 2002 Shinchō Literary Prize for New Writers for his first novel, The Gun; the Noma New Literary Prize for Shade in 2004; and the 2005 Akutagawa Prize for The Boy in the Earth. The Thief, his first novel to be translated into English, won the 2010 Kenzaburo Ōe Prize, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was a Wall Street Journal Best Fiction of 2012 selection. He also won NoirCon's David L. Goodis Award in 2014, the Bunkamura Dumago prize for My Annihilation in 2016, the Chunichi Cultural Award in 2020, and the Noma Literary Prize for The Line in 2024. His novels have been turned into 7 movies and translated into 15 languages.

Sam Bett is a fiction writer and Japanese translator. His translation work has won the Japan-US Friendship Commission Prize and been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.