A man reads a mysterious manuscript in a lodge. He’s there to assume a new identity. Also in the room is a suitcase - with a body inside. So begins the bizarre journey of Fuminori Nakamura’s latest novel, My Annihilation.
I don’t really rate Nakamura very highly as a writer - he’s written one mediocre novel, The Thief, and everything else I’ve read of his has been poor - so it’s not surprising that My Annihilation turned out to be also not good, though I’d hoped for it to be at least on the same level as The Thief, so it was a bit disappointing.
It starts well with an intriguing setup in the lodge and the strange surroundings. I’m fine with the dark material and the story-within-the-story can be a fun storytelling device. And it gets pretty good too with the fictional story of the Otaku Murderer and Kozuka’s traumatic past. I was definitely invested in the mystery up to that point - and then it collapses in on itself and never recovers!
Without giving away spoilers, this is an increasingly and immensely convoluted and contrived revenge story hinging on the most absurd understanding of brainwashing via hypnosis and electroconvulsive therapy. Characters are introduced who turn out to be other characters who’ve been introduced in a silly game of literary musical chairs, and, because Nakamura writes them all in the same voice, it made it practically impossible to follow who was who after a certain point.
I thought Kozuka was the main character but then he’s not really Kozuka and then suddenly there are four other characters - Wakui, Yoshimi, Kida and Mamiya - who are also swapping identities/roles. Nakamura also tries for too many twists in his story so that this character is really tricking this character and again and again - it’s too much. It turns a promising narrative into incoherent sludge. It might have helped if the chapters had character names at the start so you could tell who was speaking - might.
Nakamura doesn’t write female characters well either - nowhere is it more clear than in this novel. Yukari and Kozuka’s mother aren’t really characters so much as motivations for the male characters to create and enact the labyrinthine revenge plot. Female “characters” in this novel are there to be beaten, raped and, in one instance, pushed off a cliff!
The format of the story added to the confusion - there’s the manuscript, the book within the book, then there are recordings, files, and flashbacks, sometimes told from the perspectives of different characters. And the subject matter itself - near-constant domestic violence amongst all the characters - felt gratuitous and pointless; I didn’t follow the many twists nor could I discern what Nakamura was trying to say about it all (if anything).
There are completely black page interstitials separating the chapters which might serve as representative of the memory gaps of the characters. That’s a nice touch, if that’s what Nakamura was going for - otherwise it’s another useless superficial feature like the myriad formats presented throughout the novel.
Parts of the novel are fairly interesting - mostly the dark stories of Kozuka and the Otaku Murderer, and the framing was initially compelling - and generally the prose is easy to read if not very effective or memorable. It’s just that the parts don’t gel together well into anything coming close to a strong, coherent narrative.
The characters are poorly written - they’re either interchangeable male weirdos or one-dimensional female punching bags - and the plot is a mess. It’s original but only because it’s so dumb, nobody would’ve conceived of it before anyway! If you’re interested in this author, I wouldn’t bother with My Annihilation - try The Thief instead.
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