The Kingdom

Fuminori Nakamura

Jul 2016 · Recorded Books · Narrated by Lucie Kondo

About this audiobook

Yurika is a freelancer in the Tokyo underworld. She poses as a prostitute, carefully targeting potential Johns, selecting powerful and high-profile men. When she is alone with them, she drugs them and takes incriminating photos to sell for blackmail purposes. She knows very little about the organization she's working for, and is perfectly satisfied with the arrangement, as long as it means she doesn't have to reveal anything about her identity, either. She operates alone and lives a private, solitary life, doing her best to lock away painful memories. But when a figure from Yurika's past emerges, she realizes there is someone out there who knows all her secrets: her losses, her motivations, her every move. There are whispers of a crime lord named Kizaki-"a monster," she is told-and Yurika finds herself trapped in a game of cat and mouse. Is she wily enough to escape one of the most sadistic men in Tokyo?

About the author

Fuminori Nakamura was born in 1977 and graduated from Fukushima University in 2000. His first novel, A Gun, won the 2002 Shinch? Literary Prize for New Writers. His other books include Shade, which won the Noma Literary Prize in 2004, The Boy in the Earth, which won the 2005 Akutagawa Prize, The Thief, which won the 2010 Oe Prize, and Last Winter We Parted.