Last Winter We Parted
About
A young writer arrives at a prison to interview Kihara Yudai, a world-renowned photographer convicted of a bizarre and grisly murder. The writer has been commissioned to produce a full account — but as the interviews proceed, the boundary between journalist and subject, observer and participant, begins to dissolve in ways that recall Patricia Highsmith at her most psychologically unsettling. Fuminori Nakamura constructs a narrative of mirrors within mirrors, each revelation reflecting something disturbing about the previous one. The novel's real subject is not the crime but the nature of obsession — artistic, sexual, and intellectual — and the violence inherent in the act of turning another person into an aesthetic object. A dark, twisting thriller about the line between capturing beauty and destroying it — and the writer who discovers he's already crossed it.
