THE THIEF, by Fuminori Nakamura, translated by Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates. Soho Crime, 2012, 304 pp., $23.00 (hardcover)

In simpler times, in simpler tales, authors pitted heroes against villains, and there was no confusion about who wore the black hat and who the white. We no longer live in those simple times, and most of us have grown bored with those simple tales. We want, in the books we read, something that at least approaches the complexity of the lives we lead outside of those books.

One way authors have satisfied this desire is to give us protagonists who are neither heroes nor villains, characters who, because they defy such easy descriptions, demand from the reader a bit of work: the mystery to be solved is not who committed the crime, but who the protagonist is.

Fuminori Nakamura's "The Thief" is a crime novel in this tradition, a tradition that may have begun with the greatest crime novel of all, Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment." In both books it's not who committed the crime that is the mystery, and it's not — or not only — what will happen next that keeps us turning pages. Rather, it's what the author will — through the medium of his characters — think next.