I found Fuminori Nakamura’s Cult X (translated by Kalau Almony) infuriating. I requested it because I am fascinated by cults. Being an atheist, I want to understand what draws people to religion. Cults are the most extreme versions of religion; charismatic leaders with a good story suck people in for various reasons and followers stay even if it all goes wrong. What leads people to do that? Cult X does answer that question, as well as tries to answer what it is that drives those charismatic leaders to try and lead people off the cliffs with them. My problem with the book is that it is packed with lectures by male characters, with barely any attention paid to the women who appear in the novel. By the time I got to the end, I was sick of mansplaining and female characters who were treated as little more than sex dolls. There were some interesting ideas here, just not enough to make up for those two major problems.

Cult X opens when a detective gives Narazaki the bad news about the woman he wants to be his girlfriend. She’s in a cult, a mysterious cult that no one knows anything about. This short prelude dumps us straight into Narazaki’s attempts to find Ryoko, which quickly evolves into something that reads like a handful of characters being tossed into a tumble dryer on high. Narazaki follows Ryoko’s trail to a guru who has ideas about atoms, brains, and the Big Bang—but who also keeps asking to poke women’s breasts. The guru leads Narazaki to the guru’s rival and enemy, plus something a lot more sinister. Narazaki disappears as a lead character for a while so that we can follow Ryoko’s lover, Takahara, as he wrestles with his conscience.

As the novel jumps from character to character—and lecture to lecture—we get hints about what the religions of these cults are. While the guru is more philosophical and wants to share ideas about where the universe might have started and how atoms and the brain and quantum physics interact. The rival leader is downright evil. He has essentially created a sex cult, with ambitions to turn it into a terrorist organization. But instead of exploring these cobbled together theologies, the book devotes more time to letting these “great men” expound on their thoughts and their traumatic histories. While there are some interesting echoes and themes in Cult X, I started to loathe their expository dialogue the more I read, especially once I learned how depraved the rival leader was.

The ending of Cult X offered a little bit of an apology after slogging through the lectures and self-tortured men, but not enough to make it up to me for all the pretentious male characters who run roughshod over everyone to achieve their destructive goals. Some readers might enjoy the thriller aspects of this novel. The terrorism plot ratchets up to a fever pitch over the course of the book. I actually kind of liked how big of a mess the putative terrorists managed to create. I just didn’t like the lectures or the misogyny.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. It will be released 22 May 2018.

Intriguing concept but was not executed well. I liked the unique use of prose in this setting but overall I think there were too many different styles that made this seem clumsy and at times confusing.

Ultimately, this book was challenging for me because I found it dense and not much of a pager-turner. I found it especially rough when going through the leader's lectures. I was uncomfortable the very graphic sexual scenes.

What starts as a man's search for his girlfriend who he believes has been lost to a cult, quickly becomes a exploration of how these "religions" are started. He finds that there opposing groups that each have separate purposes. The reader is taken on the journey deeper into the worlds of the cults as the main character tries to find his friend. Nakamura tells this story through a 3rd person narrator, transcripts of the lectures from one of the gurus, and the diary entries.
I have read a lot about the Aum Shinrikyo cult (Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche) and Charles Manson (Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson); this book gave a unique fictional portrayal of how these cults can thrive. Nakamura touches on several questions as the narrative unfolds: How does the leader manipulate and fill the perceived needs of his or her followers? What role does history, a society's taboos and mores, and a person's individual situation have in their search for personal and universal meaning?
Ultimately, this book is challenging. It's dense and far from a pager-turner at times. It can be especially rough when going through the leader's lectures that comment on formal religion, physicals, cellular biology, evolution, and many other topics. And a warning: there are several very graphic sexual scenes. This is not a book for a young person or one who is uncomfortable with reading content of that nature.