The Gun / Fuminori Nakamura, translated by Allison Markin Powell, 198 pp.

A short, strange, and affecting novel.  Nishikawa, a young university student, happens to stumble across a crime scene and finds himself a gun owner as a result.  The novel tracks his slide into complete obsession with the weapon, to the detriment of his personal relationships, and, ultimately, his sanity.

Told in a disturbingly flat first-person narrative style, Nakamura seems to have hit on something I've talked about with friends but that I don't hear much about in the wider culture: gun love as a form of idolatry.  Frequent uneasy references to American cultural hegemony round out a disturbing, if not entirely pleasurable, read.