The action of the new novel by Christian Kracht (b. 1966), written according to the main principle of constructing a performance in the Japanese theater No jo-ha-kyu, takes place in Japan and Germany in the 30s of the twentieth century. In the center are the figures of the Swiss film director Emil Naegeli and the Japanese official of the Ministry of Culture Masahiko Amakasu, who came up with the idea of creating a “celluloid axis” Berlin-Tokyo in order to “confront American cultural imperialism.” In his unique manner, Kracht tells how the world of the 1930s became increasingly cruel due to cultural chauvinism, and at the same time appeals to the semantic resources that cultural tradition is ready to provide us with. In 2016, the novel “The Dead” was awarded a literary prize named after Hermann Hesse (city of Karlsruhe) and the Swiss Book Prize. The Swiss jury praised this novel as “an homage to silent cinema and as a historical study that finds in history material for political analysis of our time.”