The action of the new novel by Christian Kracht (born 1966), written according to the main principle of building 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 Nageli and the Japanese official of the Ministry of Culture Masahiko Amakasu, who had the idea to create the "celluloid axis" of Berlin-Tokyo in order to "resist American cultural imperialism." In his unique manner, Kracht tells how the world of the 1930s became more and more cruel due to chauvinist cultures, and at the same time - appeals to the semantic resources that cultural tradition is ready to provide us. In 2016, the novel "The Dead" was awarded the Hermann Hesse Literary Prize (Karlsruhe) and the Swiss Book Prize. The Swiss jury praised this novel as "homage to silent cinema and as a historical study, finding material in history and for political analysis of modernity."