Tangled Web UK Review September 2008
Tokyo Year Zero (Tokyo Trilogy 1) by
David Peace
hbk out August 07
Published by Faber
at £16.99
David Peace has already built quite a reputation. One of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003, and in 2004 winning the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Anyone fanatical about football, Derby County, or Leeds United will have read The Damned United with pleasure. Here, he embarks on the first of a trilogy about post-war Japan. Peace was born in N Yorkshire in 1967, but moved to Tokyo in 1994.
Tokyo Year Zero is set in August 1946, but has reverberations echoing back to wartime Japan, men who committed war crimes, and the inconceivable notion that the Emperor could admit defeat. Inspector Minami is investigating the discovery of a young woman’s corpse, and in the process finds another older body, now just a skeleton. It reminds him of an earlier case close to the end of the war, when the police clashed with the ferocious militaristic Kempei police. Now, he is working in the context of crushing defeat, in a Tokyo which is part destroyed, where women sell their bodies on the streets to survive, and food is scarce. The Victors control everything, and are continually winkling out those police and officials whom they see as war criminals. The trouble is that this weakens the police force, and only results in men changing their identity.
"No one is who they say they are..."
Even Minami’s identity is suspect. And his personality blighted by a dependence on a local gangster for sleeping pills. The gangster is seeking whoever set his boss up to be murdered, and it looks like someone in the police did it. The case of the two corpses is split between Minami and his opposite number Chief Inspector Adachi. Adachi has a stroke of luck, when the mother of his victim gives him a name. Kodaira. This leads to a confession, but Kodaira does not confess to the case involving Minami. He is progressively driven close to madness in pursuit of truth and justice for the growing number of victims he identifies in the trail of Kodira’s life. And in the process, Minami reveals unpleasant things about his own past.
Peace’s narrative style is uniquely his own, with monotonously repeated motifs. The "ton-ton-ton" of relentless Japanese rebuilding permeates the novel. Minami’s own guilt-ridden, lice infected self obsessively recurs. "I itch and I scratch. Gari-Gari." This narrative technique either rivets in its simplicity, or irritates beyond bounds. Maybe it does both, and is intended to. It certainly conveys a compulsive picture of the moral degradation and actual filth that the immediately post-war Japanese were wallowing in. The novel is based on the true case of Yoshio Kodaira. The exact number of his victims is not known, neither in China (when he was in the Imperial Japanese Navy), or in Japan. He certainly raped and murdered ten women in Japan, and was involved in thirty other rapes. Minami’s case is one of the unsolved ones.
(
Ian Morson
Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger)
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