Product Description

This book is set in August 1946. One year on from surrender and Tokyo lies broken and bleeding at the feet of its American victors. Against this extraordinary historical backdrop, "Tokyo Year Zero" opens with the discovery of the bodies of two young women in Shiba Park. Against his wishes, Detective Minami is assigned to the case, and as he gets drawn ever deeper into these complex and horrific murders, he realises that his own past and secrets are indelibly linked to those of the dead women and their killer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9462 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Tokyo Year Zero is further proof that David Peace is now one of the most ambitious and accomplished novelists of the modern era -- in any genre. He has always been an innovator, forging a striking synthesis between Noir crime writing and Yorkshire realism. Nineteen Seventy-Four was a visceral and atmospheric novel set in the year of the Silver Jubilee, with the Yorkshire Ripper at his sanguinary work. This book was the second of the Riding Quartet, and demonstrated what readers had come to expect -- a totally individual voice, with the characters (such as past-his-best journalist Jack Whitehead) memorably drawn.

Tokyo Year Zero, Peace's new novel, is another adroit synthesis, this time between the sprawling historical novel and the gritty crime genre. The author's picture of a city at war (the year is 1946) rivals that of any modern novelist in vividness and authenticity. It is one year on from the surrender, and Tokyo is struggling to maintain its pride after the American victory that destroyed its imperialist ambitions. The police force barely functions, and a variety of unpleasant individuals struggle for supremacy in Tokyo's thriving black market. Peace's protagonist, Detective Minami, is assigned a difficult case: the bodies of two women are found in Sheba Park, but as he begins to dig beneath the surface of an increasingly baffling and complex mystery, Minami finds (to his dismay) that his personal past -- and personal secrets -- are somehow involved with the murderer and his savage killings.

This first book in the Tokyo trilogy is as surprising and idiosyncratic an offering as we have come to expect from David Peace, and it's a safe bet that readers will be impatient for the remaining books in the sequence. --Barry Forshaw

Review
'A searing piece, the narration taut, the prose spare and uncompromising ... the bleakness of the times is beautifully captured.'
--Sunday Telegraph

Review
'An original voice in crime fiction, David Peace's first novel in his latest trilogy is an exhilarating read [and a] compelling story.'

Customer Reviews

Stunning
God, I'm baffled by all the negative reaction to this novel. I thought it was just the most stunning, visceral, haunting and hallucinatory book I've ever read. Peace's style risks teetering into self-parody, but in my view he avoids it here - and the result of that risk-taking is to put you right inside the mind, the body, the soul of Detective Minami, to make you breathe the foul air of postwar Tokyo, to make you ache for his poor wife and children, and to dream his recurring nightmares.

It's exhausting, and it's far from easy or light-hearted, but please please please if it sounds like your kind of thing, don't let the low average rating on here put you off. It's Peace at his best - and that's saying something.

Get off Your Knees!
****Minor Spoiler********

I can understand the criticism of this book. The repetition can get a bit much, the story isn't signposted, it's hard work etc. In fact i think i enjoyed the book a lot more once i'd read it and ruminated on it. I don't agree with the pretenious guff about how it's a meditation on how a nation's violent trauma causes individuals to suffer from multiple personality disorder or any of that. It plays like a pretty straight noir, with the caveat that the narrator has assumed a new identity after a war. I liked it a lot, but i loved GB84, the Red Riding Quartet a LOT more.

Pretentious
There are some nice ideas in this book but these are marred by awful writing. Endlessly repetitive sequences which the writer seems to think make for high tension and expressive of paranoia and claustrophobia. The only thing I felt claustrophobic about was reading the book. The style is pretentious and faux. The main ideas (if you can find them amid all the drivelling repetition) seem to be a) the different effects of violent trauma on different people, leading to dissociative disorder (split from self) in the main character, violent crime in the perpetrator, vicious power mania in the main character's rival, and vicious gang development by another, and b) the effects of natural and human trauma on a country. For much more interesting and certainly much more clearly and naturally written descriptions of reactions to trauma from that period, I would read The Railway Man by Eric Lomax. For descriptions of post war Tokyo and the effect of the war on its populace, read Dower, Embracing Defeat, which is a 1,000 times more powerful for being written with the aim of communicating ideas clearly to the reader, rather than being a book written with the purpose of solely of showing cleverness which is what Peace's book seems to be about - and fails even in that.