Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13486 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-02
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

Synopsis
August 1946. One year on from surrender and Tokyo lies broken and bleeding at the feet of its American victors. Facing the threat of a second purge, the surviving officers of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Dept, with their changed identities and false names, realise they can trust no one, least of all each other. Meanwhile another war is breaking out, as different ethnic groups fight for control of the city's black markets. 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 victims and their killer.

Customer Reviews

A disappointment
Tokyo Year Zero was a disappointment.

I have admired David Peace for some time. He has a very distinctive style, using repetition, mantra and leitmotiv to generate a claustrophobic and compelling interior monologue. He has focused in the past on Yorkshire icons of the 1970s and 1980s - the Yorkshire Ripper investigations, the Miners' Strike, and Brian Clough.

Tokyo Year Zero sees a major change of scene - Japan in 1946. Tokyo lies in ruins and a serial killer stalks the streets. In the context of a nation reeling from the utter annihilation of two entire cities, with bodies piled up in mounds, the concept of investigating murder is rather surreal. And as ever, Peace focuses on the investigators and their office politics, sleaze and decay rather than on unveiling the identity of the killer. In Tokyo Year Zero, the killer is identified early, and the challenge for the investigation is to find evidence to link him to various victims.

In theory, this should work well. There is enough to make this novel, in theory at least, differ from his previous works. In particular, the absence of personal greed; the sense of defeated honour; the obedience - should all work into giving Tokyo Year Zero something new to say. Yet it doesn't quite work.

Firstly, the repetition and mantra are done to death - to the point that they become really irksome and boring. Peace has an interesting trick of making blocks of text pare down into triangular shapes - a bit like the blade of a guillotine. But this trick, too, is done to death. The plot itself is confusing, particularly at the end, which seems to use confusion as a metaphor for insanity. But it is hardly satisfying for a longish novel to splinter in this way at the end. One of the attractions of [most of] Peace's previous novels was that the end was known from the outset (the Yorkshire Riper was caught; the miners lost; Brian Clough got sacked), and the beauty was in working slowly, inevitably towards that conclusion. That is not the case here, so the confusing end cannot even fall back on a wider public knowledge of events. And the confusing plot doesn't help itself with a cast of many, many people - all with Japanese names that are unfamiliar to an anglophone ear - and which therefore tend to blur into one.

Tokyo Year Zero feels too formulaic - as though Peace has heard praise for his technical brilliance and decided to play to this perceived strength - when in fact his real strength was injecting his work with the lifeblood and soul of his own experience. This is the first of a trilogy of Japanese novels - I hope the others see David Peace back to his brilliant best.

Not without mannerisms
The (paperback) cover offers a recommendation by James Ellroy and whoever managed to finish Ellroy's "The Cold Six Thousand" won't despair of reading Peace's latest. Both push the possibilities of hard-boiled narration to its limits. But whereas Ellroy remains cool and doesn't seem to be in need of boosting his narration with stylistic devices, Peace tries to convey his first-person-narrator's desperation by indulging in endless repititions on the phrase level.
This is a pity as the setting is ingeniously chosen and the characters and their backgrounds and motivations convincing. But the plot is not very original and surprising only because one tends to expect more as it finds its final resolution. So one might suspect that the manneristic speech just masks the plot's shortcomings.

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.