Tokyo Year Zero
David Peace
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Buy *Tokyo Year Zero* by David Peaceonline

Tokyo Year Zero
David Peace
Vintage
Paperback
368 pages
August 2008
rated 4 1/2 of 5 possible stars

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Poetic, experimental, suspenseful, entrancing, page-turning - David Peace’s Tokyo Year Zero is easily one of the best novels of the year. The ending is shocking - I’ll say that for it - and I didn’t particularly care for it - but, overall, Tokyo Year Zero is an amazing book. It’s based on a series of at least ten rapes and murders of young women that occurred in post-WWII Japan. The structure of the words and sentences on the pages and the repetition of certain words, phrases, and sentences, work to draw the reader in and influence readers’ emotions similar to T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” and the best epic poetry like The Iliad and The Odyssey. You don’t so much read this novel as you get swept away by it and carried along for the ride. It is at times graphic, in both its descriptions and expletives, but in the context of the era and the situations the characters face, this is understandable.

Detective Minami of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police narrates the events that unfold in this potboiler. “No one is who they seem” is one of the repeated phrases that weave their way like a haunting mantra throughout the narrative. Many of the people he meets are trying to destroy their pasts and recreate themselves with new names and lives. This includes himself; he doesn’t want to remember when he was a soldier fighting the Chinese, a father who went insane and died in an asylum, and his own stint in the same asylum.

He wants to do what is right, and obtain recognition and justice for the victims of the serial killer he tracks. This despite the fact that he doesn’t, in his personal life, always do what is morally right, having a mistress and popping Calmotin pills to drive images of his past and the ghosts of the killer’s victims out of his mind so that he can sleep at night. Living in a country that has been defeated militarily, Minami struggles with a case that he thinks of as being a “curse,” in which his superiors, like Chief Adachi, seem to do whatever they can to make his life more difficult. One year since the first body of a raped and murdered woman was discovered in the novel’s Prologue and the Kempai (military police) executed a Korean yabo (old man) mistakenly for the crime, another body turns up:

This case is a curse.
I curse her...
I look at my watch. Chika-taku. It is almost noon.
Chika-taku. It is August 15, 1946 -
The defeat and the capitulation. The surrender and the occupation. The ghosts all here today -
I curse her. I curse myself...
It has been one year.
Detective Minami lives and breathes the case for over a year, tying several unsolved murders to the killer. He experiences intense pressure to discover the identities of the victims and prove that they were all murdered by the same man. Though he requests a transfer to another department, it’s denied - at least until he solves the case he’s on. He humbly begs the help of a mob boss, Senju Akira, who supplies him with money and Calmotin in return for finding names linked with whomever put a hit out on his previous boos and mentor. This puts him under even greater pressure and makes him suspicious of his fellow detectives and superiors, who are involved in the coverup of the facts, and possibly in the death itself.

Tokyo Year Zero is a haunting psychological thriller, a character study of a man who tries to maintain a fragile grip on sanity while doing what he feels is morally right. Days and nights run into each other for him, identities are called into question, and feelings about what is right and wrong behavior and actions merge and reverse in meaning. It’s a fantastic tour de force by David Peace. I highly recommend it to mystery lovers.



Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Douglas R. Cobb, 2007

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