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Book Review: David Peace's 'Tokyo Year Zero'


Talking about purges. Talking about trials. Talking about all our trials: to work, to eat. Talking about food. Talking about food. Talking about food, food, food, food, food, food, food, food -
In whispers. In screams. In whispers. In screams -
If you’ve never been defeated, never lost -
If you’ve never been beaten before -
Then you don’t know the pain -
The pain of surrender -
Of occupation …
In whispers, in screams, this is how the Losers talk -
Their chests constricted and their fists balled -
Their knees bleeding and backs broken -
By the fall …
This is how the Losers talk -
To whisper, to scream -
‘We are the survivors. We are the lucky ones.’


“Tokyo Year Zero” is a sensationalized telling of the investigation surrounding real-life serial killer Yoshio Kodaira, who is believed to have raped and killed 10 women between 1945 and 1946. Detective Minami, of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, is one of the men assigned to solve the murder of several unidentified female bodies, despite the vested interest several parties within the department have in ensuring these murders remain unsolved. Atrocities committed on the continent in the name of the Imperial Japanese Army and the desire--or necessity-- to remain in the good graces of Douglas MacArthur and the Occupation ensure that some questionable deeds are swept under the proverbial rug. Furthermore, people aren’t who they say they are, having swapped names with the dead (or perhaps the living).

Tokyo, 1946, is generally not a good place to be, unless you’re one of the victors. Peace’s writing is full of descriptions of the filth, death, charred remains, lice, decay, and stench that defines postwar Tokyo. Sometimes it feels as if the dead, who no longer have to deal with all of this, have it better. According to one interview, Peace described the incredible amount of research--the hours and hours spent in the National Diet Library-- that went into his writing: If a character said that a specific date was hot, humid, and rainy you can bet that was actually the case, and these details add a layer of credibility and authenticity to Peace’s prose. Peace also peppers his writing with Japanese onomatopoeia: Minami is constantly scratching at lice (gari-gari) and Tokyo constantly reverberates with the sound of hammering (ton-ton), even though nothing new seems to ever be built. Reading “Tokyo Year Zero” is a multisensory experience, one that forces you into the gristly, seedy underside of the metropolis.

The inside of Detective Minami’s head, unsurprisingly, is also not a good place to be. He is constantly tormented by fragments of memory from his combat experiences in China, of his impoverished family and his inability to provide for them, of his mistress, and the general degradation and humiliation of the defeated Japanese nation. He is a chronic insomniac and desperate for Calmotin, a sedative he begs off the head of Tokyo’s fledgling black market in exchange for insider information about the investigations. Minami’s thoughts, delineated in italics, frequently run in circles, as scenes, conversations, and actions repeat themselves on the page in short, rapid-fire sentences. You have to fight the urge to skim after reading the same sequence of events over and over and over again.

“Tokyo Year Zero” is not a book you can read in one go; it was literally impossible for me to exist, as it were, in Minami’s mental state for long periods of time without needing to remove myself from him. Peace has done almost too good a job. It also didn’t help that so many of the scenes in the book were set in terrifyingly crowded trains in which the passengers were crammed so close together you could see the lice crawling in the scalp of the person in front of you. Doing much of my reading during my own commute, it was more than a little discomfiting. You also spend a lot of time trying to piece together the story, dropped as you are in medias res. Given the tormented state of Minami’s mental state, it’s unsurprising that the past and present, appearances and reality, are patched together in confusing ways. But despite these challenges, the need to know what the truth is and how the case will turn out is enough of a motivator to power through. This isn’t the clean, safe Tokyo of today, and “Tokyo Year Zero” prompts you to view the city just a little differently. Ton-ton.

Tokyo Year Zero
David Peace
Penguin Random House
2008
Paperback, 368pp

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