David Peace first went to Japan 13 years ago, in his mid-twenties, to teach English as a foreign language, and stayed. You could argue that the prose of the novels he has written compulsively since - seven fat books published in the past eight years - has been heavily influenced by his original day job. Peace uses truncated subject, verb, object sentences in repetitive rhythms to establish the claustrophobia of extreme states of mind. Sometimes, his paragraphs read like a basic English primer: "I haggle. To eat. I barter. To work. I threaten. To eat. I bully. To work. I buy three eggs and some vegetables," he writes here, typically.
To quote small chunks of Peace's writing, though, is to miss most of its intensive craft and appeal. He experimented with his demotic rhythms in the loosely linked novels that explored the two dominant myths of his growing up in England in the 1970s and 1980s: the hunt for serial murderer Peter Sutcliffe "Yorkshire Ripper" and the miners' strike. His real breakthrough as a stylist, however, came in The Damned Utd, his last book, the wonderful fictional rendering of an interior monologue of UK football legend Brian Clough, a deeply paranoid and self-obsessive voice, full of contradiction and drama.
It seems a long way from Leeds United to postwar Tokyo, but a good deal of the internal tension of Clough's hypnotic stream of consciousness is replayed in a different context here. It is 1946 and Japan, disgraced and defeated by the Allies, is living in fear of a third wave of destruction: "Tokyo hot and dark, hidden and cowed; night and day, rumors of new weapons, fears of new bombs; first Hiroshima, then Nagasaki, next is Tokyo ... . " The Japanese nation is under siege both from the "victors" and from Formosans, Koreans and Chinese seeking retribution. The American occupying forces are conducting purges to root out war criminals. In the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, everyone has changed identity to avoid recrimination. The slogans on the Tokyo station walls, parroted by senior officers - "Now is not a time to forget our obligations, they are who we are" or "It is time to reveal the true essence of the nation" - are blood-stained and desperate.
Even so, the Japanese are already trying to rebuild out of the wreckage of defeat and though the foundations are not promising - "rubble and ash ... piss and shit, cholera and typhus, disease and death, death and loss" - Tokyo's reconstruction is relentless. One of the percussive background noises to Peace's tale is that of jackhammers endlessly at work on the new city: "ton-ton-ton-ton-ton." All of the chaos is sharply detailed. I once interviewed Peace and he talked of his fictional method as one of obsessive factual research, total immersion in the news and culture of the time: "Everything that can be fact is fact. People say to me it is always raining in your books. But if it is raining on the day I say it was, then it certainly was raining on that day, I guarantee." In this case, the weather reports - Tokyo, 90 degrees, fine - only add to the oppression.
Tokyo Year Zero is told in the voice of Detective Minami of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. Minami has been driven crazy by nothing being as it seems, by imperial Japan being occupied. Democracy is good. Democracy is bad. My mouth is dry. The aggressor is the victim. The victim is the aggressor. My stomach aches. The winners are the losers. The losers are the winners ... ." The day Japan accepts the imposed provisions of defeat is also the day that Detective Minami starts finding bodies of young geishas in Shiba Park strangled with their own shawls.
The case is a real one - it emerged, we discover, out of a newspaper article (Peace is a great fossicker in archives) with the headline "Sex maniac confesses to killing four young women" and the information that the accused, Kodaira Yoshio, "was executed at the Miyagi Prison in Sendai Prefecture on the fifth of October, 1949." Out of these facts, Peace weaves a thriller that is both a gory psychological whodunit and a meditation on the origins of modern Japan.
The result is something dark and bloody, the tone lying somewhere between Akira Kurosawa's Macbeth and the caricatures of the more violent manga cartoons. Peace has form here, from his stylized accounts of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, and he inches two steps forward, one step back in his circling prose, towards a very Japanese heart of darkness.
Minami's voice is trapped in a continuous insomniac present tense, dogged by italicized flashbacks to the cruelties of his war and his growing fears that his violent past is somehow linked to the murders that he investigates. The minds of Peace's characters always nag at particular stubborn images. In Minami's case, this is the half-remembered fragment of one highly charged night with his lover Yuki, which somehow is implicated in all of his growing guilt.
Most of the time, Peace's staccato prose is a perfect instrument for this interior hell. Such is his control of the recurring elements of his childlike sentences that he can even just about get away with constructions like this one:
"I see Senju Akira with his pistol-
Bang! Bang! Bang!
One, two, three, four-
Bang! Bang! Bang...
Dead Formosans-
Bang! Bang ...
Five, six-
Bang!'
It is no surprise that the book comes with a jacket quote from James Ellroy: Peace's style borrows much from the noir shorthand of the American, worrying at things, never letting his reader rest. As in Ellroy, the momentum depends on sudden fresh or shocking images being injected into the quick fire paranoia.
Minami returns obsessively to the lives of the geishas, whispering their come-ons from the shadows: "Asobu?" ("Will you play?") He observes their lives with typical spareness: "In the ballroom. There are a hundred Japanese girls. In Occidental gowns. Nothing underneath. Beneath red paper streamers that hang in the heat from the ceiling. They dance with each other to scratched and deafening records relayed through a battery of amplifiers. Back and forth across the floor in downtrodden heels and scruffy school plimsolls. They push each other. To the distorted American jazz. In the ballroom. Back and forth.
"Life among them is worth nothing. There are over one million urns containing the ashes of the war dead still unclaimed by their bereaved families." Everyone has lost a daughter. In this place, it should be possible to conceal even the most brutal of crimes, but the truth, Peace suggests, is insistent.
Tokyo Year Zero is the first of a trilogy of crime novels that promises to address the creation of modern Japan (Peace is nothing if not ambitious; he thinks in epic terms). The idea that it was built on horror committed and horror received seems a very fair place to begin. It will be interesting to see how he proceeds. The voice that comes so alive in 1946 might, you suspect, prove harder to sustain in less extreme moments.
April 28 to May 4 During the Japanese colonial era, a city’s “first” high school typically served Japanese students, while Taiwanese attended the “second” high school. Only in Taichung was this reversed. That’s because when Taichung First High School opened its doors on May 1, 1915 to serve Taiwanese students who were previously barred from secondary education, it was the only high school in town. Former principal Hideo Azukisawa threatened to quit when the government in 1922 attempted to transfer the “first” designation to a new local high school for Japanese students, leading to this unusual situation. Prior to the Taichung First
The Ministry of Education last month proposed a nationwide ban on mobile devices in schools, aiming to curb concerns over student phone addiction. Under the revised regulation, which will take effect in August, teachers and schools will be required to collect mobile devices — including phones, laptops and wearables devices — for safekeeping during school hours, unless they are being used for educational purposes. For Chang Fong-ching (張鳳琴), the ban will have a positive impact. “It’s a good move,” says the professor in the department of
On April 17, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) launched a bold campaign to revive and revitalize the KMT base by calling for an impromptu rally at the Taipei prosecutor’s offices to protest recent arrests of KMT recall campaigners over allegations of forgery and fraud involving signatures of dead voters. The protest had no time to apply for permits and was illegal, but that played into the sense of opposition grievance at alleged weaponization of the judiciary by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to “annihilate” the opposition parties. Blamed for faltering recall campaigns and faced with a KMT chair
Article 2 of the Additional Articles of the Constitution of the Republic of China (中華民國憲法增修條文) stipulates that upon a vote of no confidence in the premier, the president can dissolve the legislature within 10 days. If the legislature is dissolved, a new legislative election must be held within 60 days, and the legislators’ terms will then be reckoned from that election. Two weeks ago Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) proposed that the legislature hold a vote of no confidence in the premier and dare the president to dissolve the legislature. The legislature is currently controlled
RSS