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.
RSS