Gripping vision of crime and the city
IT DOES David Peace a disservice to describe him as a crime writer. He is, quite simply, one of the most compelling and original contemporary authors anywhere, in any context.
That he has chosen to write crime fiction is cause for fans of the genre to give thanks.
And they should certainly give thanks for Tokyo Year Zero, the first instalment of a trilogy set in the Japan of the immediate post-war years.
It is a triumph, an audacious, dazzling, furiously-paced, admirably intelligent page-turner that both tugs at the heart and chills the blood.
This is Peace at the peak of his form, spinning a tale in which the favoured themes at which he has become a master – betrayal, corruption, and moral ambiguity – are the heartbeat of the narrative.
Like his Red Riding Quartet set in his native Yorkshire during the Ripper years, Peace takes a real crime as his story's backdrop, this time a serial killer of young women in the Tokyo of 1946.
The task of catching him goes to Detective Inspector Minami, a tortured soul whose own uncertain past constantly threatens to overwhelm
his uncertain grasp on the present.
In lesser hands, such a story and such a central character could be the stuff of a painting-by-numbers whodunnit, given the added pep of an unconventional setting.
That's not for Peace, though. There is nothing conventional about his approach to the narrative. The phantasms that haunt Minami drive the story forward with as much force as the plot twists, and Peace transforms the setting of a war-ravaged Tokyo into a character in itself.
His evocation of the city is startlingly vivid. The air is filled with the sound of hammering which ticks off the time as unremittingly as Minami's watch, the population is ridden with lice, the women debase themselves to survive and the only prosperity to be found is in the black market.
Purges by the occupying American forces have left the police fearful and shifty as they slough off identities and assume new ones in the effort to stay one step ahead.
The Americans themselves hardly appear, remaining as shadowy – and menacing – as the demons that haunt Minami, who is one of Peace's great creations. As the tension heightens, a parallel narrative similar to that Peace used in his "occult history" of the year-long miners' strike, GB84, tightens the grip.
The writing is extraordinarily taut and urgent. Staccato bursts of dialogue and thought are juxtaposed with onomatopoeic passages about building noise to create an edgy, jumpy atmosphere.
Similarly, Peace makes brilliant use of the contrast between characters at the edge of reason and their characteristic Japanese formal politeness to evoke a sense of a society clinging to the wreckage of the familiar because it is fearful of the future.
Peace has no peer in evoking and then picking away at the nasty secrets of the people and places he writes about, whether they be the worn-out, shabby West Riding of the 1970s, or the clannish, menacing football club he created in The Damned Utd.
Now he's turned his attention to a whole new time and place, and demonstrated that the themes which drive his work are universal.
Such depth of conception and mastery of detail are rare in crime fiction. But then David Peace is a rare writer.
Q&A with David Peace
Q: Why did you decide to embark on a trilogy about post-war Tokyo?
A: Well, I've lived in Tokyo for over 13 years now. And, during that time, I've become increasingly interested in the history of the city. Particularly, how Tokyo rebuilt itself twice in the last century. Once after the 1923 earthquake and then following the devastation of the 1945 air raids. But a lot of the history of the city is buried and hidden. So, initially, I planned to write a Quartet, telling the secret history of Tokyo from 1945 through to its official "rebirth" with the 1964 Olympics. However, there was so much to say just about the period of the US Occupation that the Quartet became a trilogy.
Q: Tokyo Year Zero is set against the backdrop of a real series of murders. What drew you to that story?
A: Soon after moving here in 1994, I came across a book called Shocking Crimes of Postwar Japan by Mark Schreiber which contained a brief account of the Kodaira case, which is the basis for Tokyo Year Zero. Perhaps because of resonances with the Yorkshire Ripper, the Kodaira case always stayed with me.
Q: You have a reputation for meticulously researching the background to your novels. How much research did you have to do?
A: Well, I was very nervous about writing about a time and place I had not grown up in, but I used the same method and routine I have always used: I read and researched the newspapers, novels, films and songs of the time. I read the histories and "non-fictions". I was also very lucky to be assisted by a young editor at my Japanese publisher. Mr Nagashima found and translated many articles and documents that would have otherwise remained lost and unknown to me.
Q: You've said in the past that living at a distance from Yorkshire helped your perspective in writing about it. Did living in Tokyo help or hinder you in writing a novel set in the city?
A: Yes, going back to the previous books, writing about the place where I was born and brought up was easier from a distance. But with Tokyo Year Zero, as I say, because so much of the Tokyo of 1945-46 is now forgotten and lost, that it felt like I was writing about a "different city" to the Tokyo I live in now. So the present
was less of a hindrance this time.
Q: Do you feel there are parallels between the corrupt society you evoke in Tokyo Year Zero and the one you wrote about in the Red Riding Quartet?
A: Well, I think writing about crimes is a way to try to understand the society and the time in which they occurred. And, certainly, there were parallels between Kodaira and Sutcliffe, parallels in the way both societies regarded women, and parallels in the way the police handled the investigations.
Q: James Ellroy says the book has a flavour of Kurosawa's films. Was Kurosawa's vision an influence on you?
A: Yes, particularly his earlier films Drunken Angel and Stray Dog. Both these films certainly capture post-war Tokyo and were a big inspiration.
Q: How do you feel about returning to crime writing after The Damned Utd and GB84?
A: Well, you see, I think GB84 and The Damned Utd are crime novels, so I never really felt I had been "away"!
Q: Can you tell us something about the next book - and even the third?
A: The two remaining books in the trilogy both deal with true crimes from the Occupation period. The second book deals with a 1948 bank robbery in which 12 people were poisoned and the final book deals with the death of the head of Japan National Railways in 1949.
David Peace
Born: Ossett in 1967
Education: Batley Grammar School and Manchester Polytechnic
Went to Istanbul to teach English in 1991. Moved to Tokyo to teach in 1994, and still lives there
Married: to Izumi. They have two children, George and Emi
First book: Nineteen-Seventy-Four, published in 1999
Named as one of Granta's 20 Best of British Novelists in 2003. His "occult history" of the miners' strike, GB84, won the 2004 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The Damned Utd, published last year, was hailed as the greatest novel ever written about sport. Tokyo Year Zero is his seventh book.
Tokyo Year Zero, by David Peace, Faber, 16.99
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