There are a million and one ways to kill someone, but fewer ways to tell the story. A crime writer can be psychologically penetrating (Jess Walter, Sara Paretsky) or socially significant (James Lee Burke, Donna Leon) or spooky as hell (Stephen King, Patrick Suskind, Chuck Palahniuk). Noir novelists drench the whole affair in atmosphere.
And then there is David Peace’s method – which is to be all these things at once while subjecting the reader to what can only be described as textual violence. Here, for example, is the opening scene of his American debut, “Tokyo Year Zero,” a murder mystery based on a real crime set in the bombed-out moonscape of postwar Tokyo.
“Detective Minami! Detective Minami! Detective Minami!
“I open my eyes. From dreams that are not my own. I sit up in my chair at my desk. Dreams I do not want. My collar is wet and my whole suit damp. My hair itches. My skin itches -”
Readers of James Ellroy will recognize the sawed-off shotgun spray of Peace’s prose, the load-and-reload rhythms created by sentence fragments. But splicing the hero’s thoughts into the text as it trundles onward over the rubble of Tokyo in 1946, this is something new.
To read “Tokyo Year Zero” is to be dragged, dunked and shoved headfirst through the muck of a ruined society – slowly. Here is the rotten-apricot smell of human flesh rotting. Here are the buzzing flies. Here is an entire society in shell shock.
It’s hard to blame Peace, who has lived in Tokyo since 1994, for wanting the reader to take a good look around. Japan, in 1946, was absolutely leveled by U.S. firebombing, especially Tokyo. Afterward, as John W. Dower wrote in “Embracing Defeat,” social upheaval reigned.
“Corruption on a grand scale was taken for granted. Gouging on the black market came to be expected. Suddenly it seemed possible that anyone at all might become the victim of a predatory crime.”
Into this environment Peace thrusts our exhausted hero, Detective Minami, father, husband, lowly policeman. To feed his family (and mistress), Minami must steal, bargain and provide names to a local gangster. The chaos of this world makes for a compelling crime drama. Minami cannot trust any of his fellow officers since they, like him, are desperate. When a series of young womens’ bodies turn up in cases that appear to be the work of a serial murderer, several of Minami’s colleagues immediately become suspects.
Most of all, though, Minami cannot trust himself. As Peace plunges us deeper into the miasma of Tokyo as it rebuilds, Minami is pounded by memories he cannot escape, of things he did during the war and which hardly make him a pure judge of the crimes that occur after the peace.
Like Mark Danielewski’s “Only Revolutions,” Peace’s fiction gives the reader’s eye a lot of credit for its ability to multitask. Opposing the opener of some chapters are stream-of-consciousness dirges from the voice of Minami, a kind of Dos Passos-like ticker tape, only consisting entirely of horrors: “The mutilated corpses of three Japanese are unearthed in a field northwest of the railway bridge, six more by the water tank. Their ears have been sliced off, their stomachs stuffed with stones.”
“Tokyo Year Zero” feels like a graveyard thronged by zombies. The unfortunate result is that Minami, for all his memories, all his guilt, for all his authentic suffering, resembles a figure sketched entirely in shades of black.
Peace’s other characters, minus a mistress and a market’s bullying strongman, are even less delineated on the page. Keeping their names straight is difficult. Caring about what they do is actually impossible.
In the end, this doesn’t really matter because once this hellish locomotive of a book hooks onto its tracks it becomes difficult to hop off. Belching, stoked by corpses, syncopated by Peace’s heedless repetitions, it powers into the heart of darkness of a country desensitized by war.
In one of the novel’s most powerful scenes, Minami and a colleague ride with some American GIs out to a pleasure palace that has been shut down by Gen. MacArthur, thanks to the amount of disease it was spreading among U.S. soldiers.
Ruined, ridden with disease, the place is a symbol, writ large, of the devastation of Japan – and why 1945 really was Year Zero. There really was nothing left, except women’s bodies, and even those were hardly wanted.
Minami’s interview, not surprisingly, comes to naught in this hollow shell. The women there know nothing about one another’s past. “There are no interviews here,” says one of the female bosses, “Only medicals.”
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
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Fiction
Tokyo Year Zero
by David Peace, $24
