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It's August 1946—one year after the Japanese surrender—and women are turning up dead all over Tokyo. Detective Minami of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police—irreverent, angry, despairing—goes on the hunt for a killer known as the Japanese Bluebeard—a decorated former Imperial soldier who raped and murdered at least ten women amidst the turmoil of post-war Tokyo. As he undertakes the case, Minami is haunted by his own memories of atrocities that he can no longer explain or forgive. Unblinking in its vision of a nation in a chaotic, hellish period in its history, Tokyo Year Zero is a darkly lyrical and stunningly original crime novel.
How exhilarating…to discover David Peace through his brilliant, perplexing, claustrophobic and ambiguous seventh novel, Tokyo Year Zero…The atmosphere Peace creates, built through nightmarish repetition, keeps the reader off-balance. Peace's Tokyo is a smoky, fetid city, filled with packs of wild dogs and equally feral humans, scavengers all. Within the relentless fragments of italicized interpolation that serve as both exposition and background noise Peace places bits of popular song, propaganda phrases, the importuning of prostitutes, the sound of air raids and repeated phrases from the haunted, self-lacerating monologue Minami conducts at all times. There is constant oscillation between waking and dreaming, past and present, memory and fantasy…Above all, Tokyo Year Zero portrays a rigidly hierarchical culture recovering from the near chaos brought on by its defeat. One of the marvelous things about the novel is Peace's depiction of a country on its knees but relying for order upon the maintenance of elaborate everyday formalities and ceremonies.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $109.00 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Petr Handl
reviewed Tokyo Year Zero on April 20, 2017 Tokyo Year Zero
I itch. I scratch. I write a review. Gari-Gari.
In the smoke-filled bar, in a dark corner of cyberspace, where people are too interested in noir novels to care about the real world, I tell the man across from me that the book is one part mood, one part madness, one part stylized crime novel.
What does it all mean in the end?
One year after the end of the war, at the height of the US occupation of Japan, everything is still too broken to be meaningful. And yet something called life goes on. Wrapped in a warped, twisted world, there is a fairly standard crime story based on fact. But the devil is in the details. And the details lead to mood. They lead to repetition. They lead to doubt. The narrator is a broken man, so meaning comes in shards of broken glass.
The man seems unimpressed. Yes, he says. But what does it all mean in the end?
I itch. I scratch. Gari-Gari.
Some parts are easily understood. I hand him the pieces of glass.
Other parts don't come so easily. As easily as war-memory battered sleep. As easy as the stains come off the mugs of this smoke -filled bar in the dark corner of cyberspace. As easily as...
Enough, he says. You know what I want.
I itch. I scratch. Gari-Gari. I hand him the pills.
And this will take me to sleep? he asks. This will take me to your book review.
I smile. I bow. I itch. I scratch. Book-review. Book-review.
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