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Overview
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.
Synopsis
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.
The New York Times - Christopher Sorrentino
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.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
On August 15, 1946, the partially decomposed bodies of two women who were raped and strangled are found in Tokyo's Shiba Park. As time passes, other mutilated corpses surface, all apparent victims of the same savage "Japanese Bluebeard." pursuing this fiend is the enigmatic Detective Minami, a man plagued by his own memories of wartime horrors.Christopher Sorrentino
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.—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
British author Peace (GB84, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction) bases this riveting novel on a real-life serial-killer case in post-WWII Japan. When the nude body of a young woman turns up in a local park, Inspector Minami of the Tokyo police and his squad of detectives investigate. At the crime scene, Minami finds another woman's body nearby and begins to suspect there will be more to come. Minami, married and a father of two, is smart, tenacious and experienced; he's also addicted to sedatives, keeps a mistress, is in the pocket of a local crime lord and not above sampling the wares of prostitutes he encounters while roaming the city at night. Tokyo has been heavily damaged by Allied bombing, the populace is starving, the occupying victors are overbearing and brutal; for the Japanese, there's only an unrelenting struggle to stay alive in a nightmare world. Peace, whose complex style feels like a cross between Haruki Murakami and James Ellroy, delivers an expressionistic portrait of a harrowing, devastated time and place. 50,000 first printing. (Sept.)
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