Tokyo Year Zero
by David Peace
(Faber and Faber)
Darryl Accone
Towards the end of World War II, Tokyo was firebombed by the United States as an experiment in the destructive power of incendiary “payloads”. More people were killed in that attack than by the murderous atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
It is in the charred, ruined landscape of Tokyo’s Ground Zero, to apply retrospectively a term with contemporary resonance, that David Peace’s massively ambitious policier-cum-historical epic unfolds. Peace begins not so much in medias res as at the end and the beginning: noon on the 15th day of the eighth month of the 20th year of Showa; midday on August 15 1945, when Emperor Hirohito is to address the nation. At 10 past 12 it is over. Japan has surrendered or, as Peace infuses it with its true meanings: “But this hour has no father, this year has no son / no mother, no daughter, no wife nor lover / for the hour is zero; the Year Zero / Tokyo Year Zero.”
Then the rebuilding begins. Ton-ton. Ton-ton. Ton-ton. (Tap-tap — the sound of hammering.)
Time crawls. Chiki-taku. Chiku-taku. Chiku-taku. (Tick-tock.)
The relentless sound of scratching continues — against the heat, the lice, the dirt. Gari-gari. Gari-gari. Gari-gari.
Peace uses these and other refrains and his hallmark prose is rhythmic and muscular as well as deeply internal in a bravura performance that makes reading Tokyo Year Zero the next best (or worst) thing to being there at the time. His fiction gleams with beautifully turned declarative sentences of deceptive simplicity (and also with a stylistic curlicue of patterning text on the page by the way he shapes his prose). It is based on a deep command of place and time past and present: Peace has lived in Tokyo for the past 13 years and the fiction and non-fiction sources he acknowledges include some of the finest literature and cinema about Japan.
Akira Kurosawa’s masterly detective story Stray Dog (Nora Inu), set in and made under the United States occupation of Japan, is among those. Peace deploys the refrain: “Under the Black Gate, I can hear a stray dog panting. His house is lost, his master gone.”
Remarkably, what Peace achieves through characterisation and structure, and evocation of place — down to the reader feeling as hot, prickly and insecure as the characters being read about — becomes a prose companion to Kurosawa’s sweltering, unsettling images and tangible atmosphere.
The heavy hand of US imperialism lies on Tokyo. Peace’s characters refer to its agents as the Victors and much of the Victors’ behaviour reads as an analogue of Baghdad in 2007. There are, of course, no roadside, anti-US personnel bombs; Japan is a more compliant client state being rebuilt (Ton-ton. Ton-ton. Ton-ton.) in the image of the Victors.
Defeat is central in this, the first of Peace’s projected crime trilogy on the making of post-war Japan. But it is a larger defeat than the war. It is the overthrow of the Japanese intellectualism represented by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, from one of whose stories Kurosawa adapted the screenplay for Rashomon and whose “Defeat”, from A Fool’s Life (1927), Peace uses as the epigraph to his book.
Akutagawa killed himelf at 35 in 1927, fearing he’d inherited his mother’s madness, but driven to something close to that state anyway by insomnia and self-loathing. Peace’s narrator/protagonist Detective Minami is pursued by insomnia, denial of true self and incipient madness as he attempts to solve a case that he doesn’t want: a series of murders of young women.
“No one is who they say they are …
“No one who they seem to be …”
This is one of Minami’s refrains, a personal reconstruction among the post-war ruin and rebuilding intercut every hundred pages or so by dense but brief narratives of Japanese atrocities in China during the war there.
As detective fiction, Tokyo Year Zero is compelling. As a portrait of a nation and a psyche, it is a triumph. For Peace to emulate that is the sternest of challenges.
Ton-ton. Ton-ton. Ton-ton. (Tap-tap — the sound of a keyboard hammering.)
SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY
Renegade’s Magic: Book III of the Soldier Son Trilogy
by Robin Hobb
(Harper/Voyager)
The limits of loyalty to power are Hobb’s perennial concern; her various worlds through three previous trilogies have been pagan or baroquely mediaeval. But in this world, Gernia, rulers whose corseted attire, class and gender conventions might have been designed by Queen Victoria, have to deal with rebellious, half-naked — and fat — natives. Hobbs cites two sources for the trilogy: reading about disease and about empire. The narrative explores how definitions of health form part of a cultural discourse that allows one nation to consume and annihilate another, through the story of a loyal young officer of good family “infected” — mentally and physically — by the indigenous population he is being trained to subdue. There’s a compellingly written but only half-happy denouement: the march of empire turns, but does not halt. This may not be our final visit to Gernia. — Gwen Ansell
The Right Hand of God: Fire of Heaven Book III
by Russell Kirkpatrick
(Orbit)
This epic gets more and more like Tolkien as it marches grimly towards its conclusion. Tolkien, that is, as in The Silmarillion and Children of Hurin: beautifully detailed and described, but dark-visioned, obsessed with moral choices and resolutely humourless. The hero, Leith, finally finds his predestined place after learning from his own selfish mistakes, which contribute to countless deaths and much misery for others. Everyone suffers a great deal on the road to redemption, a saviour is revealed and rises from the dead, and what scrap of happy ending we are allowed is confined to the final lines. — GA
The Twilight Watch
by Sergei Lukyanenko
(Heinemann)
As the movie of book two, Day Watch, makes its way into cinemas, the concluding volume of Lukyanenko’s trilogy appears in translation. Those hoping for a wand and fire-wielding final battle with the Moscow skyline lit up by swooping dragons, will be disappointed — but then, The Sopranos ended with a family meal, not a family shoot-out, and was the more impressive for that. The cold magic war is over: Light and Dark co-operate to unravel murder and defuse a dangerous book of spells, but along the way the layers of authority, virtue and respectability on both sides are peeled back. They reveal a monstrous self-serving conspiracy. After book two, it seemed impossible Lukyanenko could multiply and intensify further the shades of grey in his world. Yet he has done so, and still crafted a conclusion full of hope. — GA