Tokyo Year Zero (Tokyo Trilogy 1)
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Amazon.co.uk Review
Tokyo Year Zero is further proof that David Peace is now one of the most ambitious and accomplished novelists of the modern era -- in any genre. He has always been an innovator, forging a striking synthesis between Noir crime writing and Yorkshire realism. Nineteen Seventy-Four was a visceral and atmospheric novel set in the year of the Silver Jubilee, with the Yorkshire Ripper at his sanguinary work. This book was the second of the Riding Quartet, and demonstrated what readers had come to expect -- a totally individual voice, with the characters (such as past-his-best journalist Jack Whitehead) memorably drawn.
Tokyo Year Zero, Peace's new novel, is another adroit synthesis, this time between the sprawling historical novel and the gritty crime genre. The author's picture of a city at war (the year is 1946) rivals that of any modern novelist in vividness and authenticity. It is one year on from the surrender, and Tokyo is struggling to maintain its pride after the American victory that destroyed its imperialist ambitions. The police force barely functions, and a variety of unpleasant individuals struggle for supremacy in Tokyo's thriving black market. Peace's protagonist, Detective Minami, is assigned a difficult case: the bodies of two women are found in Sheba Park, but as he begins to dig beneath the surface of an increasingly baffling and complex mystery, Minami finds (to his dismay) that his personal past -- and personal secrets -- are somehow involved with the murderer and his savage killings.
This first book in the Tokyo trilogy is as surprising and idiosyncratic an offering as we have come to expect from David Peace, and it's a safe bet that readers will be impatient for the remaining books in the sequence. --Barry Forshaw
Review
'A searing piece, the narration taut, the prose spare and uncompromising ... the bleakness of the times is beautifully captured.'
--Sunday Telegraph
--Sunday Telegraph
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
It is the year after Hiroshima and in a shattered Tokyo Detective Minami investigates the murder of two young girls found close to each other in Shiba Park. The chief suspect is very quickly identified and charged and the majority of the book follows Minami as he searches for connections to a number of similar murders; all of which point to a hidden truth in his own past.
The murders and the identity of the killer are secondary to a mediation on the meaning of identity and are ultimately a metaphor for the birth of a new Japan- a country struggling to find itself after the devastation of American victory.
David Peace is a writer, for me, whose imagination and stylist inventiveness are barely contained by the robustness of his craft. He treads a very fine line between dazzling brilliance and unreadable pretentious twoddle. Never more so than here.
The plot points, the characters and the stylistic flourishes will be familiar to any reader of his Red Riding Quartet, but everything is turned up to eleven. We have the familiar corrupt cops, the lead character tortured by his past and searching for redemption. We have the betrayed family, the lust for prostitutes, the underworld father figures, the drugs and a killer- whose identity is a clue to the protagonist's shady past. All of these will be familiar to anyone who has read 1974 and 1977, as will be the cascading text, narrowing to a point of a single word, and the repeating mantras that make up such a bulk of the text.
Tokyo Year Zero is undoubtedly an impressive book, it is a beautiful evocation of time and place, written in a hugely distinctive style which can be both exhilarating and disturbing.
In parts Peace's writing is simply stunning, but too often it loses itself in a miasma of repetition and the substance becomes buried by the style. Still, it has to be said that not many authors chart the territory of inner turmoil as thoroughly or as effectively as Peace.
This is a hugely ambitious novel and in parts fails because of it's aspirations, but the ending is shattering and just about manages to pull it back into something worth the undoubted effort that it takes to read this book. Just about.
The murders and the identity of the killer are secondary to a mediation on the meaning of identity and are ultimately a metaphor for the birth of a new Japan- a country struggling to find itself after the devastation of American victory.
David Peace is a writer, for me, whose imagination and stylist inventiveness are barely contained by the robustness of his craft. He treads a very fine line between dazzling brilliance and unreadable pretentious twoddle. Never more so than here.
The plot points, the characters and the stylistic flourishes will be familiar to any reader of his Red Riding Quartet, but everything is turned up to eleven. We have the familiar corrupt cops, the lead character tortured by his past and searching for redemption. We have the betrayed family, the lust for prostitutes, the underworld father figures, the drugs and a killer- whose identity is a clue to the protagonist's shady past. All of these will be familiar to anyone who has read 1974 and 1977, as will be the cascading text, narrowing to a point of a single word, and the repeating mantras that make up such a bulk of the text.
Tokyo Year Zero is undoubtedly an impressive book, it is a beautiful evocation of time and place, written in a hugely distinctive style which can be both exhilarating and disturbing.
In parts Peace's writing is simply stunning, but too often it loses itself in a miasma of repetition and the substance becomes buried by the style. Still, it has to be said that not many authors chart the territory of inner turmoil as thoroughly or as effectively as Peace.
This is a hugely ambitious novel and in parts fails because of it's aspirations, but the ending is shattering and just about manages to pull it back into something worth the undoubted effort that it takes to read this book. Just about.
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
God, I'm baffled by all the negative reaction to this novel. I thought it was just the most stunning, visceral, haunting and hallucinatory book I've ever read. Peace's style risks teetering into self-parody, but in my view he avoids it here - and the result of that risk-taking is to put you right inside the mind, the body, the soul of Detective Minami, to make you breathe the foul air of postwar Tokyo, to make you ache for his poor wife and children, and to dream his recurring nightmares.
It's exhausting, and it's far from easy or light-hearted, but please please please if it sounds like your kind of thing, don't let the low average rating on here put you off. It's Peace at his best - and that's saying something.
It's exhausting, and it's far from easy or light-hearted, but please please please if it sounds like your kind of thing, don't let the low average rating on here put you off. It's Peace at his best - and that's saying something.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
What is often remarked upon with David Peace's novels is the prose style. Of late he seems to have come in for some stick about his 'staccato' sentences, the short breathless bursts of prose, often the same phrase repeated over and over. It's true that in parts of Tokyo Year Zero the style gets a bit frustrating. You feel stifled by it, wishing - in the way you sometimes wish with a James Ellroy novel - that he'd mix it up a bit, allowing some sentences to stretch out a bit - to breathe a little.
But it's foolish to think Peace isn't using this prose style deliberately. If you feel stifled, it's because he wants you to feel stifled. He's enormously skilled at conjuring up the Tokyo of 1946, battered by American military might. Against this setting is the story of two young women discovered dead in Shiba Park. It's a dark, brooding story, and for me - on the whole - the stifled, incantatory prose style was perfect for the tale Peace chose to tell.
What none of the Amazon reviews of this book to date seem to have picked up on is that, as well as being an exercise in literary experimentation, this is a real page turner. It's a suspenseful thriller-esque plot, and it had me pretty gripped.
Not a comfortable read - but a clever, taut, powerful one.
But it's foolish to think Peace isn't using this prose style deliberately. If you feel stifled, it's because he wants you to feel stifled. He's enormously skilled at conjuring up the Tokyo of 1946, battered by American military might. Against this setting is the story of two young women discovered dead in Shiba Park. It's a dark, brooding story, and for me - on the whole - the stifled, incantatory prose style was perfect for the tale Peace chose to tell.
What none of the Amazon reviews of this book to date seem to have picked up on is that, as well as being an exercise in literary experimentation, this is a real page turner. It's a suspenseful thriller-esque plot, and it had me pretty gripped.
Not a comfortable read - but a clever, taut, powerful one.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
More of the same from Peace
There's no middle road with David Peace's writing style. Love it or hate it. The Tokyo Trilogy is along the lines of 'GB84' and the 'Red Riding' stuff, only bleaker and if... Read more
Published 20 months ago by Gramercy Riff
More miso than hit
TYZ is a sordid crime novel located in Tokyo in the immediate aftermath of WW2. The blurb advises that its ultimate purpose is to explain the origins of modern Japan. Read more
Published on 9 May 2010 by Sporus
Dreary and BORING
My first and last ever book by this guy as he writes in a awful style. Great plot, great idea, great settings but awful style of writing and I gave up after reading 100 pages. Read more
Published on 10 April 2010 by Mr. Ruairi McGovern
Battered, bombarded, confused: I raised the white flag of surrender
I couldn't get into this story at all. The premise is very interesting -- the narrator is investigating a double murder, exactly one year after the Japanese surrender and the end... Read more
Published on 31 Mar 2010 by General Accident
Having some points of reference help.
Loved this book, living in Tokyo helped with some of the geography and references, but saying that coming from Leeds also helped enjoy his other works. Read more
Published on 11 May 2009 by Matthew Robin Best
Style over substance
It's one thing for a writer to have a distinctive style but it's another thing when a writer allows style to get in the way of telling the story. Read more
Published on 15 Mar 2009 by N. Morton
Get off Your Knees!
****Minor Spoiler********
I can understand the criticism of this book. The repetition can get a bit much, the story isn't signposted, it's hard work etc. Read more
I can understand the criticism of this book. The repetition can get a bit much, the story isn't signposted, it's hard work etc. Read more
Published on 26 Feb 2009 by A. J. Laws
Quirkily effective, yet no masterpiece
*** Contains very slight plot spoilers ***
I had been intending to tackle David Peace first through GB84, but this came my way beforehand so was my rather impromptu... Read more
I had been intending to tackle David Peace first through GB84, but this came my way beforehand so was my rather impromptu... Read more
Published on 18 Feb 2009 by Mr. A. D. Maddox
Modern Japan's pre-history
A fantastic original work that contains real substance in defining the nadir of a nation's history before its renaissance. Read more
Published on 17 Feb 2009 by Truth Seeker
Want a good reason to commit seppuku?
Hey, great a murder mystery set in the post WWII apocalyptic landscape of Tokyo. Imagine a cast of engaging characters struggling to get by under the occupation, and also a series... Read more
Published on 17 Feb 2009 by Caterkiller
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