Tokyo (Paperback)

Tokyo tells two stories. The first if that of Grey, who has come to the city to seek out an obscure piece of film. It depicts some of the horrific atrocities committed by the Japanese during the 1937 Nanking Massacre. Many people doubt that the film even exists.

She hopes Shi Congming, a visiting professor at the University of Todai, will be able to help her. He is one of the few survivors of the massacre, and one report claims he is actually in possession of the film. However, he is at first unwilling to help her, and sends her away. Chongming's story is the second, told through his harrowing diary extracts written during the events of 1937.

Desperate and alone in a strange city that is caught between the Orient and the seductions of the Occident, Grey finds herself lodgings and takes a job as a hostess (informed by shades of Hayder's own experiences?) in a club that caters for all manner of wealthy Japanese men, including one of the most powerful and feared gangsters in the city.

Tokyo has been three years in the coming. Three long years. I would gladly wait that long again for another book of this quality from Hayder, who is certainly by far the best of the new generation of crime writers. There is a wise and compassionate maturity to this third book (that wasn't necessary in The Treatment), and there are some passages, especially in the later parts, that are so moving and affecting that they demand to be read over again. The book as a whole explores the line between ignorance and evil, and often demonstrates that the things we need to maintain our hold on life are not always the things best for us. Explored too is the nature of the relationship between the past and present, the circles that exist within history, spinning through time like fractals, repeating and repeating and repeating.

This is partly achieved by the way the two separate experiences - Grey's life in 90's Tokyo, and Chongming's diaries - toy with one another, connecting then bouncing off, reflecting then informing the other. In the end, the two strands mesh together in a conclusion that is possibly the most emotionally shattering I've read since that of her last book.

There are a couple of things that should also be commented on. Firstly, there is her excellent portrait of Tokyo, caught between two cultures, feeding off both in bizarre ways - huge posters of old American movie stars adorn the buildings; the manager of the club where Grey works has had surgery to look like Marilyn Monroe. It is a bizarre, surreal and yet perversely seductive city.

The second is the character of Grey. A "weirdo", as she is constantly referred to by one of the characters, there are oblique and teasing reference to a "hospital" and "nurses", which eventually become darkly, disturbingly clear. Psychologically damaged in ways we at first cannot comprehend, she is a fascinating, rather haunting narrator, one of the marvels of this book. There is no doubt that she is the true dark heart of the piece. Simultaneously strong yet vulnerable, knowing and yet naïve, her character is where this novel's devastatingly sharp edge lies.

Tokyo, a book in which the extensive and informative research always adds and is never intrusive, is an excellent new thriller, so haunting that, over a year later, I still find that splinters of it are still caught in my mind.

Mo, you are a star, and I await your next novel with baited breath (and a big lock on my door!!!)